I don’t really know when I fell asleep, mostly because I wasn’t expecting to. Between the constantly booming thunder and my paranoia that something bad would kill us all if I dozed off, I was sure I was gonna be wide awake. So I was more than a little surprised and disoriented when I woke up and the storm had almost passed.

At first I thought I was just super exhausted from everything and the constant magical exertion that day, and my body had simply shut down once it had a quiet moment. Then I started wondering if maybe Surge kicked me off to dreamland or something. I already knew the mare could play with my brain more or less at will, and doing something like that to make me fall asleep didn’t seem too farfetched. Especially since she was awake and actively keeping watch with my body when my mind finally came to.

Of course, she knew the question I was going to ask before I even asked it. Probably because she was reading my thoughts again or something. “You needed your rest.”

“Yeah, I did,” I reluctantly admitted, taking in my surroundings. The rain had slowed to a drizzle outside, and the riverbed had turned into an actual river, with water lapping at the entrance to our cave. I was just glad it hadn’t risen high enough to flood us out or anything. At my side, Ace was merely a feathery ball of warmth I held onto, and she’d pinned my left foreleg under her body so I had no hope of escaping without waking her up. Defeated, I rolled onto my back and stared at the cave ceiling, blowing a few strands of orange and yellow out of my face with a huff. “How the fuck does this work?”

My eyebrow rose as Surge expressed her own confusion. “How does what work?”

“How can I be asleep and you be awake when we’re in the same body?” I idly looked over my hoof, at all the mud and grime covering it from frog to halfway to my knee. “Like, I’ve only got one brain, and my brain is me, so… yeah. I’m confused.”

“The brain and soul are two different things,” Surge said. “Animals have brains, but they have feeble, weak souls. That’s what separates us from them. Thoughts and consciousness are generated by the soul. The brain is just the hardware they run on. Your body has two souls, Ember: mine and yours. It’s not just you in here.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I grumbled.

Surge rolled my eyes. “I’m trying to keep it simple for you. When you sleep, your soul and your brain disconnect in a sense. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the general gist of it. So while your spirit is resting, I can still use your brain to pilot your body. To an extent, of course. It naturally prefers your soul to mine, and even then, your body needs to rest physically. And even I need to rest, despite just being an incorporeal soul using your body and your magic to survive.”

“Huh. Spooky.”

“Ember, are you talking to yourself again?” Gauge’s voice echoed lightly around the cave, and shortly after I heard his hooves clopping against the stone. “We should really get that checked out.”

I raised my head as he approached us. “Yeah, my split personality’s kind of a bitch. She’s really fucking smart, though, so I guess that evens it out.”

“Still not smart enough to figure out why I’ve been cursed with such a fate as this,” Surge groaned. “If this is Tartarus, then the gods did a really good job of personalizing it for me.”

“It could be worse,” I offered. “You’re only trapped in a stupid mare’s body and have to deal with her shit all the time.”

“You’re right. I could be trapped in a stupid zebra’s body instead. I would actually prefer the embrace of dispersion and oblivion instead of the afterlife over that.”

Gauge shook his head and sat down on the opposite side of me from Ace. “Love you too, Sparky,” he said with a wink. “But actually though, how does that work for you? If Ember just spit you out through her horn or something, would you go to the Summer Lands?”

“At this point, who’s to say?” Surge asked. “My research was on manatronics and robotics, not the afterlife. But usually just releasing a soul with no guiding strings to send it off to the afterlife doesn’t work all that well. That’s what the light you see when you’re dying is, or at least, that’s what I’m told. I wouldn’t get that if Ember just released me because my body is long rotted away and it couldn’t send me on. I’d just fade away until my soul energy is returned to the ambient mana of Auris.”

“Doesn’t sound fun,” I said. “But I mean, at least dying isn’t so bad when you know there’s an afterlife, right? That’s pretty cool, I guess.”

“It’s a lot easier to die for something you believe in when you know there’s a reward waiting for you on the other side.”

After a moment, I decided to ask Surge something I hadn’t really thought much of as of late. “Surge, what happened at your installation? What happened when you died?”

Ghostly images flickered past my mind’s eye too quickly for me to make sense of. I felt a crushing weight of panic and stress settle in my ribs before I realized it was coming from Surge. She made me swallow, and when she spoke, my voice shook and wavered. “We were trying to survive.”

