As we trotted out into the sunlight the snow on the ground started to melt and expose the wet sand beneath. I couldn't stop thinking about New Trotakomai. All my friends, family, and fellow ponies gone and taken from me in a flash. They had suffered, and I was too sickened to go back into town to help anypony that might have lived. I felt the sand at my hooves. It has a very unique feel and sparkles in unison with the snow, giving off a bright, beautiful gleam. Yet, all of this, stained in blood at the hooves of those fiends. We looked into the sea as it washed the sands clean, purifying it, like washing away past sins. It was still a bright and clear blue, clean, yet still salty. Felix and I were born near this ocean and we'd play and swim in the water during summertime. A lot of time has passed since the bombs and our long distance away from Equestria, rendering the oceans safe from debris and radiation. I still stood there, starring into the bright blue gleam.

“Hey,” Aurora interrupted, “You okay?”

I sighed, “Not really. But I think I'll manage. I need to hold onto the hope of both you and Felix.”

She gave an empathic nod, “I understand. Talk to me about anything please. Whatever is on your chest, I'll try to pry it right off.”

She looked at her wing, checking it over for signs of decay before turning back to me.

“Let's start with a change of subject. I'm guessing you like weapons?”

“Mhm,” I looked to my cutie mark. It was of a vulture grasping a G3 rifle in its talons, “I like rifles of any kind. Sniper, assault, battle, anything accurate and long barreled. You?”

I tried to get a glimpse of her cutie mark. It was almost the same symbol on the plane she had crashed in, minus the black diamond in the middle. It was the brilliant stylized sunburst of the NFR.

“Light rifles, carbines, SMGs, and explosives. Grenade launchers are my thing too, but what I really want is an RPG battle saddle. If you haven't noticed by now, I like missiles, a lot,” she gave me a wide grin and bumped her face into my cheek. I rolled my eyes and smiled.

I stopped and my eyes widened. We did have an RPG battle saddle. I wanted to surprise her, but that would mean that I would have to go into town. Something my stomach wasn't ready to take. I gave another sigh.

“There's something I need to do before we go. Stay here, I need to put some things behind,” I walked off into the distance.

“Take all the time you need Ranger...” she almost whispered as she starred back at me.

As I made my way into town, the streets were luckily picked clean by the many wasteland critters. Some I don't want to name or even think about. But at least the streets were empty and a few buildings were still on fire, but not much. I gathered my thoughts through my heavy heart and cleared my head.

“Focus Ranger. Just loot the merchant, grab all his stuff and get out!” I exclaimed to myself as I neared the booth. I got up onto one of the stools and pretended to barter, trying to grasp a sense of normality, “Hey Swords, just came to stop by for that RPG. I've finally got enough to buy it.”

I looked down to see the dead corpse of the merchant pony that I had worked with so long. Flies had started to buzz around him and it gave off a smell of rotting flesh. I tried to dismiss it as rotting meat from a shipment gone bad.

“Sleeping on the job again I see?” I was holding back tears, “Don't worry, you've done a hard days work my friend.”

His eyes were open and tongue drooped out. I stuffed it back into place and closed his eyelids shut. I focused on his head rather than the blown out midsection blasted open by a shotgun shell. I could clearly see buckshot imbedded into his flesh. The front half of him seemed peacefully asleep after I had closed his eyes and mouth. I started to sing, half crying to the loss of my friend.

“H-Hush now, q-quiet now... It's t-time to lay your sleepy head...” I turned away and vomited into his trash bin. I looked around to find anything I could use to distract me, or at least give me a false sense of normality. I found it in the form of a blanket in the back on his bed of hay. I pulled it over him and lifted one arm to tuck him in. Now he looked comfortable and I could easily mistake him for being asleep. I calmed my breathing as I could finally look at him. I continued to sing, “Hush now, quiet now, it's time to go to bed...”

I pulled the pistol from one of his drawers and it was the same 9mm that Felix used, only with a mouth grip for ponies. I looted all the ammo I could carry in my new saddlebags and eyed the RPG battle saddle on the wall. The menacing weapon came in a pack with pockets designed to hold six rockets total. I floated it down with magic and ran back to Aurora who was skipping rocks into the water.

“Oh no way! Hehehe!” she started to bounce and giggle with glee as I brought back the RPG, “Please! Please! Please! I want big boom!”

Her smile was enough for me to purge my grief. I breathed a sigh through a very relieved smile, “Here you go. Happy belated however many birthdays I missed.”

I handed her the saddle and ammo. She came up to me and gave me another firm hug.

“Thanks cous! Tell you what,” I helped her strap the launcher on and fitted it to her size, “I want to teach you a little trick just in case you ever get into a jam.”

She stood a few feet away and pointed to my rifle, “Point your rifle at me like you're holding me up.”

“Okay, sure I guess,” I unloaded my rifle and cleared the bolt, pointing it right at her like she told me to.

“Alright you got me,” she smirked. I was confused.

“What am I suppose to learn from-” Aurora rushed forward, bucked the rifle out of my magical grasp, caught it in her teeth, and tackled me back. I understood now, “Ahh!”

