“You look like a weirdo,” Scootaloo said finally. Nix stared at the filly with a neutral expression, two green unicorns and one light blue pegasus forming a loose perimeter around the human and the filly at the edge of the Everfree Forest. He had remained still while she circled him cautiously for half a minute, a discerning look in her youthful features, before she planted herself before him and voiced her final appraisal. “Definitely weird.”

“Well, I doubt I’d make a very good alien if I didn’t look weird,” he stated plainly, drawing on his cigarette. He exhaled the cloud of smoke towards the sky, away from the filly. “Although I’m not so weird that I stalk around things in silence without first introducing myself.” The orange filly’s mouth gaped before snapping shut. Nix stuck his tongue out at her. She glared and mirrored the human’s action, before she withdrew her tongue and glanced awkwardly towards the ground.

“I’m Scootaloo,” she muttered quietly.

“And I’m The Alien,” Nix responded. “I make most of these lame-o’s call me ‘Nix’, though. Pleasure to meetcha, Scoots.” He extended a hand to the orange pegasus. She flinched, and Nix resisted the urge to frown as his hand dropped.

“Are you...evil?” she asked hesitantly.

“Only to librarians and princesses,” Nix replied quickly.

“And the Royal Guard,” Ridge Dancer muttered under her breath.

“And guardponies,” Nix added gleefully with a quick glance to the sienna-maned unicorn. “Why, you’re not a princess, are you?”

Scootaloo stood up and leveled a defiant glare at the human, flaring her diminutive wings threateningly. “No bucking way!”

Rainbow Dash burst out laughing. The filly looked at the rainbow-maned pegasus in shock, before the slight red creep of humiliation began to paint her cheeks. From the corner of her eyes, Rainbow caught the shift and quickly added, “Like she could be some namby-pamby princess! She’s way too cool for that!” The filly’s chest puffed out with pride. “Although don’t let your parents hear you using that sorta language, squirt.”

“Sorry, Rainbow Dash.” Scootaloo rubbed the back of her neck sheepishly, before her gaze crept back to the human. He flicked his cigarette to the side. It slowly melted into ash in midair as he raised his hand again.

“So, we square, Scoots?”

The filly looked at him through squinted eyes for a long time, before finally spitting on one hoof and slamming it into his palm. “Just no funny business, or I’ll sic Rainbow Dash and the Alien Hunter on you!” she added as an afterthought.

Nix wiped his palm on his blue jeans. “So long as you promise not to sic your saliva on my hands, I promise to behave.” He grinned. “Princess.”

Scootaloo groaned. Rainbow Dash zipped behind the filly and bounced her into the air with her muzzle. She landed squarely on Rainbow’s back, a giddy smile quickly replacing her dissatisfaction.

“Now that you’ve met Mr. Tall-Dark’n’Ugly, here, can we get on with the house thing? My wings are itching for some sky.”

“Yeah!” the filly exclaimed. “M-mine, too!”

Rainbow gave the small orange pegasus a quick, warm smile before she turned to the edge of the Everfree, leveling an iron leer at the thickly overgrown border to its depths. “Let’s rock this joint!”

Lyra stared at them as they breached the wall of trees leading into the harrowing forest. “I must be crazy,” she mumbled as her hooves moved of their own volition after them.

“So, about this ‘Alien Hunter’,” Nix started as he strolled carelessly into the foreboding green foliage. The edges of his mouth curled upwards subtly as he pointedly ignored meeting Ridge Dancer’s eyes.

A simple flick of his hand. A tiny, meager motion. But Lyra saw it with the burgeoning horror of sudden revelation; one twitch of his wrist, a small flash of light, and the timber wolf that bore down upon her exploded into ash and a glowing cataract of bright red embers. Just one innocuous motion and one of Equestria’s most fearsome predators simply ceased to exist.