“Survive what?” Gauge asked. “You were in probably the safest place you could’ve been, deep underground with lots of food and water and your own power source. You even had soldiers for your own protection.”

“That was the problem,” Surge said. “I talked to Ember about this before. The soldiers sent to guard the installations on Auris and garrison the planet were the dregs and rejects from the Synarchy’s military. The Synarchy didn’t want them fighting on Equus, so they shipped them off here. Half of them were criminals and murderers who took several years of military service out here in place of execution. They were all scum simply given weapons and kept in line by officers and automated defenses. They were as much prisoners here as anything.”

“Did they turn on you?” Gauge asked. “Is that why there was nobody in your installation?”

“No. We turned on them.” Memories of secret meetings, stealing weapons, and more drifted past my mind. “Almost as soon as we landed on Auris, I had my team prepare for this. We drew up plans, collected weapons, had a master key and passwords for all our security measures. I didn’t pull the trigger for years, though.”

“So why’d you pull it when you did?” I asked. “The Silence?”

“It was the root of the reason, sure,” Surge admitted. “When we lost comms with Equus, the military brass from all across the planet convened in the Ivory City to plan what to do next and how to keep the rest of us calm. Then we heard there was a riot in the City and most of them were killed. As soon as we knew the scum guarding us wouldn’t have officers to keep them in line, I knew they’d start shooting the place up within a day. It happened at so many other places. I activated the security systems and we killed them before they could kill us.”

“But the place was on lockdown when we got there and you were dead,” Gauge stated. “I’m guessing not everything went according to plan.”

Surge shook my head. “Far from it. Though every pony in that installation had military training at some point in their lives, we were still no match for soldiers in a stand up fight. Our bodies had decayed from the peak of our youth after years studying and working in labs, and our training was rusty. After we got the drop on them, they rallied and fought back. They tried to storm the reactor core because that would shut off all the automated defenses chewing them to shreds. I stopped them… but not before one of them threw me through the core. That’s how my soul was separated from my body. That’s how I died.

“But my colleagues were successful,” she continued. “They killed the rest of the soldiers. Afterwards, they cleaned the place up and locked it down. They thought I was dead, and I didn’t know how to manipulate circuitry in my pure mana form then, so I couldn’t communicate with them.”

I felt my throat temporarily seize and my body shuddered. A memory seared into Surge’s mind latched onto mine. I could see the reactor room, the walls peppered with bullet holes, and automated robots dragging away bodies and cleaning up blood. I saw a small knot of eight or nine scientists standing at the base of the reactor ring, staring at Surge’s body below it, unwilling to go any closer for fear of what the torus might do to them. Surge tried to wail at them for help, but she didn’t have a mouth. She tried to make noise, but she didn’t have hooves. She tried to channel her magic, to do something, but she didn’t have a horn. And I felt the fear and dismay settle over my body like poison when they walked away, leaving her to a fate literally worse than death.

“They left me there,” Surge said. “They didn’t know. But they left me to rot in that reactor for one hundred and ninety-five long revolutions of this horrible planet around its pitiful sun. You can never understand what that was like. Every day, I wished that I hadn’t attacked the soldiers if only so they’d kill me and send my spirit on later. I would’ve sacrificed everypony in that installation just to die once and for all.” She swallowed hard, and then her voice took on a softer note. “But now I have you all, primitive and misguided as you may be. So I guess life’s worth living once again.”

I offered her a smile, genuinely surprised by the tender moment she’d allowed herself to admit in front of us. “I’m glad you’re with us, too,” I said, “though maybe not in the current arrangement. That could be improved. But still.” With a burst of magic, I lit a cigarette and continued to nurse my addiction. “It’s good to have you with us. You’re super helpful when it comes to getting any sort of idea what all this ancient madness was caused by.”

“And I’d be lost without somepony to explain the state of the world to me today,” she admitted. “So much has changed over the two hundred years I was dead. It was disorienting when we first left my installation, to say the least.”

“Yeah, I can bet.” Blowing smoke out of my nose, I watched it dissipate as it drifted up to the ceiling of the cave. “And now we’re here, and we’re hopefully close to Teka’s tribe. Once this rain clears, we won’t have much farther to go. I hope.”

“Me too,” Gauge said, shaking his head. “I’m just amazed that she trusts us enough to lead us back to her tribe. She could’ve run off so many times today, but she didn’t.”