“Tricky tricky!,” she giggled and spat out my rifle, “That's one of the many counter techniques taught to me by my mother after I joined the NFR military. She was such a brave mare.”

Her giggle turned to sadness. She shook it off and continued, “Nevermind about that. You go ahead and give it a try!”

She picked the rifle from the dirt and pointed it at me. I tried to go for it but I was greeted with the buttstock right to the face.

“Nopf!” she mouthed, “Toof slow! Wanna fake if step by stepf?”

“Okay, that hurt. But I'll try again,” I got back up and followed her step by step instructions. We did all this for a better portion of a few hours with Felix spectating us. At the end of our session I picked the lesson up quick as a snap. Felix returned to his duties burying the dead in town.

Aurora looked to him as he disappeared, “Is there anything you'd like to share about him? I haven't got the chance to really talk to him yet.”

“I'll tell you this much. He was hatched on the same day I was born. His brother and sister were stolen as eggs and roasted by those raider ponies. His mother died in the same raid,” I started to explain, “His father committed suicide. Felix was orphaned so my dad took him under his wing. We were brothers and always had each other to look after. He's dependable, fast, caring, and mature for his age.”

“He sounds really nice. Is there anything he can do in combat that might be helpful?”

Felix returned a few minutes later and pointed back to town with one of his claws, “Buried the last pony. We're good to go.”

“We can talk on the way to the airbase. Let's go,” we trotted on west towards the old ruins of Noboribetsu. Aurora was itching to fire her launcher at any Deathclaws that might rear their ugly heads and my battle rifle was loaded with armor piercing ammunition.

We walked for hours on the crippled and crumbled road that was once a major highway for chariots before the war. We kept our eyes peeled and mouths shut as we focused on our eyes forward sparkle. All it detected so far were a few starlings and a rabbit or two. There was oddly nothing hostile so far but as we approached the ruins my EFS compass lit up with a spot of red.

“Hold up,” I whispered to Aurora.

“What is it?” she stopped and hugged the wall.

“There's a pony in there. I think maybe a raider, I can hear him talk,” I pressed myself onto the side of the building. I could hear the stallion talking in a strange language. Aurora picked it up immediately.

“That's Stallionradish. And by the guess of it my EFS says he's alone,” she turned to me as she screwed on her suppressor, “I have a plan. You look like a merchant with all that stuff you're carrying. Go to the front and get his attention. Try to make him think you're selling stuff.”

I nodded to her as she went in through the back door. I trotted over to the front and knocked on the door, moving to the side, “Hey! Is there anypony in there? Traveling Wasteland Salespony with working electronic bits! Radios! Working phonographs! And other assorted gadgets!”

The door opened with the soldier pony stepping out. He wore a red uniform and was armed with an odd saddle with a suppressed AK-74u mounted on a turret that followed the movements of his head. He looked lost.

“Do you accept Stallionrad Rubles comrade?” he asked in a heavy accent.

Aurora got in behind him and stabbed into his neck with a deployable hoof mounted combat knife, “Nope! Die fucker!”

The soldier slid down to the floor and convulsed as blood seeped out of his neck at an alarming rate. He died from a combination of choking on his own blood and the blood loss he experienced from a recently opened jugular. Aurora was unphased and grabbed the AK off the dead body. I was slightly surprised at her, but dismissed the idea of killing our enemy instead of trying to reason with him. He did appear hostile on the EFS after all, even as I was talking to him pretending to be a merchant.

“Sweet! I've always wanted one of these. And look at all this ammo he was carrying! Looks like I got a good pick-me-up,” she removed the gun from the saddle mounted turret. I was fascinated by the contraption itself. I examined the body and all the soldiers gear. It all looked pretty ragtag but at the same time it looked more uniform than the standard garb of a wasteland mercenary.

“Strange, why is this guy here?”

“He's probably part of a scouting party. The NSL has been eying territory worth taking. From the look of his uniform I'd say he's a paratrooper,” she looked at the earth pony corpse and looted more ammo, “VDV huh?”

She stopped and eyed her new rifle as she held it in her right wing. I found it odd that she was using it that way. She checked the condition of her rifle and examined its features. The AK was short, had a fixed wooden buttstock, a suppressor, a custom desert paint job, and an odd reflex sight.

“That's a lot of attachments,” I was impressed.

“Definitely worth 5000 caps with this many weapon mods on it,” she adjusted the magical red dot sight and looked up, “You know what I find strange? There's no Deathclaws here and not a single mutant creature.”

“You're right cous. Looks like they migrated,” I smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. The sun was about to set and it was getting dark. We reused the soldiers camp as our own and locked all the doors. The building was reinforced and might have been a pawn shop once before. There were bars on the windows and double locked doors. The back door had been blown apart, probably early on during the first few years of the apocalypse. The shelves and racks also hinted at the former purpose of the store. Aurora and I searched the building for anything of use. We got more ammo from a hidden safe, some money from the trash cans, and a few cans of food left over by the soldier. Nothing else was out of the ordinary aside from the soldier and the lack of mutants. The sky was turning dim and night had fallen.