She was too stunned to move. She simply stared up at the human as his knee-length duster began to dissolve into oily smoke around him, small tendrils of liquid shadow growing out from the darkness and framing the violent blue flares that burst from his eyes. This wasn’t like at the train station. He wasn’t grandstanding, summoning illusions of light and color to frighten the naïve inhabitants of some backwater. No. As the black smoke tendrils danced around his looming form, twisting and curling with a horrifying, viperous grace, Lyra realized with a chilling clarity just how wrong she had been about the human. She barely registered the growls, the bone-shaking roars, of the gathering timber wolves as a handful of them began converging on the group’s position. Instead she simply stared up at Nix, into his freakish, blazing sapphire eyes, frozen in place. He was Death and Life given form, power and murder and the blackest depths of the night sky melding with the fiery explosions of stars he allowed to be born, and planets he allowed to coalesce out of cosmic dust. She trembled, her hooves frozen in place as she realized she was little more than an insect to the being, to the thing, the monstrous, glorious thing that grew before her. She didn’t hear the mewl that escaped her own lips.

“Go, now!” the alien snarled. She turned to flee. She ignored the handful of timber wolves that moved to flank her escape. She had to get away from here. Away from him. She barely registered her own scream as dark tentacles of velvet ink slammed into the ground on either side of her, impaling the five pursuing timber wolves with a sickening thud. Her hooves were a mint blur as she sprinted past the predators, leaving them nailed to the ground in unearthly crucifixion to the murderous god behind her. She thought she heard him—no, it—laughing as a shadowed form fell upon the fallen creatures. She squinted her eyes shut and forced herself to run faster as the wolves’ yelps began. She was almost out of hearing distance when she heard the pained cries of the creatures cut off.

A rainbow blur shot between her and a similarly sprinting Ridge Dancer. The blue bullet paused in mid air ahead of the two, an orange filly desperately clinging to the pegasus’s neck.

“You slowpokes don’t hurry the buck up, you’ll be compost piles for those rotten sons-of-birches back there!” she cried. Lyra wheezed and willed herself faster. Willed herself away from the shadows. Ridge Dancer, however, began to slow, falling behind the golden-eyed unicorn. Rainbow Dash let out a frustrated growl before zipping behind them and snagging each unicorn under her two front hooves. She shot off into the sky, breaking the forest’s dark canopy.

“N-no!” Ridge Dancer shouted. “Put me down!”

“No time for that! We’re gettin’ the buck outta Dodge!” Rainbow Dash’s eyes narrowed in concentration as she increased her speed.

“No! I have to go back! He’ll be hurt!” the unicorn pleaded.

“He’s half-universe or something! His mutant powers will heal him!” Rainbow struggled to keep her hold on the lime green unicorn as the guardpony began to squirm. “H-hey, cut it out! You’ll get yourself killed!”

Something hard entered the lime green unicorn’s voice. “I am Private Ridge Dancer of Celestia’s Royal Guard! I command you to put me down this instant!” she roared.

“Your funeral,” Rainbow muttered, diving down into the trees and placing the unicorn back onto the darkened earth of the forest. Ridge Dancer immediately tore off in the direction of the human. Rainbow merely shook her head and took off into the blaring cerulean expanse of the midday sky.

Lyra looked back timidly at the darkened shadows of the forest below as it slowly shrunk beneath her. Was that guardpony crazy? Didn’t she understand? That alien, that twisted thing, he was no chick, no awkward, ugly, endearing babe in an unfamiliar situation.

He was a monster.

“Whistle while you work!” Nix belted out cheerfully, joyfully sauntering with unrestrained pep towards the seething brown mass of timber wolves in the clearing. They lurched toward him in a sickening wave of bark and claws and teeth. Nix smiled before pursing his lips. The roiling cloak of black shadows that enveloped him began to thin and harden into inky, sharpened filaments at its edges. With every bar he whistled of the song as he continued his relaxed walk towards the throng of predators, a blackened tendril shot out from his form and shattered through the skull of one of the horde’s vanguard. The horde trampled their fallen packmates underpaw and continued rushing towards Nix.

’Hmm, seven down,’ Nix thought, pausing his advance and placing a thoughtful hand on his chin. The blue suns of his eyes flared a bit more brightly as he sent out an invisible wave of his lifeforce, sensing and tagging the soul signature of every timber wolf in the clearing. ’117 to go.’