“I guess she likes me or something,” I said with a little chuckle. “I did save her life, after all.”

“With plans like that, I’m amazed you’ve lived this long,” Surge said. “And I’m more than a little concerned for my own fate since I have to share your body.”

I waved my hoof that wasn’t pinned under Ace’s side. “Get used to it, sister, because it’s a nonstop fucking mess on the Ember Express.”

“I want to get off,” she grumbled.

As Gauge and I laughed, Ace snorted at my side and raised her head. She blinked her bleary eyes one at a time and yawned, her whole body shaking and stretching as she did so. When she finally had her wits back about her, she craned her head back to look at me, almost bumping our noses together. “So,” she said, her words still slurred so shortly after waking up, “Anypony else hungry, or is it just me?”

I slapped Ace on the shoulder and giggled. “Of course that’s all you care about.”

A corner of Ace’s mouth inched upwards. “The best things in life are those you can eat.”

“What about sex?”

“My point still stands.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me for emphasis. “Am I wrong, Gauge?”

Gauge shook his head and stood up. “I’m gonna ignore that question and wake Nova instead,” he said. “And get some fuel on the fire too so we can start getting food ready.”

“You didn’t answer my question!” Ace shook her head while he walked away, grunted, and shut her eyes again. “Maybe I’ll just doze another five minutes.”

“Can I have my foreleg back?” I put my free hoof against her back and pushed, rolling her back just enough to wiggle my pinned limb out from under her. The sensation of pins and needles covered the whole thing, and I massaged it with my other hoof while I waited for feeling to return to it. “I don’t know how you thought that was comfortable. I could feel your ribs jammed against it.”

Instead of a snappy comeback or something, Ace blushed and fidgeted her wings. “I can sleep on anything,” she said, looking away so I couldn’t see her face. “Ain’t no beds or mattresses out in the wild. You learn to make do.”

I didn’t push her on that, mostly because I started to feel a similar heat building in my cheeks. I could feel Surge watching me from the other side of my brain, and I let a frown settle on my muzzle to let her know that I didn’t want to hear it. Especially because she was right. Her and Nova both. But I couldn’t bring myself to admit that yet, still wary of taking that step after the pain I’d felt at Zip’s death.

After a moment to clear her throat, Ace sat up and used her wings to help stand up. “So, uh, I reckon you should help start the fire or something so we can eat. Our backup’s still asleep.”

I glanced across the room and saw Teka still curled up on her side next to Nova, who was beginning to stir at Gauge’s gentle prodding. Unlike before, her ears were still and relaxed, instead of upright and discreetly poking around for noise. That made me feel good. The poor native mare really needed her rest, I could tell. And though it seemed like she trusted us, I just wished she could be more comfortable around us. For all the effort Nova was investing in this mare and her language, I knew the only way we’d really learn it would be if she felt comfortable enough to open up and talk at us long enough for us to start picking up bits of her language. I really wished there was some device that could automatically translate her language into something we could understand, but as far as I knew, Equestria hadn’t managed to make anything like that before the Silence.

In short time, me and Ace moved to a pit Gauge was constructing in the middle of the cave, I lit a fire, and the zebra started preparing meals for us. I guess it was dinner, but I wasn’t really sure. The constant rain all day, coupled with my already fucked up sleep schedule and midday nap, really had me all out of sorts. I even tried to count my meals for the day and realized I’d only eaten breakfast and had continually been munching on berries or other small morsels as snacks to keep my energy up while I maintained the rain shield. To top it all off, I had the sneaking suspicion I was gonna end up awake all night again. On the one hoof, that meant that keeping watch would be easier, but on the other, fuck me I just wanted to get a good night’s sleep and feel like a normal pony for once and not a wailer.

Though maybe I shouldn’t joke about that. If it wasn’t for Surge, I would have been a wailer. Sometimes I still felt random hot flashes, and I had to wonder just how much damage the wailer spores had done to my brain before Surge killed them all. I’m sure she would tell me if I asked, but I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to know that.

Nova yawned and fluttered her wings as she slowly roused herself from her nap. Her eyes went cross and she blinked several times before their bright teal mirth fell on me. “Heya, Em. Did you manage to get some sleep too?”

“Yeah, I got some sleep,” I said. “Not by choice.”

