Within minutes, we’d gathered all we’d need to drive Yeoman away from the Walsalhn. I had my rifle and a few spare magazines for it, Gauge had SCaR freshly loaded with bullets, and Nova had spent the time bandaging my mauled leg so I could at least move it easier. I’d suggested that she just slice it off with her wing and be done with it, since I’d need to get it removed anyway with how badly it was mangled, but she’d refused and had instead patched it up as best she could. She’d tried to justify it by saying that the pain and shock would almost certainly take me out of the fight entirely, even when Surge protested that she could just block the sensations streaming down my nervous system. In the end, however, Nova just wrapped up my leg as tightly as she could, implanting a couple sticks in the wrappings to give it a little support.

And then we were off, venturing once more back out into the fiery haze that clung to the city. The trees overhead seemed like they collected the smoke and pushed it back downwards, making the air thick and hot and difficult to breathe. Distant gunshots still cracked throughout the settlement, but it seemed like most of the fighting had died down. The Ivory City soldiers were pulling out, and they’d left a mountain of corpses in their wake.

“By the stars… this is horrible!” Nova gasped as we passed by a few of Lento’s surviving blood brothers lining up the bodies of their fallen comrades, grim looks chiseled into their faces. They’d amassed nearly thirty or forty tattooed bodies on the flat ground, and a short ways away was a haphazard pile of half a dozen City soldiers. Most of those soldiers were ponies I’d killed with my machine gun; very few had any spear wounds or scorch marks from the Feati’s futile attempt to fight back. The attack had been a massacre, a horrible massacre, all for a single string of six or seven letters hidden away on a computer somewhere nearby.

“Is it bad to say it’s a good thing they found Sandy as quickly as they did, then?” Gauge asked, shivering at the carnage surrounding us.

“They would have continued to tear this settlement to pieces had they not,” Surge said. “A lot more would have died.”

“At least they’re not interested in slaughtering these ponies for the sport of it,” I said. “That’s the one reason why I’m happy they’re not bandits. They’re professional, as horrible as they are.”

We made our way down the hill, away from the misery at the longhouse, and I did my best to avoid looking at all the death around us. Mothers wailed in the streets as they cradled the bodies of their dead children, and tattooed ponies tried desperately to use their ice magic to put out some of the fires consuming their homes. Glassy eyes stared skyward, forever unblinking, and the suffocating, choking ash and smoke hung heavy over the settlement like some abominable hell.

The clouds in front of us swirled as a pegasus descended, and I lowered Gauge’s rifle with my magic before the zebra could jump and start shooting at her. Ace appeared through the smoke and dust like an angel from on high, and her hooves struck solidly into the soot coating the ground as she landed. “Ember, guys, thank Celestia you’re alright,” she said, worriedly trotting closer to us. I saw her eyes dart over all of us as she looked for any obvious injuries, and her wings relaxed when she saw none of us were fucked up that badly. “I missed the party, didn’t I?”

“Not yet,” I said, rolling my shoulders. I offered Ace a cigarette, which she happily took. While she got it started with a helpful spark from my horn, I gestured vaguely toward the outskirts of the settlement. “Yeoman was looking for somepony who could take him to the big fucking tree, and he nabbed Sandy. We need to go there now. You know the way, right?”

“I didn’t spend a whole day preening sap outta my feathers for nothing,” Ace said. “I can get us to it.”

“Good.” I looked over my shoulder and nodded to Nova and Gauge. “Nov, when we run into trouble, just fly out of sight as quickly as you can. If you’re gonna hit them with that wing of yours, they can’t see you coming.” When she nodded, I turned to Gauge. “Just stick with me, buddy, and have SCaR support us when we try to move or get pinned down. He saved my ass just trying to get up to you two, so he can be really useful.”

“I’ll do my best,” Gauge said.

“Me too,” Nova added.

Satisfied, I turned back to Ace. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you what to do,” I stated.

Ace just rolled her pretty blue eyes. “I can’t be up in the trees none if I have to lead y’all to the big one,” she said. “But if the shooting starts, I’ll find a nice vantage to start plucking away from.”

“Good. Let’s just be careful, then,” I said, and I felt my cheeks beginning to turn rosy as I looked over Ace’s muzzle. “I, uh… we need to have a talk when this is all done…”

To her credit, Ace just smirked and winked at me rather than descending into an awkward mess like me. “You just want another peck on the lips, don’t you?”

“I’d hardly call that a peck,” Surge commented. “That was anything but chaste.”

Nova blinked in confusion. “Wait… what happened?”

“Nothing!” I insisted, trotting forward. “Just… stuff! Stuff that’s not important right now!” Coming upon a fork in the road, I struck off at random to the right, my hooves stomping through ground.

“Uh… Em?” Ace chuckled. I turned around to see her pointing her wing in the complete opposite direction. “The tree’s this way.”

“I knew that!” I abruptly turned around and set myself on that path instead. “Come on, we don’t have time to waste!”

As Nova and Gauge giggled, I heard Ace chuckling to them over my shoulder. “I gave her teeth a good cleaning, if you know what I mean…”

The embarrassing levity of the moment didn’t last all that long. All we had to do was walk past a few more burned-out husks of buildings and skirt around a dozen bloodstained piles of ash and dirt for the lightheartedness to all disappear. There was only the grim feeling of failure and doom hanging over us, the worry that we might be too late, and all our efforts would be for nothing.

And despite all that, we made agonizingly slow progress. Now that the adrenaline of combat had gone away, my body began to show its weariness, and I started to struggle to walk. I could only move so fast on my mangled leg; even though Nova’s bandages had helped keep the mess a little more contained, I couldn’t put any weight on it. Gauge tried to give me some support so we could move a little bit faster, but I could still barely manage more than a trot. It was clear I was slowing everyone else down, but the stubborn part of me refused to admit it. I had to find Yeoman, and I had to kill him. If I wasn’t out there to protect my friends from him, he’d take them from me.

Just like how he’d taken Zip from me.

But for better or for worse, the rational part of me could talk on her own these days. “Stop,” Surge finally said aloud, surprising my friends. “Ember and I need to stop. We can’t do this.”

“What do you mean?” Gauge asked, helping Surge guide me to a wall despite my protests.