He grinned wildly as the horde closed in on him. Thirty yards. Twenty. Ten yards between him and the edge of their savage wave. The black shadows of the ominous cloud that hovered around him arced high in the air before slamming down across the front lines of the wolves in a forest of black spears, slowing the horde’s advance. A dozen of the wooden monsters immediately burst into a shower of dead timber. A single wolf thrust itself through the thin pillars of liquid shadow and lept at Nix. A pair of shadowy tentacles intercepted the creature, wrapping around its torso from either side and halting it in midair. Nix approached the suspended wolf casually as the rest of the timber wolves began to warily surround him. His hand shot forth in a violent blur, grasping the throat of the snarling beast and ripping its head from its body. A viscous, iridescent green liquid leaked from its twitching bulk before it dissolved into chips of bark and wooden sticks.

The thundering, snarling mass of timberwolves halted their approach entirely and circled him with more caution. He ignored them. He held the severed head of the timber wolf to his ear and shook it. Its teeth clattered together macabrely as its slackened jaw flapped at the motion. Nix’s eyes widened and he gasped, holding the head before him at arm’s length. Its glowing green eyes were rapidly fading.

“What’s that, Lassie?!” Nix asked with mock shock. “Timmy fell down a fucking well? Again?!” The waves of wooden wolves were slowly inching closer to him. “Well, fuck him. The little bastard should be up for a Darwin Award by this point.” With a flippant fling of his arm, he tossed the skull behind him. He dropped to one knee and stretched an upturned palm to the sky. “Alas, poor Yorstick! I knew him well.” The wolves mistook his lowered form for weakness and seethed upon the human. By this point, Nix’s maniacal smile was a permanent fixture to his face. As the wolves closed the final yards to their bipedal prey, his smile deepened and darkened.

Tendrils of flame danced gingerly at his elbows before flaring and shooting along his arms, transforming into searing yellow talons that subsumed his hands. The first two wolves that were dumb enough to assault him came in low, snapping at the kneeling human’s legs. He slammed his fiery claws through their skulls. Another closed from behind. He shot off the ground in a forward flip, his heel catching the beast underneath its chin, shattering its face with a wooden crack before the creature’s various components exploded and showered its packmates behind him. As he tumbled forward towards more snapping jaws, his claws brightened to a blinding blue and he slashed down with them laterally. The wolves at his landing were immediately turned to ash and the ground exploded violently, leaving a deep furrow a few yards wide at the human’s feet.

’Hmm, only 98 left. Too easy. Too boring. May as well just end it.’ The timber wolves leapt back from the human. A few of the creatures at the fringes of the horde began backing into the forest. Brilliant wings of bright yellow and blue flame burst from Nix’s shoulders, flaring out widely from his form. His eyes fell on the dead center of the horde before flickering brightly. The shadows of his coat mixed with the flame of his wings and formed a massive, twirling arrowhead of fire and night in front of him.

He shot through the gnashing mass of wooden beasts with blinding speed, towards the center of the horde. The timber wolves in his path were flung high in the air, alit with sparking blue flames and being torn apart by severed segments of shadow as they yowled in pain, hurtling back towards the earth. Nix impacted the center of the timber wolves with a rumbling shockwave of heated air that sent the monsters reeling.

He levitated off the ground, arcs of electricity shooting from his fingertips and writhing coyly up his forearms, across his shoulders, and into his burning wings. They infused the blue jets of flaming pinions as his wings shot out to their full length. Motes of sparking, dazzling light began flitting away from the feathers, robbing them of their luminescence even as the lights began coalescing into turbulently gyring dual orbs in front of the human. They whirred faster and faster as more glowing stars of power joined the spinning spheres, a keening whine shrieking ever louder through the air of the clearing. The crackle of electricity thrummed deeply from the rapidly gyrating balls of energy as the shadowy smoke of Nix’s duster gathered into a perfect black sphere at his chest. The light seemed to warp around the fell orb’s existence, and with a sickening lurch it began dragging the now-terrified timber wolves toward it, toward the human.