“She needed it,” Surge finished. “I helped.”

Nova shrugged. “Whatever works, I guess. I’m glad we have you to keep an eye on her, Sparky. Stars know she needs an adult.”

“I am an adult,” I grumbled, lowering my head.

“And I’ve got two centuries on you,” Surge countered, raising it back up. “I could be your grandmother with several ‘greats’ affixed to it.”

“Does that mean I get to call you granny?”

“Only if you want me calling you filly.”

I noticed Teka had opened her eyes and was staring at me with a confused frown on her face. “Ete U’a takka U’a ho’hn ifite?”

“I bet she’s asking why you talk to yourself so much,” Gauge said. “If I didn’t know the story behind you and Surge, that’s the question I’d be asking, too.”

“I don’t know how the fuck I can explain that to her,” I said. “She only understands my name and nothing else.”

Nova shrugged. “She might understand a few more things, but we don’t really have a way to tell. I mean, apart from pointing at things and saying their name. We’ve done that a bunch since we met!”

“Yeah, and that’s why she thinks you talk too much,” I said, smiling when Nova pouted. “It’s okay, Nova, I know you’re just trying to help.”

“I thought it was another one of her selfish desires to learn more,” Gauge said, gently elbowing his marefriend. “She puts everything else on hold when she’s trying to learn something new. Even me.”

“Do not!” Nova protested, slapping Gauge’s shoulder. “I have time for everything, okay? I work this stuff out!”

“Where do I fit in on this schedule?” Gauge asked, sticking his tongue out at Nova.

Nova blushed and quickly focused her attention on her meal. “Whenever we’re alone,” she muttered. “Which hasn’t been that often as of late…”

“Hey, girl, don’t let us bother you none,” Ace said. “Just say the word and Ember and I will skedaddle.”

Gauge started passing out food to the five of us and ultimately ended up leaning back to back with Nova, each using the other as a backrest. “We’ll keep that in mind for later, then,” he said, shooting a sly look at Nova. “Not right now, though. I bet the acoustics in this cave are something else.”

“It’d probably sound like a pair of rock runners fucking. Those fat bastards are loud.”

Once more, Nova started blushing and she dipped her head and tried to appear small behind Gauge’s back. “We’re not like that…”

“Nov, don’t try and defend yourself against everything,” I said, winking at her. “It just makes the rest of us think we’re right and you’re embarrassed.”

Nova wisely decided to shut her mouth and pout after that. At least she had Gauge to give her nuzzles in between bites of his dinner. I was just content to watch them cuddle and be cute together while I ate. I gotta have some kind of entertainment during dinner, right?

When we were most of the way through dinner, joking and laughing about all sorts of dumb shit, I noticed that Teka looked stiff and on edge, even more so than she had been all day. Frowning, I set what little morsels of my dinner I had left aside and nudged Ace’s shoulder to get her attention. “Does Teka seem tense to you?” I asked the outlaw. “Like, more than usual?”

Ace continued to noisily work on her dinner (she was one of those horrible ponies who chewed with their mouths open) but gave Teka a curious sidelong glance. The tattooed mare sat stock still and rigid except for her ears, which slowly swept across the cave. The muscles in her shoulders and forelegs would twitch like they were coiled springs about ready to let loose at any second. As far as I could tell, she had every appearance of a mare deciding whether it was time to fight or flee.

“Yeah…” Ace said when she finally swallowed what was in her mouth. “That’s pretty odd.” Clearing her throat, she opened and closed a wing to catch Teka’s eyes. “Hey, Teka, what’s worrying you?” She cocked her head to the side, trying to communicate with the tribal mare as much through body language as through the spoken word.

Even Nova and Gauge fell silent as they realized what me and Ace had realized. All eyes turned to Teka with a mixture of confusion and worry. Teka looked between all of us and swallowed hard, then rose to her hooves. Her tattoos flickered a few different colors, and she turned toward the entrance leading deeper into the cavern. “Himnm,” she said. “Sotto noal mofmi’set”

We all turned in the direction Teka was looking, but we couldn’t see or hear anything. I wasn’t really gonna risk it, though; if she’d heard something bad back there, then I didn’t want to stick around and figure out what it was. “Nov, Gauge, start packing shit up,” I said. “I think we might have woken something bad. We better get going before it finds tasty ponies in its house.”