“Don’t listen to her,” I insisted, trying to hobble away from the wall, though Surge and I fighting over my legs mostly left me fidgeting uselessly in place. “I can do it. I can make the walk.”

“We can’t,” Surge said, shaking my head. “We’re slowing you down, and time is of the essence. We’re hurt, weak, tired, and Ember’s finding it hard to see straight.” That was true enough; the world was roiling around me, and I felt sick to my stomach. “We’re going to be useless in a fight. Given everything we suffered through during the Trial, it’s a miracle she even fought her way up to the longhouse to get you.”

“I can go faster!” Once again, I tried to get back on the path, but this time Surge slapped me down with a pinch of nerves that made me too dizzy to stand up right. “Fuck you, you Synarchist cunt,” I growled, even as my vision swam and my mostly-empty stomach felt like it was doing flips.

It was at that point that Ace took charge. “Surge is right,” she said, much to my dismay. “They can’t go on like this. We’ll move faster and safer if we make sure she’s tucked away safe and set off on our own. Time is of the essence.”

Nova and Gauge hesitated, looking toward me almost as if they were asking for permission, and I finally reluctantly waved my hoof. “Fuck it… fine. But you better be careful, okay?” I tried to sit up a little straighter and lock Ace with my eyes. “Don’t let anything bad happen to them, you hear me? They’re not as experienced in a fight as we are.”

“I’ll keep them safe,” Ace said, solemnly nodding. “You can count on that.”

“And let me ride along with your drone,” Surge said.

Gauge lifted an eyebrow, and SCaR pivoted about to face me. “Why?”

“I’m pure energy, remember?” Surge said. “I can zip along any circuit and override any doors, terminals, et cetera. You’re going to need me if you’re going to get to that code.”

“Do it,” Ace said. “We’re gonna need every bit of help we can get.”

“You’re not going to mess with SCaR’s programming, are you?” Gauge asked, still wary. I couldn’t blame him; SCaR was basically his pet, or his son. I didn’t really know where exactly he drew that line with the drone.

“I might dig through its memory to see if it has anything stored from before the Silence, but I’m not going to touch the code if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Gauge still wasn’t happy about the whole thing, but he eventually relented. “Alright, fine. SCaR, go fly over to Ember.”

The little drone did as it was told, and Surge touched my horn to its frame. My legs twitched and jolted as a blue spark of mana connected the two, and then it felt like my mind went silent. I’d grown so used to having Surge present in my mind, even when she was quietly resting, that having my head all back to myself felt eerie and odd, like there was a void in my skull. And strange as it sounds… I sort of missed that intrusive companionship the moment she left.

SCaR shifted and puttered wildly for a few seconds before it stabilized. “This is certainly much different than playing with a unicorn’s body,” Surge said through the drone’s speakers in a tinny voice. She spun the metal frame around and turned the camera on the rest of the group. “Let’s get moving, then. I’d much rather be back in Ember’s body as soon as I can be.”

“You’re not going to die if you spend too much time in there, are you?” Nova asked.

“I’ll be fine for a few days before the mana holding my soul together dissipates,” Surge replied. “Though if I’m in this frame for more than a day, something’s gone terribly wrong.”

“And the longer we stand around here yapping, the worse it’s gonna get.” Ace impatiently fluffed the feathers on her wings. “Let’s get moving, or there ain’t gonna be a tree to save!”

They began to form up around Ace, and I finally slumped back against the wall. Disappointment hung heavy in my heart, but I tried to wave off Nova’s concerned look. “Go,” I told them, propping my rifle up against the wall. “I’ll be here when you’re done. If you can, try to bring Yeoman back alive, alright? I’d love to have a few words with him before I skullfuck him with my rifle.”

“We’ll do our best,” Gauge assured me. The corners of his lips twitched up as he tilted his head down a few degrees. “Just rest and take it easy. Maybe you can find somepony who will help you with your leg.”

“I’ll just wait for Nova to take care of it with her wing,” I said. “It’s likely gonna be sharper than anything the Feati have here.”

“Eat and rest,” Nova insisted, and she gave me a quick hug. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

“Keep your body in one piece for me,” Surge simply said. “I’d like to not go down with your ship too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and then my eyes locked with Ace’s. She didn’t say anything, but I saw the flare of her nostrils, how she parted some of the long strands of her sweaty mane away from her hidden eye with a wingtip. She flashed her teeth in a tiny approximation of a smile, and then, winking, she turned back to the rest of the group.

“We good?” she asked, and when she got nods from everybody else, she spread her wings open. “Good. Come on!”

I weakly waved as they galloped off after Ace, moving much, much faster than we were before when they were all waiting on me. As much as I hated missing a fight, I knew it was for the best. I was too hurt and too weak to do anything other than get in the way and drag everyone else down. And on top of that, a haunting thought began to creep into my skull. Even if we did all leave this place with our lives, how useful would I be to my friends with only three legs? If they had to wait for me to limp everywhere after them, if they had to carry me whenever we needed to go over rough terrain or mountains, was I really still an important member of the team anymore? Or was I just a burden?

I closed my eyes and tried not to dwell on those thoughts. They had Ace with them, and Ace seemed committed to the group, and to me. If it came down to it, she’d be a fantastic leader for them. She’d know how to keep them alive, and they’d thrive under her command. They’d probably do a lot better than I would.

Keeping that in mind, I was at least able to close my eyes and doze as the past twenty-eight hours finally caught up to me.

Or at least, I’d started to before I heard a surprised gasp coming from right in front of me.

My eyes popped open to see a familiar tattooed stallion looking me over. His coat was roughed up with scratches and soot, but he looked lively and unharmed. His headdress was askew, but everything about him was so unique that it would be hard to mistake him for anypony else. When I looked up at him, he came closer and dropped the basket of salves and wrappings he’d been carrying and trotted closer to me. “You are alive? Ha! I should not be surprised! Lentowenye had tried to make the Trial as hard as he could, but he could not keep you down!”

I found myself smiling up at the delighted face of the Shaman. “I’m just glad to get back here in one piece,” I said, though my eyes wandered down to my bandaged leg. “Or, well, mostly in one piece.”