The fierce green light in the eyes of the dozens of wolves that remained now flickered fearfully, sensing their imminent end as their claws scrabbled uselessly across the ground in their attempts to escape.

“Welp, it's been fun.” Nix’s voice boomed across the clearing. The timber wolves began yelping pitifully as they drew closer to the increasingly sparking orbs of energy in front of the human’s flaming wings. “But as the old saying goes, time flies when you’re about to die!”

The shriek of the spinning spheres of energy cut out suddenly, and a deathly quiet permeated the air. Their light sputtered, darkened, and—with a muffled thunderclap—they winked out of existence. Nix’s eyes widened. The black hole in front of his chest lost its form and slowly filtered back onto his shoulders in the shape of a trench coat. His wings flickered once, twice, before dissolving into thin air. The human fell from the air and collapsed onto the ground, wheezing. His head shot up, meeting dozens of angry green eyes that had turned upon him as his lifeforce left him.

An angry roar shattered the sudden calm. More followed as the wolves turned onto the newly weakened human. He reached for the cosmic lifeforce that gave him power, and found nothing. A crashing swell of wooden teeth and growls trotted towards the weakened human. He rose slowly to his feet.

One of the wolves behind him struck first. It darted in, trying to close its jaws on his right leg’s hamstrings. He spun, bringing an elbow down onto the back of the creatures neck. Another jumped at him from the side, going for his throat. He jumped back. The animal’s razor sharp teeth snapped shut in the empty air. He rammed a closed fist into the bottom of its throat, an assortment of leaves and sticks thumping down onto his head and shoulders as the beast collapsed. Two more closed from the front. He dodged the first. Flecks of salival tree sap landed on his face. Time seemed to slow down and he felt the creature’s hot, fetid breath on the side of his face. He uppercutted the wolf, sending its broken form into a backwards cartwheel that shattered into more of its closing packmates. The second clamped its teeth into his shoulder when he was too slow to dodge. He rained blows on its wooden snout even as the the rest of the horde surged onto him, the sharpened spikes of their teeth finding purchase wherever they could as they tore into him.

“Fucking goddamn pony uni-” the rest of the sentence was lost in a bloody gurgle as a pair of jaws clamped down on his throat. He reached desperately for some lifeforce, any lifeforce, his summons glancing off the vast barrier of emptiness that this reality had erected. Without the power to heal himself, he’d soon blackout from bloodloss. The creatures would tear him apart. He’d survive. But they would grow bored. They would breed. They would fall upon Ponyville. But he’d survive. He always did. He’d survive just long enough to sift through the pieces. To sift through the body parts because he failed. He failed again.

A gurgling scream escaped Nix’s lips, spilling blood across his face, as he struggled with his arms to lash out at the growing, hungry jaws that were tearing at his body. He failed. He twisted in vain under the barbed paws that held him down. He failed. The light in his pale blue eyes flickered and died, their glossy sheen reflecting the uncaring pale sky as another pair of jaws closed over his face. He barely felt the wooden pikes puncture his skin as his skull fractured with a dull crunch. He failed.

He stopped searching for the power that would allow him his freedom. Even if he could access it, what good would it do? The power of gods, and the smatterings of memory he was allowed only painted one grim picture. He had failed. He’d tried for a thousand years. Had tried to...had tried to what, exactly? He was vaguely cognizant of his left arm being torn off of him. He had tried to atone. Atone for what? The snarling buzzsaw of teeth and claws that tore at him, fed on him, had become a distant reality as he desperately flicked through a thousand years of experiences, senses, and abandoned thoughts. He couldn’t remember why he had to atone. He couldn’t. He could no more access his memories than he could his lifeforce. And now others had to die, because he couldn’t save them.

Because he had failed. He had failed to atone. He was a monster, and monsters can’t atone. They can only be monstrous. He didn’t deserve to succeed. He was a monster, and he was being torn apart.

’Just let it end.’ He abandoned himself to slashing teeth. It’s what he deserved.