Ace and I both readied our weapons and carefully moved closer to that tunnel in the back of the cave while Nova and Gauge started putting everything away as quickly as they could. If I strained my ears, I thought I could hear something shifting across the stones and breathing down the corridor. Whatever it was, it sounded big and nasty. Because of course it was going to be big and nasty. Big and nasty is pretty much all Auris does.

Either way, I set the mode for my rifle to ‘AP’, figuring I was gonna need it. I also made sure the grenade launcher mounted on the underbarrel rail was loaded. That might also save my fucking life today.

“How’s it going?” I asked my friends. “You guys almost done?”

“Almost,” Gauge hissed between something clenched in his teeth. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the tunnel entrance to see what he was working on, worried that the moment I did, this nasty thing was gonna come flying around the corner and tear me in half immediately. “It’s a lot harder without unicorn magic!”

“I’m watching the fucking tunnel!” I hissed back at him. “You wanna fucking shoot?” I glanced at Ace. “Any idea what the fuck could be inside one of these tunnels?”

Ace shook her head. “I ain’t never been out to the Spines before. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Shhhh!” Teka glared at the two of us and put a hoof to her lips. “Shwikskit uss’set bowib Tm’a poppo lifte! T’a soe’set’un, twee! Kepsep Um’a soew’an lopo...” She said the last part under her breath in a fairly ominous tone, but I had no idea what she was trying to say other than that we needed to be quiet.

I glanced at Ace and shared a nod with her. “Quiet’s good,” I whispered. “I can do quiet.”

“Can you?” she whispered back. “You’re usually pretty awful at it.”

“Shut up, Ace, this isn’t the fucking time!”

Something made a noise in front of us, just down the tunnel. I immediately tensed, and my magic flared as a result. I still couldn’t see anything, but whatever it was, I knew it had to be close. “Hey, Sparky? You don’t happen to know what wildlife lives where on Auris off the top of your head, do you?”

I could feel Surge wracking her brain (figuratively, of course) for anything that could help us. “We didn’t get a chance to come anywhere near even performing basic taxonomy of the planet,” Surge said. “We never even explored the other continents. We—!”

“Stum!” Teka suddenly screamed. As soon as she shouted that, a number of different things happened all at once. Her tattoos flared red, and tongues of flame began to peel off her body. I noticed the air in front of me shimmer slightly, sort of like the distortion that happens to it on a hot day. Ace’s rifle boomed next to my ear, and something let out an ear-splitting shriek as lead and fire sailed toward the tunnel leading deeper underground.

Blood splattered across the ground, and what looked like an enormous snake shimmered into view. Its body was long and flat, and its upper body raised up until its head nearly brushed the thirty foot ceiling of the cave. Spindly clawed spider-like legs stuck out of its oval-like torso, the hooked ends clutching at rocks and the walls, and its back was arched almost like an inchworm mid-stride. Its tail ended with two long, gnarled, bony spines that curled up over its back, and each spine was about ten feet long. Gray and blue scales covered the length of its body, and it had six eyes on its flat head; four on top, and two on the bottom. When it opened its mouth, I saw dozens of sharp and hooked fangs pop out of its gums, and green acid dripped from its lips, hissing when it hit the ground. If I had to take a guess, I figured it was probably somewhere close to fifty feet long from head to tail.

I’ve seen a lot of terrifying things in my life. I thought shrikes were awful, but they’re tame compared to the stuff that’s out there on the rest of Auris. And while the tolan had been terrifying, it just looked like big, hungry, raw power. This thing—whatever it was—was like evil personified, like something straight out of a nightmare.

And then its edges shimmered and blurred and the damn thing turned invisible right in front of us.

“Run!” I screamed, immediately backpedaling and desperately firing my rifle where the monster had been just moments before. I saw blood spray a few times out of thin air, so I at least knew my bullets were hitting it and doing something, but it remained invisible. It screeched and the cave shook, and I heard the sound of claws tearing across rock and rubble as it started to move into the cave. A fireball left my horn and briefly outlined the monstrosity as it struck off its scales, but that didn’t even seem to slow it down. I didn’t know how fast that thing could move, but I had the distinct feeling that it could move faster than us.