The Shaman shifted his attention to my leg. “Yes?” he asked, hooves resting on the bandages. I assumed he was asking if he could take a look at the wound, so I nodded. As he began to unwrap the bandages, he whistled as more and more scorched flesh began to emerge. “What happen?”

“Wargs,” I told him, not really sure if he knew the common name for them or not. “Big wolf things. One mangled my leg and nearly ripped it off. I had to burn it to get it to stop bleeding. It’s… really fucked. I’m gonna have my friend cut it off when she gets back. You know, the mare with the cool metal wing…”

As the Shaman slowly undid my dressings, I let my eyes wander around the settlement. “What happened while I was gone?” I asked him. “I mean, I know outsiders attacked this place and all, because I fought and killed a bunch, but how did it start?”

“Attacked at the height of day,” the Shaman said. “Boom-shots out in the middle of the forest. Must have killed hunting party. Set us on edge. Then they came and blew down the gates. No warning, no demands, no willingness to talk. Just attack. Attack and kill. Burned down everything they touched to make chaos.”

“They’re looking for the tree,” I told him. “You know… the big tree.”

“The Walsalhn?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. They’re trying to get something from it. The same thing I was after,” I said, dropping my voice a bit.

The Shaman didn’t react to that at all, instead only continuing to tend to my mangled leg. So it was something of a surprise when he finally quipped, “If they were upset about missing Grass Trial, could have asked nicely.”

“Really?” My brows knitted together. “After all this shit… you can still joke about it?”

“Horrible, yes,” the Shaman said. “Sad, yes. Disgusting, very yes.” His withered nostrils flared nonetheless. “Misery is trap. Embrace it, grieve, but never let paralyze. For me… laughter helps keep moving.”

It was certainly an interesting thought, considering how miserable my life had become. “I’ll… try to keep that in mind,” I said. “It’s wise, in a way.”

“Not much point to old shaman if not for wisdom!” the stallion said with another breathy chuckle, and I had to admit, it got me to smile a little bit as well.

His expression soured, however, when he finally peeled away all my bandages and saw the mess I’d made of my leg. “I told you it’s pretty fucked,” I said as he looked it over. “You’d be better off taking care of the rest of your people.”

But he only shook his head and placed both his gnarled and cracked forehooves on my mangled leg. His tattoos began to glow soft white, and I gasped when I felt the burned and mangled flesh around my wound begin to itch. As I watched in awe, the black char and ash that made up my roasted flesh began to flake away, replaced with rapidly growing—and healthy—pink skin and muscle. Bit by bit, my wound began to close, my leg repairing itself as if the terrible wound that would have otherwise required an amputation was nothing more than a mere scratch.

Eventually, I had to let out the guilt gnawing away at me. “You don’t blame me and my friends for this?” I finally asked him.

“Why?” He momentarily took his eyes off my legs and raised an eyebrow. “Did you bring? They with you?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m trying to stop them. We’re trying to stop them. But they’re after the same thing we are. I just… I-I can’t help but feel like we led them to you, somehow. Like, if we could have gotten what we wanted and left, we could have led them away…”

My hoof on my mangled leg twitched for the first time since the warg had ripped the muscle to shreds, and my eyes widened. “Holy fuck, that’s amazing,” I murmured aloud as I watched the Shaman finish sealing my horrid wound back up. “You… I…”

The Shaman panted lightly as he finished closing the wound and took his hooves off my leg. “Like new,” he proclaimed, and I immediately began kicking the leg around. It felt like it was so full of energy… come to think about it, it wasn’t the only part of me that felt completely re-energized. I felt awake, alert, and ready to take on the world. Sure, I was still hungry and a bit thirsty, but I still felt like I could sprint a mile at full gallop without pausing for breath.

“How?” was all I could ultimately ask. “How do your tattoos do that?”

“Nature,” the Shaman said. “Our ink is nature. Fire, its anger. Ice, its sadness. Healing, its life.” He pointed to my leg. “The world is life. Can be moved as needed… if you know how!”

“But why would you do that for me?” I asked him. “I’m an outsider, and I’m sure Lentowenye would have loved to see me crippled, if not just outright dead.”

“Lentowenye cannot stop this,” the Shaman said with a wink of his cloudy eye. “We cannot. Can only slow down. But you, outsider… You can.”

His split horn sparked and fizzed to life, and he picked my rifle up from the ground and pressed it against my chest with great difficulty. “Go. Lentowenye cannot save the Feati. But you will.”

I took the rifle from his grip and swallowed hard. “Jeez… no pressure, right?”

The Shaman grinned at me. “Pressure where you thrive! Ha! Nopony better, no?”

Smiling, I slung the rifle across my back. “I guess you’re right about that.” Then, because I felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t start moving, I began to bounce back and forth on my newly rejuvenated hooves. “Thank you, dude. Like, so much. I would have lost my leg if you hadn’t done that.”

The Shaman merely nodded. “Is nothing,” he said. “Now go. Bad outsiders need you to stop them. Hopefully I don’t have to fix other leg when you come back, ha!”

“I hope so, too.” I rolled my shoulders and began to side-trot in the direction my friends had galloped off toward. “I’ll be back with the head of the stallion that did this. I guarantee it.”

And then I spun around and began to sprint after my friends’ tracks, leaving the Shaman behind. Hopefully I’d be able to catch up to them, but they’d left several minutes before the Shaman had found me, and I didn’t know exactly where the big tree was. But I would get back to them, and together we’d take Yeoman down.

He was so close now. The next time I saw him, it’d be through the sights of a gun. Finally, after so long, I could put an end to that monster and avenge everypony he’d killed.

The thought of an orange face resting easy after all this time spurred me to gallop faster, and I practically tore apart the Feati’s dirt streets as I raced off toward destiny.

My heart pounded, my lungs burned, and my hooves thrummed against the soft dirt of the earth. I was running, I was alive, and most importantly, I wasn’t out of the fight yet.

I galloped out of the shattered settlement gate and hooked a left, following the churned up earth leading around the village’s walls. Lots of ponies had passed through here recently, all carrying enough gear to leave deep ruts in the dirt and mud. They had left with purpose and left as a unit, and there was only one place they could have been moving with such focus.