A hail of rocks slammed into the horde of timber wolves around him; the rocks hammered against the soft wooden bodies of the creatures in a pelting symphony of cracks, splinters, and wafting leaves. He felt the pressure on his chest lighten as the creatures flaying him alive began to dissolve under the barrage of rocks. The brilliant cyan heights of the sky opened up to him again as every timber wolf that hovered over him, gnawing on his broken form, detonated in a shower of dry brush and dead leaves. He pushed himself onto his knees with his one remaining arm, his head searching the clearing dumbly. He knelt in a small circle of dead wood, confusion and despair contorting his bloodied face.

“N-no,” he mumbled, the flesh of his throat slowly knitting together. “Come back. I have to die. I have to...” The wolves closest to him rapidly shifted their gaze from him to the edge of the forest’s clearing. Nix regarded them with a dead sheen over his eyes. He numbly patted the ground around him, searching for his other arm. He held the appendage up, staring at it for seconds, empty moments that stretched into a lonely eternity. “I was human once,” he whispered to himself. He held the severed arm up to his shoulder, grimacing as the limb began to reattach itself to him.

His muddled vision of the clearing was subsumed by a dark green glow. As the wolves turned their attention back to him, what was left of his stomach lurched as he was jerked through the air. He landed harshly on the ground, sliding across his back for a few meters before coming to rest next to a pair of lime green hooves. He struggled to stand before one of them came to rest softly on his shoulder, gently holding him down. He looked up into the glimmering emerald eyes of his savior. Ridge Dancer gazed down on him as calmly as she could. She failed to keep her eyes from welling up after seeing the extent of his injuries. No healing white flames danced across his bloodied form. He saw more hurt in her eyes than he felt in his gnarled, undying body.

Nix hated that look.

“Dancie...” he wheezed. “No. N-no, you have to...you have to get...out of here...” The unicorn looked away from the tattered remains of the human at her hooves. Her face became a stoic mask, as unbreakable as the stones she wielded, and her horn began to glow a green deeper than a calm ocean’s depths. The earth began to rumble around the pair as three bulging masses grew from the soil behind the unicorn.

“Do you know why I took the name Ridge Dancer?” she asked almost casually. Three dull grey boulders, each weighing several tons, erupted from the ground, black soil spilling off of them into the yawning sepulchres of earth from which they were summoned. They rotated threateningly in the air behind the green mare, encompassed by a dull green aura, as the few dozen remaining timber wolves closed in on the broken human and his companion. A few beads of sweat formed on her brow as her face scrunched in concentration; the dark green glow of her horn grew in size as bright green sparks began shooting from its tip. The levitated boulders stopped their rotations and shuddered, releasing a loud, deep groan from their centers. Ridge Dancer looked back down upon Nix, all pretense of sympathy in her eyes replaced with an imperious fury, her eyes harder than jade.

“Because even mountains crumble beneath my hooves.”

An apocalyptic roar cracked through the clearing as her levitated boulders shattered into a thousand little pieces before shooting into the mass of timberwolves, sending up a shower of dust and broken limbs as the rocks hammered home with cacophonous thunder. Every last timber wolf in the clearing was torn apart beneath the shredding barrage of the unicorn’s meteor storm. Ridge Dancer stared coldly into the distance, panting heavily.

“D-Dancie?” Nix whispered out quietly, shocked, as the dust slowly settled. The mare collapsed next to him.

Author's Notes:

Alright, I know I pester you guys for feedback all the time, but I’m serious this time; this is the very first thing I’ve written, uh, ever, that features an extended action sequence, and I’d really, really like to know how I’ve done. If you’re worried about hurting my feelings, trust me, I’m a lot harder on myself than anyone else ever could be. I can take the criticism.

Seriously, please, please, please let me know how I handled it. This isn’t an adventure fic, but there is still quite a bit of action I have planned, most of it making this chapter look like a pathetic schoolyard squabble in scope, so anything you can give me will end up in a much more enjoyable story for all of us.

That said, I fucking love Ridge Dancer.