Ace flapped her wings and flew backwards, firing a few random shots from her rifle into the cave, hoping to score some hits on the invisible monster. Teka merely turned tail and fled, bolting right out of the cave and past Nova and Gauge, who were trying to haul what they could of our gear out of the cave. Deciding they had the right idea, I grabbed my own bags in my magic and galloped for the exit, practically feeling the thing skittering across the ground after me. My horn flared at Surge’s beckoning, and a shield manifested behind me right before acid splattered against it. Had she not have done that, I probably would’ve been turned into a pile of pony goo on the floor of the cave.

And then we were outside, the five of us sprinting for our lives across the rough and muddy ground. Gauge and Nova led the way, and Nova used her wings to gain some height and distance on the thing, followed not too far behind by Ace. The outlaw would occasionally twirl about in midair and fire her laser pistols in a wide arc, simply trying to hit this thing wherever it might have gone. That left me to take up the rear and try to get away from the centipede-like thing. I wished my hooves were as light as Teka’s as the thing breathed down my neck; Teka had quickly left all of us behind with her light hooves and took the lead of our column, the mud not slowing her down in the slightest.

“What the fuck is that thing?!” I screamed, practically crying as I heard it skitter out of the cave and into the mud behind me. “I hate it! I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it so much!”

Trust me, if you’ve ever seen one of these things before, you’d understand while I was wailing like a little filly.

My horn flared again on account of Surge using it to cast more spells while I simply focused on running and not tripping. My stomach did backflips as the world flashed around me, and then suddenly I was on the other side of the river and maybe a quarter mile in front of my friends. The disorienting teleport ended with me falling on my face into the mud and muck, nearly dropping my rifle and definitely succeeding in dropping my bag of supplies. I pulled my head out of the mud and sputtered, then grabbed my rifle and tried to orient myself again. “Why’d you do that?!” I shouted at Surge, eying my friends with worry from afar.

“It was going to fucking eat us!” Surge shouted back. She seized control of my foreleg and pointed my hoof across the river to where the mud seemingly tore itself up and went flying. “There! You can see it now! Shoot it!”

I did my best to shoot at where its invisible legs churned up the mud and splashed through the water. I tried to remember what exactly it looked like and how it was proportioned to make sure I was actually aiming for its body even though I couldn’t see it. I fired several heavy duty shots from my rifle, the AP setting doing wonders as it punched through the monster’s hide and sent splatters of blood into the air. After about the fourth hit on its body, however, the mud shifted again, and this time it came charging across the river at me.

Well, on the bright side, I’d bought my friends some time and some space. On the other hoof, fuck me, why did I have to piss it off?!

“Get another one of those teleports ready,” I told Surge, firing several more times at where I thought the thing’s head was in the meanwhile.

“I can’t!” Surge shouted back. “Your horn’s exhausted from the rain shield today! You’re running on empty as is!”

Of course, now that she mentioned it, I suddenly started feeling it. I was shaky and woozy, even after getting some time to sleep and rest. I knew I needed a long vacation after we got the next code piece if I was ever going to recover my magic and strength, but that wasn’t really something I had the fortune of asking for right now. Besides, if I couldn’t shoot this thing, I had a feeling I was about to take a vacation inside of its stomach.

I wondered if it would swallow me whole or if it’d chew first. I didn’t know which prospect was worse.

All of a sudden, SCaR zoomed over from my friends and began shooting his little guns at a space in midair. At first I didn’t know what the drone was doing, because I didn’t really see anything happen, but then I heard the monster roar and SCaR quickly juke backwards and off to the side. Was SCaR trying to distract it so I could get away?

“That sentry drone has infrared,” Surge said. “It can see the creature’s body heat!”

“It can?” I took another look at SCaR’s movements and where the drone kept firing its weapons. Sure enough, he was moving with too much purpose and caution to be just flying blindly over the river. And judging by the way the drone pointed his weapons about, he had to be trying to shoot the thing in the face. With that in mind, I adjusted my aim accordingly, trying to shoot a few feet off to the side of SCaR in whatever direction the drone was oriented.

I was rewarded with several more roars and chittering screeches of pain, accompanied by a huge splash in the river as the monster fell over. For a brief moment, I dared to hope that I’d actually shot the thing in the brain and killed it, but Auris’ wildlife is much too tough to go down that easily. Once more, the water splashed about, and this time the monster shimmered back into view, allowing me to see the damage I’d done to it. I’d managed to hit several spots along its neck and head, but it didn’t seem too impaired by its wounds. If anything, I might have disabled its invisibility for a little while… and really pissed it off.