I passed dozens of distraught Feati huddled in groups and caring to their young and wounded outside of the settlement. Their eyes, shot through with red from tears and soot, watched the fires still crackling and roaring through their home with distraught pain carved deep into their features. Their entire way of life had been uprooted and tossed into the fire on a moment’s notice, and now many of them were left to wonder if things would ever be the same for them again.

The things these ponies would do to Yeoman if I could drag him back to them… the thought of it made me consider letting them have their vengeance instead of keeping it all to myself just to see him suffer.

Then, distant gunshots. They started with the loud report of Ace’s rifle, followed by a few rapid three-shot bursts of an Ivory City rifle—maybe one I’d given to Gauge. But then a cacophony of shots answered them, drowning out the repeated crack and boom of Ace’s sniper. A full on firefight had broken out, and whatever ambush Ace must have been planning descended into a messy shootout.

I swallowed hard and tried to redouble my pace. They needed me in there to help them. Ace was a crack shot and Surge could do tricky things while in SCaR’s frame, but Nova and Gauge were hardly combat experts.

I saw the Walsalhn before I even saw the fighting. It was impossible to miss once I got into line of sight of it, and the only reason we couldn’t see it from the Feati settlement was because of the sheer density of the forest around it. But here, through a parting in the tree canopy, I saw an absolutely monstrous tree rising out of the ground. It put all the other petrified giants around it to shame, not only because it was the biggest, but because it was still alive. Pink and red leaves grew aplenty on the branches radiating out from its colossal trunk, and the wood still had a healthy dark brown color to it, unlike the paling gray of the other petrified spines.

It was easy to see why the Feati worshipped it or whatever. If you saw a tree like that and didn’t know any better, you’d think it was holding the sky aloft. It was the last surviving member of a dead breed, and maybe there’s something mystical in that notion alone.

But it was still so far away. I knew it would take me another few minutes to reach it on hoof, and who knew what shape my friends were in. They were still fighting, true, but the gunshots didn’t tell me what exactly they were up against. If I took too long, I might end up arriving too late. And I couldn’t let that happen.

Surge had repeatedly warned me that I needed to save my mana and conserve my strength, so we hadn’t teleported around a whole bunch today. But after the Shaman worked his voodoo tattoo magic on me, I suddenly felt full of life and energy. And if there was ever a time to push myself in the name of haste, now was the time.

I just hoped I wouldn’t teleport right into the center of one of those petrified monoliths. That’d be a messy way to go, and nopony would ever find my body. What a horrifying thought.

Still, that didn’t stop me from mustering the mana for the spell and focusing on a target. I didn’t have Surge’s expertise to guide my horn, true, but I at least had done it enough to feel my way through the spell. I tried to aim between the trees maybe three or four hundred yards away, trusting that my marksmare insticts were good enough to judge the range accurately, and let the spell fly in a sloppy burst of orange light.

There was a loud pop, a dizzying flip of vertigo, and then weightlessness. When I opened my eyes, I had just enough time to realize that I’d teleported myself maybe thirty feet into the air, roughly right where I was looking when I was trying to see over the undergrowth and brush back on the ground. I yelped in alarm and flailed my legs as gravity took hold, my horn sparking in confused and startled bursts of mana.

It was to my surprise, then, when I fell not on the hard ground, but something rushing underneath me, something I sent sprawling to the ground with a grunt and a surprised scramble of hooves.

I rolled three times away from the pony I’d landed on, my rifle bouncing barrel-over-butt past me. Before it could roll out of sight, however, I snatched it with my magic and swung it around. I sighted a pair of figures scrambling to pivot about, their bodies covered in makeshift armor, their faces torn up with cruel and sinister-looking scars. As soon as I saw they weren’t my friends or Feati ponies, and the moment I saw the weapons on their armor, I opened fire, cutting the two of them down with two quick bursts to their necks. The spent cartridges tumbled over my face as I fired from my back, and I cursed when one hot casing struck me on the nose.

That gave the pony I’d landed on enough time to get back to their hooves. I heard something metallic slide and lock into place, and I immediately rolled to the left, practically throwing myself into the brush. Just in time, too; as soon as I rolled away, a deafening boom nearly knocked the leaves off the trees around me, and the ground where I’d been lying moments before exploded in a shower of dirt.

I popped back onto my hooves, already bringing my rifle to bear, and a second shot blew up the tree next to me. Wooden splinters exploded outwards, peppering my hide and biting into my skin, and the sudden spikes of pain down my right side made me accidentally squeeze the trigger. A trio of bullets cracked forth from the gun, flying who knows where, but the burst sent my assailant slipping away instead of shooting me while I staggered from the blow. When I’d finally found my hoofing, I narrowed my eyes at the shock of white mane and brown body hurtling toward me.

The blow from the pony’s shoulder struck me square in the chest, and the force behind it swept me off my hooves. I cried out and helplessly waved my legs around as I flew through the air, only coming to a stop when I slammed into a tree trunk and slid down to the ground. Momentarily dazed and stunned, I could only look up as the pony I was fighting rushed over to me only to stop in place with a rise of her eyebrows.

“Well, look who it is!” a familiar mare’s voice said, and when my eyes finally realigned, I saw my face reflected in the chipped silver aviators perched on a mare’s face maybe fifteen feet away. Her cobbled-together armor was scratched up and stained with mud, and the protruding barrel of the high caliber weapon built into the side still smoked faintly from the pair of shots she’d flung at me. But even though I’d met the mare only a few times before, it was impossible to forget that face or confuse her for somepony else.

“Hunter?!” I nearly did a double-take. “What… The fuck are you doing out here?!”

“A job,” the slaver said, calmly striding closer to me. “Yeoman wanted backup to comb the Spines after the great job we’d done for him helping him find that neat little installation in the Bluewater. And when he told me that he’d run into you while there, I just had to see for myself.” Her grin was sickening, full of poison. “Sooner or later I’d run into you, I knew. And here you are. I think it’s time we settle the score, hm?”

She knelt down across from me and chuckled as she casually aligned the barrel of her weapon with my heaving, panting chest. “Nopony gets away from the RPR, bitch,” she growled at me. “It’s our fucking job and we’re fucking good at it.”

I didn’t bother wasting my breath with a reply. Instead, I spat right in Hunter’s face, and the slaver flinched back. Of course, she had her aviators over her eyes, so I didn’t exactly blind her, and she growled in irritation. “Whore!” she shouted, and the hammer on the rifle built into her armor struck down.