Aurora and I lit up a campfire on the roof of the building. She had caught a wild starling and was roasting it on a makeshift grill of corrugated metal. I was killing time by recording a journal into my watch while Felix slept in a tent beside me. Aurora came next to me and gave me a wing and some wheat stalks to munch on.

“This is pretty good,” she bit down into the crisp skin of the feet, “Do a lot of wastelanders eat meat?”

“Of course,” I sat there sucking on the succulent juices of the fried bird, “It's out of necessity really.”

“I know what you mean. Filipinos ate meat even before the war. After Sky Buster evacuated all those Equestrians to our country they were vegetarian. I can tell you that it was an odd culture shock when we started to blend together,” she continued to eat then asked me a question, “What's it like living in the wastes?”

“Hell, but you learn to live with it. As my father put it if you can thrive in chaos you can adapt to anything thrown at you,” I replied back as I kept gnawing on the bones.

“Insightful. I do hope you are okay though,” her and I discarded our bones off the rooftop.

“I'm fine, really. That town is literally and figuratively behind me. I want to see that you two, as my only family left, are kept safe. We should get some rest, it's almost nine o'clock,” I went into my tent and yawned, “Good night!”

“Good night cousin.”

I laid my head down on a sandbag and shifted around the crude tarp bedding I had prepared. Surprisingly, the loose sand underneath was comfortable and I found myself drifting off into a dreamless sleep.

I awoke to the sound of an excited yell in the distance. I jumped up and scrambled out of my tent to see Aurora looking puzzled into the distance.

“What the hell was that?” she asked without taking her eyes off the object in the distance. I grabbed my sniper rifle from my tent and floated it up to my eye, right down the scope.

“Luna fucked us with the moon. Raiders,” I rolled my eyes and floated the rifle near her, “Take a look.”

“Looks like they got jeeps,” she brushed her mane away from her right eye.

“Jeeps?” I was confused, “Nevermind! I think they saw our fire last night and they're headed this way!”

“I-” Aurora was cut short by a few bullets impacting the side of the building, tearing through the heavy brick and concrete. We ducked down behind the parapet, “Yup! They saw us!”

Felix threw us our weapons and we prepared for a firefight, sealing the hatch to the roof with sandbags. Peeking sideways above the edge I could see the raiders in sniping range. I ducked back and checked my PSG

“Aurora I'm gonna snipe these bastards with a little trick I wanna show you!” I put on a wide and zealous smirk, “Ever seen a unicorn curve a bullet?”

My horn glowed a brighter brown, imbued with magic energy.

“Now that is badass! Show me!” she gave me a brohoof and smiled.

“Hah! Sure thing!” rising above the ridge I shouldered my rifle and scoped in. I saw my crosshairs vaguely centered on the driver of one of the menacing looking vehicles. They were painted in blood with welded spikes and improvised armor with all the ponies inside the vehicle and not pulling it. I found it odd that it wasn't even vaguely in the shape of a chariot. I shrugged the thoughts off, “Watch closely!”

Feeling the bullet, I fired. The armor piercing round curved left and downward right and pierced, not shattered, the glass and went in between the eyes of the driver. Aurora followed the tracer of the bullet as the round arced unusually. The tracer itself glowed a bright yellowish brown, mixed with the tint of my magic. As the round made contact the jeep careened out of control and crashed into his ally. The two vehicles flipped and twisted into wrecks, exploding with magical energy as they impacted the ground. Their crews thrown about like burning rag dolls.

“Now that was cool!” Aurora was astonished and smiled at the carnage.

“Get the fuck down!” I tackled her to the floor as the fifty caliber machine gun punched through the bricks.

“Son of a bitch! Thanks,” she looked at me and brushed the dirt from her coat, “How the hell did they get that fifty?”

“Gimme a grenade, I'll dispose of him,” I pointed to one of the grenades we had looted from the dead soldier.

“Here! Fuck 'em up with ya?”

With my eyes forward sparkle showing me the direction of the bandit I threw the grenade blindly towards the jeep. In the explosion I heard a faint gargle and death rattle. I peeked out of one of the holes blasted from the brick. The gunner of the jeep was slumped over on his gun and the driver was aching in agony from the shrapnel imbedded in his gut.

“Come on,” I got up and grabbed my .44. I unlocked the hatch and we carefully checked the building. We trotted out to the jeep and there was a large pool of blood from the driver, who was still in agony writhing in his seat. I grabbed his head and turned it towards me, “You deserve no mercy!”

I leveled the revolver to his head and fired.

“Such uncivilized barbarians. No regard for life whatsoever. Sickening ain't it? Oh well, let's see what they had on them,” Aurora patted down the two bodies of the intact jeep, “Nothin' but a few nine mils.”

“I need that ammo,” Felix raised his claw up, “You think that one still works?”

“Hold on,” Aurora bent over and twisted the keys. The jeep sputtered to life and the magic powered engine thundered, “Sweet! It's good to go and humming just fine!”

Author's Note

Footnote: Level Up!

New Perk: Travel Light

You will have 10% faster running speed when wearing light or no armor.

Bonus Perk: Starstreak Counter

Use the Starstreak Counter to swiftly counterattack opponents holding you up. Perform a standard buck when prompted to steal your enemies equipped weapon.