It spat more acid at me, and I didn’t waste any time to turn tail and gallop away. I heard the mud and rock sizzle into sludge where I’d been standing moments before, and I even watched my bag of supplies hiss into useless slag as it took a hit before I could move it out of the way. But I couldn’t spend any time to dwell on the fact that I’d lost my tent and sleeping roll now; I’d lose a lot more than some random shit if I hung around any longer. Once more running for my life, I just tried to focus on keeping my hooves from slipping while I galloped along the riverbank, hopelessly trying to outrun this centipede-scorpion-monster-thing.

Of course, I wasn’t alone. I had my friends to look after me, and thankfully that’s exactly what they did. Ace soon started harassing the thing from above and behind, distracting it while I made my getaway, while Nova put her super fucking bionic death wing to good use in chewing its hide up with precise cuts and slashes. The monster’s bony tails jabbed at the air with frightening speed and accuracy, nearly turning Ace into a cloud of beige feathers and blood, but the outlaw managed to twirl away when she realized just how fast those spines could move. Both she and Nova immediately backed up, giving the creature some more space as they tried to gauge its reactions, but that just let it have more freedom to decide what to do. Before I’d even gone a sufficient enough distance to feel comfortable setting up and taking shots at it again, it roared, reared its head back, and flung its body into the soft earth, its numerous legs dragging its serpentine body deep into the muddy soil around it.

Great. Add burrowing to the list of things this monster could fucking do. That was exactly what I wanted to see from it. Now we couldn’t even attack it!

The ground rumbled as the thing burrowed its way through the earth, but with the ferocity and intensity of the burrowing, I had no idea who it was going for. Instead, I opted for caution and decided to start moving again, not wanting to get caught by its jaws when it inevitably erupted from the ground and tried to swallow me whole.

Which for some reason, pissed off Surge. “Don’t run!” she shouted, and she asserted herself to make me stop.

“What the fuck?!” I shouted at her. “We’re going to die!”

“No! It’s burrowing! How do you think it’s going to figure out where we are?”

“I don’t know, it’ll fucking smell me or something!”

“It uses vibrations! If you move, it can find you!”

I was about to protest, but amazingly, we hadn’t died in the entire ten seconds we’d been standing utterly still. The thing still burrowed its way through the ground, but I felt like it had given up on me in pursuit of Gauge and Teka, who continued to gallop across their riverbank as fast as they could. If Surge was right, then we had a way to avoid getting eaten—but only while it was underground. And that still didn’t really help us get away.

Ace flew down to me while Nova flew over to her coltfriend. “Why’d you stop?” Ace asked me, panting slightly and her coat covered in spotty dribblings of the monster’s blood. “What’s going on?”

“It can sense tremors,” I said. “If I walk, it’ll know where I am! We just gotta stay still!”

Ace raised an eyebrow in surprise but didn’t question me. She did, however, point across the riverbank to my friends. “I don’t think they got the memo,” she said. “They’re gonna be worm food in a few minutes at this rate.”

“Warn them!” Surge shouted, pointing desperately across the river. “If you care so much for the zebra, now’s your only chance!”

Ace grunted and flung herself airborne, wings frantically flapping as she tried to gain lift. I, meanwhile, readied my gun while I couldn’t move. If that thing burst out of the ground, I was ready to unload hell into its brain and hopefully drop it for good.

But I could only watch, wait, and worry while my two pegasus friends tried to rescue Gauge and Teka before the beast could get to them. I saw the ground begin to bulge upwards as it closed in on Gauge, but before it could snap him up in one vicious bite, Nova swooped down and pulled him skyward, her bionic wing compensating for his surprised flailing and weight. No sooner had she pulled him into the air did the monster burst out of the ground in a shower of mud, teeth and fangs snapping at the air while acid sprayed from its gums. It twisted and clawed at the retreating pair in frustration, but ultimately its weight dragged its upper body back down to the earth and it set its sights on its next target.

Before Ace could even get to Teka, however, the tribal mare abruptly turned away from her and started running deeper into the spines. Her tattoos shimmered with a light even I could see from the other side of the river, and moments later sent several colorful flares flying off of her back. They whizzed and curled through the sky before fizzling out, but they definitely seemed to get the big creepy-crawly’s attention locked on her. With big chitinous legs churning through the mud, the beast skittered in pursuit, inadvertently putting itself between Ace and Teka.