Of course, by that point, I’d already yanked open the rifle’s receiver, and the slide slammed shut on a shell halfway sticking out of the side of gun.

I immediately seized the advantage even as the glow on my horn faded. My left hoof flew up from the ground, striking Hunter in the face and smashing her aviators against her eye. The chipped silver glass shattered, and she howled as the shards dug into her face. She lunged forward on instinct, trying to pin me against the tree, but I used the momentum from my punch to fall to the left, barely twisting away. I didn’t see my gun, and I wasn’t about to waste time looking for it, so I instead turned my horn towards Hunter herself. I tried to break her neck with some well-applied telekinesis, but the mare twisted her body in the direction of the force, so all I succeeded in doing was spinning her about.

And here’s the thing about earth ponies: they’re freaky good at finding their balance, no matter what you do to them. Hunter must have spun twice, but when she came to a stop, it was with all four hooves slamming into the dirt, one after the other. She charged at me, even when I pushed back at her face with my telekinesis. She bowled me over, and the two of us went tumbling across the ground, fighting and scratching and biting like animals, not ponies. But even as we wrestled in the dirt, I knew this wasn’t going to be a fight I could win. Hunter was bigger than me and way stronger, and to top it all off, some of the adrenaline and extra energy I’d gotten when the Shaman fixed my leg was beginning to wear off. Soon, I found myself on my back, trying to push Hunter off of me and protect my face as she smashed her hooves into it, one after the other.

Each shot put stars in my eyes, and my ears started to ring and clatter like a million bells falling off a cliff and pummeling the ground below. I knew from the pain that Hunter had broken my nose again, not that it’d had much time to heal since our fight in Hole, and it wouldn’t be long before the rest of my face followed it. Though I tried as hard as I could to push her away, she seemed to somehow anchor herself in place with her hooves, so instead I reversed my magic between punches and brought her head down to mine even as I lunged forward. She screamed as my horn stuck something soft, and I was able to punch her in the throat and throw her weight off of me before she could recover.

When she took her hoof off of her face, blood poured out of the mangled mess I’d made of her eye. “You fucking bitch!” she howled, her single remaining eye fixing me with all its fury. “Stop fucking around and let me kill you!”

She charged again, but this time there was a little more distance between us, giving me enough time to fling fire at her. She weaved around my magic on agile hooves, and when I threw a wall of fire down in front of her, she instead jumped clear over it. I backpedaled as fast as I could when she landed in front of me and ripped her knife out of its sheath, her sweaty white mane whipping back and forth as she sliced the blade through the air at me. I tried to dance backwards as best as I could with my head turned to the side, one eye trying to watch out for things that could trip me up and the other tracking the knife, and both failing to do either thing very well. When I inevitably tripped, Hunter pounced on me like a warg diving for the kill… but I’d had enough experience with wargs today that I wasn’t going to take anymore of this shit. Even as I fell on my back again, my magic plucked a rock off the ground and drove it right into Hunter’s face.

The colossus of a mare snapped her head back as the stone met bone, and she lost her balance when her front hooves hit the ground, sending her for a rough topple into the muck. This time it was my turn to seize the upper hoof, and I rolled back onto my hooves as I drove the rock down toward her skull again. It shook in my grip as it made solid contact with her forehead, but I was trying to fight an earth pony in close quarters through brute force here. That’s a fight that’s pretty hard to win on its own, and when fighting a determined and veteran slaver like Hunter…

She managed to twist her head to the side before I could strike it again, and the rock only bit dirt. When I tried to pull it out to hit her again, she caught it with her hoof, punching it clear across our makeshift arena, her ruined depth perception apparently not bothering her at all. When my attempts to pluck it out of the air fumbled and failed, I shifted my mana to burning the bitch alive, but Hunter clearly knew how to fight dirty. Her hoof dug into the dirt as she pulled herself off the ground and whipped muck at my face like a brown snowball of mud and shit. The muck stung my eyes and blinded me, and I responded by throwing up a shield around myself just in time to feel the point of the knife stress my defenses.

As soon as Hunter hit the shield again, I reversed the magic, blasting mana outwards in a cone of force. I felt her stagger backwards, which gave me enough time to clear the muck and shit out of my eyes and orient myself before she attacked again. By this point, we were both panting heavily, and I didn’t know who would break first. I had an advantage with my magic, but Hunter was relentless. If cracking her in the skull with a heavy rock twice was hardly enough to faze her, then I really needed to figure out what would fast before she simply overwhelmed me.

There wasn’t any banter or threats or cursing. We were way far past that by now. All we had left was a furious rage and the will to kill each other. One of us was going to end up in the dirt, and I was damn certain that it wasn’t going to be me. And I knew that Hunter was thinking the same thing.

Her leg twitched, my horn flared to life, and our momentary stalemate ended as quickly as it began. Once more, the mare came barreling at me, and once more I tried to stop her with a whirlwind of fire and telekinesis. But again, the slaver was too fast and nimble, skirting around fireballs and either jumping over or barging through walls of fire, her armor absorbing most of the heat anyway. I began to retreat as her brown body grew closer and closer to me, and then in a flash, she pounced, knife glinting in the light of the fire crackling through the undergrowth and along the trees.

I fell back, hooves raised and horn already spitting out fire, and I felt her knife dig into my foreleg as I sacrificed it to keep the blade away from my neck. But with my other leg, I managed to push Hunter off toward the side so we awkwardly fell on our shoulders instead of with her atop me. She dropped the knife as she hit the ground, and before I could snatch it in my magic, she twisted to strike the tip of my horn with her hoof. The shot of pain running down into my skull severed my ties to my magic, and this time she rolled on top of me and began crushing my throat underneath her powerful hooves.

“Die!” she screamed at me, her single orange eye glaring down at me as blood poured out of the socket where her right one used to be. “I’ll fucking bury you! Nopony fucks with the RPR! Nopony fucks with me!”

I gasped and choked and wheezed as I desperately tried to inhale and couldn’t manage it beneath the crushing force of Hunter’s hooves. I tried to push her away, my hooves clawing at her face and her bulky neck, but I couldn’t throat punch her again because of the angle of the armored collar she wore. Not only that, but she expertly used her body and her weight to keep my hind legs pinned to the ground, unable to do anything except thrash and flail uselessly. She’d managed to collapse my windpipe, and I didn’t know how much longer it’d take for her to break it entirely. The edges of my vision were already going black…

A glint of metal flashed at the edges of my hazy vision. It was her knife, buried halfway up the length of the blade in the ground, just outside of my reach. I could already feel my magic returning, rallying to my horn just before I could black out, and I knew that the moment Hunter knew what I was trying to do, she’d punch out my magic again, and then I’d be dead.

So instead of grabbing the knife, I feebly pushed against her face. She snorted and pulled her head back, but she didn’t take her hooves off my throat to snuff out the spell. And in that single decision, it was over. All I’d intended on doing there was showing her my magic was too weak to fight back. So she didn’t even realize that I’d picked up the knife in the same flare until I drove it into her neck.

Her body went rigid, her hooves suddenly losing their choking force as her muscles locked stiff. Even as I coughed and started desperately sucking down air, I tore the knife out of her neck and stabbed it in again. A tidal wave of blood drenched my face as Hunter’s severed arteries drained her life all over me, but I didn’t stop. I stabbed her again, and again, and again, cutting and thrusting as the slaver choked and gagged and collapsed, too weak to stand, too weak to do anything. After the sixth stab, I left the knife buried in her neck and pushed her away, standing up and coughing as my windpipe propped itself back open again. I grimaced as I tried to catch my breath, doubled-over and covered in another mare’s blood, while Hunter convulsed and trembled on the ground. Eventually, I found the strength to stand up. The same, thankfully, could not be said about Hunter.

I turned around and looked the dying mare over. Her chest still heaved and shook, caught between coughing on her own blood and a primal thirst for air. The river of red running out of her neck bubbled and gurgled, and she only looked up at me with a hateful glare, somehow, somehow remaining conscious and coherent enough to hate me one last time. I knew she was cursing me out as furiously as she could inside her head, devoting the last few moments of her existence to despise the mare who got the better of her.

Just to stick it to her, I laughed and shrugged. “Hey, don’t look at me like that, Hunter,” I told her, my voice raspy and raw after nearly having the life choked out of me. “We couldn’t keep dancing around the point forever.”

Hunter’s dying glare hardened into something more… and then eventually something much less as her chest finally stopped struggling.

I left her body where it lay, instead limping along in the direction of the Walsalhn. In the end, that dirty slaving bitch had gotten exactly what she deserved, and I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for her. In fact, I was actually quite pleased with myself. All I’d expected to get out of today was Yeoman’s head. Taking down Hunter, the RPR’s lead whore, was just a bonus on top of that. And even though I’d almost died, and my gun was lost somewhere in the dense undergrowth of the Spines, I was feeling confident. Hunter was just the latest thing to try and kill me and fail. Yeoman would be the next.

Or so I thought, but then a zebra began firing wildly through the brush around me. I immediately hit the dirt and covered my head (for all the good that would do) and waited for the barrage to stop. When it did, it was accompanied by a horrified gasp and the dull clatter of a rifle hitting the dirt. “Ember?!” Gauge shouted as he galloped toward me. He tried to slide to a stop at my side, but instead slipped, stumbled, fell, and then picked himself up again. “Holy shit! I didn’t think you’d be… I didn’t… you aren’t hurt, are you?”

“For fuck’s sake, Gauge, look at what you’re shooting before you shoot it!” I sat up, thankfully unharmed by Gauge’s wild shooting, and almost immediately did a double-take when I saw he was hurt. “What the fuck happened?” I asked him, my eyes honing in on the shoddily bandaged gunshot wound near his right shoulder. “Where’s Nova and Ace? Surge? SCaR?”

“We couldn’t stop Yeoman from getting into the tree,” Gauge said in a hurried breath. “He got the door open and went inside with a pair of his lackeys, while the rest stayed outside to keep us away. Ace tried to force her way in, but they hurt her bad. Nova had to get her out of there, and Surge rushed ahead with SCaR to get inside the installation’s circuits before it was too late. We’re scattered, Em. It’s bad.”

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “Then I need to get there. Somepony has to rip Yeoman in half. I’m not letting him get away from me again.”

“But how—?” Gauge began to ask, until he saw me stand upright on my four perfectly fine legs. “What happened to your leg?” he instead asked, eyes wide in surprise. “Wasn’t it—?”

“The Shaman,” I told him. “He used that freaky healing magic the Feati have. And if Ace is hurt bad, then she needs to see him.” I snatched the rifle Gauge had dropped from the ground and turned back to him. “How… how bad is it?”

“I don’t know, Ember,” Gauge admitted. “I’m not a doctor. I only saw her go down. But Nova was worried. She ran out there in the hail of bullets using her wing as a shield and dragged Ace back. When she flew off with Ace, that was when I fled too. I’m just… not a good enough fighter for this shit.”

“I don’t give a fuck about that,” I told him. “You’re alive. That’s the only thing that matters.”

“But what about the code?” Gauge asked me. “Yeoman probably already has his hooves on it.”

“Not if Surge did her job,” I told him. “And regardless, I’m going to find out. If I can’t stop Yeoman from going inside and getting the code, I can at least kill him on the way out.”

The zebra nodded. “SCaR should still be over there,” he said. “After Surge jumped circuits, I told him to hang around and make sure Yeoman doesn’t go anywhere. He was a little pissed we let Surge possess him, but I know he isn’t gonna let us down.”

“Good.” I checked the ammo in the rifle and pulled the spare magazines out of Gauge’s bags. “Go back to the settlement and help there. They really need it.”

“You’re going to go in there alone?”

Nostrils flaring, I finally bobbed my head. “Yeoman’s not going to get away from us,” I told him. “I just killed Hunter on my own. All Yeoman has is a pair of wings. Once I catch him, he’s dead.”

Though I could tell Gauge wanted to argue with me, he at least seemed to know better. “Alright,” he finally said. “Just be careful. You and Ace… you have a lot of things to discuss and…”

“Yeoman’s not going to take another pony I care about away from me,” I told him, and it wasn’t a promise, it was a fact. “I’ll see you when this shit’s all done.”