Ace tried to capitalize on approaching the monster from its blind spot by stopping her charge and coming to a hover so she could use her rifle. She let the powerful high caliber weapon fire off three shots in rapid succession, keeping a tight grouping on the back of the creature’s neck even with its erratic and exaggerated movements during its charge. But even Ace’s amazing skills with a rifle didn’t drop the thing, and it continued to close the distance on Teka.

I wasn’t standing around being useless this whole time, though. I fired several times with my own rifle, though I had to be careful not to hit Ace when she stopped between me and it. But at the distance it had moved, and the angle its armor made as I tried to shoot through it, my bullets didn’t have the same punching power as Ace’s rifle did, even with my rifle set to its AP mode. Growling in frustration, I lowered my rifle and cursed, trying to think of what else I could do to help out. If bullets didn’t work, and my magic was fried, what could I do?

Apparently nothing, and it turned out I didn’t need to. I heard a yell somehow slice its way through the rain and the noise of the creature, and my eyes widened in surprise when I saw four more tattooed ponies emerge from the foliage around the enormous trees of the Spines. They immediately moved to intercept the monster, fanning out into a formation as they did so. I saw their tattoos glow in different colors, and two of the ponies stopped to launch barrages of ice and fire at it. Though they failed in bringing it down, I had a feeling that wasn’t their intention. It hissed in pain and surprise, and a wave of mud flew into the air as it abruptly changed its direction and started to charge at them.

But the moment it tried to pivot in place, the other two tribal ponies hurled themselves at it. While one spread his wings and buzzed its head, another began to climb its legs, swinging around onto its back before it could react. With the monster disoriented and focusing on the pegasus around its head, the pony on its back started to climb up the jagged chitin scales lining its upper body. Me and Surge watched in disbelief as the pony managed to climb all the way to the thing’s head, take a spear off his back, and jam it into the base of one of its antennae.

A sickening howl seemed to shake the entire river basin, and the monster fell onto its side and began to flail, disoriented. The resulting thrashing flung the one tribal pony on its head into the air, where the pegasus smoothly caught him and carried him back to the ground a safe distance away. The other two who had been just casting magic likewise backed up, and they watched with their tattoos flashing while the monster writhed in agony.

And to my shock, whatever they did seemed to work. They didn’t kill it, not even close, but it reared back and began to slink away, hissing and spitting acid. I watched it scuttle backwards until it figured it was a safe distance away from all of us, at which point it turned around and scurried back into its cave. With one last hiss and a flexing of its bony spines, it slipped through the entrance and disappeared from sight.

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. “…It’s gone?” I wondered aloud. “Just like that?”

“Instead of killing it, they disoriented and dazed it,” Surge observed. “They struck it right in the antennae, made it sick and dizzy, and that was enough to scare it away.”

I eyed the new arrivals and watched how Teka fearlessly trotted over to them. If I hadn’t already pegged them as Feati ponies from the tattoos earlier, her friendly and relieved expression upon seeing them would’ve done the trick for me anyway. They seemed surprised to see her, at least from what I could tell this far away, and they immediately circled around her and started checking her for signs of injury.

Ace drifted back towards me and raised an eyebrow. “Guess we were right on their front porch this whole time,” she said. “Think they’re gonna be nice to us outsiders?”

“Only one way to find out,” I said. Shouldering what was left of my supplies, I nodded to my outlaw friend. “Mind carrying me across the river?”

“Can’t you teleport?” Ace asked, raising an eyebrow.

“If I teleport her, her horn’s likely to shatter from extreme burnout,” Surge said, switching my diction and accent back into her natural speaking patterns. “That won’t be very useful to anypony.”

“Wait, my horn can do that?” I asked, now kind of worried about how much magic I’d been using as of late. “I know you can kill yourself if you cast too much, but that sounds really unpleasant!”

Ace just blinked at me. “You’re… more worried about your horn blowing up from overuse than you are dying from it?”

“Shut up,” I growled. “I like my horn. A mare’s allowed some vanities, right?”

Ace shook her head. “Whatever. I ain’t gonna ask.” Lowering her stance, she spread her wings so I could climb onto her back. “Come on. Let’s see what the locals think of us.”