“Good luck, Em,” Gauge said. “Stay safe.”

I nodded and wordlessly turned away, once more stalking through the undergrowth of the Spines. Behind me, Gauge limped off in the opposite direction, back toward the settlement, back toward the smoke. I could only hope that my friends had done a number on Yeoman’s party before they were driven away. If I had to fight Yeoman and an entire squad of the Ivory City’s finest at the same time, I probably was not going to win that clash. But if I could catch Yeoman on his own…

As I approached the Walsalhn, I slowed down and moved with a little more caution. Yeoman was in total control of this area, based on what I’d heard from Gauge, and I didn’t need to stumble right into an ambush. My best bet was to try to move quickly but quietly and not get caught in the process. But as I slowly began to circle the enormous tree, working my way closer and closer to its trunk and to the clearing that separated it from my cover, a thunderous boom that shook the ground roared from the other side of the tree. I crouched low as the earth shook like an earthquake was ripping through the Spines, and some of the trees began shedding leaves and branches as the vibrations caused them to start whipping back and forth. For a moment, I feared it was another one of those huge invisible burrowing centipede things, but the ground hadn’t shaken nearly as much when we fought it as it was now. And it wasn’t until I saw a few trees begin to topple ahead of me that I knew whatever was causing the ground to shake was emerging.

But when I finally wound my way around the base of the huge fucking tree, I saw a sight I absolutely was not prepared to see: a steel tower jutting out of the ground, waves of dry dirt and detritus cascading off of its sloped roof. A few birds screamed in alarm at the sudden appearance of something so foreign and alien to this undisturbed patch of woods, and the light of the sun silhouetted the tower’s sleek form and tall antenna against the smoke and ash still filtering through the forest. It was only then did I realize that the tower had appeared near the edge of Spines, for the trees suddenly thinned out behind it, opening this dark and shadowy forest up to the light of Auris’ blue sun.

I watched it for several long seconds, rooted in place with shock and awe. The tower was part of the installation hidden underneath the big fucking tree; that much was obvious. But why had it suddenly arisen? Was it Yeoman’s doing, or Surge’s? She was in the systems, after all, and if she wanted to fuck with Yeoman, she definitely had the means to do it.

Perhaps she was raising the tower so I could sneak in the back way?

I mean, I sure as shit wasn’t going to call it the stealthy route, considering all the noise it’d made coming up, but if it was an entrance to the installation where I didn’t have to shoot my way past a half dozen soldiers without backup, I was all for it. And it was that notion that sent me galloping toward the raised tower, determined to reach it before any of Yeoman’s posse did. Besides, I hadn’t gotten close enough to the tree to be out in the open yet. I still had plenty of brush to use as cover.

When I finally made it to the front of the tower—or rather, what I assumed was the front—I finally slowed down and began to circle it much more cautiously. There weren’t any other signs of activity around it, save for a few freakishly large insects scurrying away from the uprooted ground as their buried burrows were suddenly exposed to the air. I was the first one here, if any of Yeoman’s soldiers were coming to investigate, and I knew I couldn’t squander this opportunity. After I spied what looked like a door leading deeper into the tower, I popped out of the brush and galloped over to it, immediately trying to force it open with my magic. “Come on… come the fuck on…” I growled under my breath. I didn’t see any sort of latch or button or terminal to get it open; it must have only been operable from the other side. Finally, I cursed and stomped my hoof on the ground. “Surge, if you can hear me, open this fucking door!” I shouted at it. “I can get in this way and we can stop Yeoman before he—!”

There was a hiss of hydraulic fluid, and a seam suddenly appeared in the middle of the door. I backed away as the rust-speckled door began to groan open, shedding dirt from its joints like rain. Thank the stars, Surge must have heard me! I never would have thought having a dead mare in our little team would be so useful a month ago, but now…

The door dropped open with a heavy thud, revealing a staircase going down into darkness. I didn’t need any more of an invitation to go charging on in; with my rifle held closely in my magic, I rushed right at the entrance, hoof making solid contact with the metal step, the first time a pony had touched it in almost two hundred winters. I could hardly see down the shadowy corridor, but the lights began to flicker on, one after the other. And when the one above me finally flashed to life as I hurtled myself toward the next step, I found myself face to face with a shocked yellow pegasus flying up the other way.

We slammed into each other, and the momentum he’d had on his side overpowered my unicorn weight and sent me toppling backwards and out of the stairwell. I clutched tightly to my rifle as we tumbled through the dirt, but I didn’t get the first kick in. The pegasus stomped on my gut as he worked his way out of my tangle of limbs, and I coughed and rolled away, using the trunk of a tree to pull myself up.

It was then that we locked eyes, and there was no mistaking that terrible, terrible scar covering half of Yeoman’s skull.

Red filled my vision, the red haze of anger, the crimson of my marefriend’s blood as it drained on the ground around her body. I screamed with rekindled rage and sorrow and began firing wildly with my stolen rifle, the bullets chasing the bastard off to my right. But I checked my anger with focus; as much as I wanted to rip him limb from limb, blind rage had nearly killed me at the dam. This time, I wouldn’t burn away all my anger on furious, angry shooting, but neither would I give him a chance to recover.

“Get back here!” I screamed at him, taking off after him through the undergrowth. I ripped branches and leaves out of the way with my magic and held my gun just out in front of my face, firing quick bursts whenever I thought I had an opportunity. Ahead of me, Yeoman bounced from tree branch to tree branch, using the towering trunks for cover, but not stopping to return fire. Not like I gave him much of a chance, anyway; the moment he even began to slow down in the slightest, I fired at him, forcing him to keep moving. Bark and wooden splinters erupted from trees as my bullets chased him through the forest, and more than a few yellow feathers ripped free from his wings as he frantically changed direction to avoid getting shot.

But then he burst out into an opening through the trees, and I had to slide to a stop as I suddenly realized the clearing was actually the overlook of a cliff. Rocks clattered down the side of the cliff as my hooves sent them toppling over the edge, down into a river maybe one or two hundred feet below. For once, I could see above the canopy of the Spines, the red and pink leaves of the forest swaying beneath me as the mammoth trunks of the Spines’ petrified giants rose up to reach unfathomable heights in the sky. And just ahead of me, Yeoman flew for the open space away from the cliff, to where I wouldn’t be able to follow him.

I brought my rifle to bear and braced it with my forelegs as best as I could, trying to sight down the erratically flying pegasus. I fired one burst, the middle tracer round flying wide left. I adjusted and fired to the right, but Yeoman climbed above the bullets on some instinct. I parted my lips and gritted my teeth as I fired a third time to no avail. But the fourth time, I saw feathers fly out into the air, and the pegasus began to fall…

But he recovered and adjusted, once more gaining altitude. When I tried to shoot again, the rifle squawked that it was empty, and I threw it aside in frustration. I had more bullets, but Yeoman was heading for the trees, and the moment he got beneath the canopy, I’d lose him for good. And this rifle just wasn’t accurate enough to hit him from that far away. Not like Fortitude, which the bastard still had on his back, or Ace’s rifle, which was with the mare back at the settlement.

So I came up with another plan. And I flung myself off the cliff before stopping to think about whether it would work or not. I didn’t even ask myself if it would just end up getting me killed because I already knew what the answer was going to be.

My stomach jumped into my throat and I felt my whole body clench up in terror as I began to free fall off the side of the cliff. Beneath me, the waters of the river churned, still white and frothy from the heavy rain that’d fallen in the past few days. But even as I started picking up speed, I built magic onto my horn and took careful aim at the figure fluttering away from me. I’d likely only have the one shot; I didn’t think I’d have the recovery to adjust if I missed.

With a flash of magic, I shunted myself through space, reappearing far in front of the cliff. But this time, I reoriented myself and pulled my momentum through the teleport to keep going. Using the speed I’d gained, I propelled myself right at Yeoman, who whipped his head toward his right at the sudden flash and pop. Screaming, I flailed my hooves as I slammed into him before he could dive out of the way, and I hung on as tight as I could as we tumbled out of the air, doing my best to drag him to the earth and not let him shake me off.

Ideally, we would have hit one of the trees and fell to the ground there, and even more ideally, he would have taken the brunt of the impact, not me. But I misjudged my teleport in one way, and our combined momentum didn’t take us to the trees. Instead, it sent us hurtling toward the river. I only figured this out when suddenly the cold fingers of the water knifed their way into my coat and the world suddenly began to spin as I tumbled through the rapids. I managed to get my head above the water and coughed, my legs instinctively kicking at the current to keep myself afloat. This was the second time I’d ended up in rapids fighting for my life, and I wasn’t about to lose the rematch.

A little ways away, Yeoman also emerged from the water, and before he could drag himself to safety, I lunged at him and hooked my forelegs around his neck. I dragged us both back beneath the current, and soon we were wrestling for control as the river sent us tumbling about. Rocks and roots blurred by, but all I focused on was Yeoman’s furious half-face. I at least had one advantage over him when fighting in the water: I could actually keep the water from flooding into my mouth since I still had both my cheeks.

But even under the water, Yeoman was strong and used his wings like another set of forelegs. It wasn’t enough that I had to try and fight his hooves off; I also had to keep his wings from jabbing my eyes or punching at my throat in an effort to get me to inhale the water around us. Thankfully, I could still use my magic underwater, albeit fairly poorly considering I was more focused with trying not to get throat punched and trying not to lose my horn on a rock. Still, it helped to negate Yeoman’s extra limbs, and I soon found myself on top of him, trying to force his head down to the riverbed where a rock would hopefully cave his skull in.

Instead, Yeoman snapped his wings open to his sides and fanned his feathers out as wide as they could go. The sudden drag sent us spinning again, and this time I lost my grip on him completely. We separated, and I saw him go up for air, so I immediately did the same. My nostrils blew a spray of steam into the air as I exhaled and sharply drew in a few more breaths, and I saw Yeoman trying to use his wings to help him paddle off toward the side of the river. “No, you fucking don’t!” I screamed at him, and I yanked back on one wing with my magic, dragging him back into the center of the river and closer to me. Yeoman shouted something at me in return, but I couldn’t hear him over the growing roar of the water around us—and it was then that I noticed the current was getting stronger.

I looked over my shoulder and realized I couldn’t see much more of the riverbank ahead of us. It looked like the trees suddenly ended in a frothy white line of water, and it didn’t take me too long to realize what I was headed for. “Fuck!” I shouted, trying to muster up the energy to teleport out of the water, but Yeoman latched onto me and started trying to dunk my head back under the water.

“No!” I heard him shout as I struggled to keep my muzzle out of the river. “You’re going to drown, bitch! Drown! You’re not cheating death again!”

The river roared so loud I feared it was going to burst my eardrums. I felt it tug on my mane and tail like a strong hand, and before I knew it, gravity began to take over. I cried out in fear and alarm as I went over the edge of the waterfall, Yeoman pushing away from me to try and glide to safety now that he had some altitude to work with. It felt like I was watching him spread his wings in slow motion as I fell backwards who knew how many feet to the water below, the water rolling off of his feathers as they began to fan to their full glory. They began to catch the air and we started to separate, me chained by gravity, him cheating it and death with an extra pair of limbs. I didn’t know what lay beneath me or if I would even survive it, but in that moment, only one thought crossed my mind.

“You’re coming with me!”

My magic took hold of his wing, and he jerked his body to try and shake it free. But a single second was all I needed to work with, and that one motion did half the work for me. Summoning all the telekinetic strength I’d built up over the years as a forgemare, I twisted his wing as far back as it would go, and then some. His mouth parted in pain when the bones popped out of their joints, and suddenly he wasn’t flying anymore, he was falling just like me.

That look of fear, that pained shock carved deep into his features… that was an image I knew I’d never forget. Reclaimer’s right hoof pony brought low by a simple forgemare. And now he was going to die. We were both going to die. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pull off another teleport, not unless the bottom of this waterfall was a lot farther down than I thought it was.

I’m pretty sure I grinned at him as our eyes locked. Payback. That’s what it was. Payback for taking Zip from me. Payback for destroying Blackwash. Payback for all the misery he’d caused in his life. And to top it all off, he was taking a piece of the code to the grave with him instead of back to Reclaimer. We’d won. All it would cost us was my life.

An even trade, I’d say.

I slammed into the water like a bag of bricks hitting concrete and knew nothing more.