Fallout Equestria: No Holds Barred

Captain Eyepatch

Prologue: The Cold Shoulder

The snow crunched under my boots as I wound my way through the Scion River Valley, the storm raging around my ears like the poor, abused stepchild of a drunken hurricane, the smell of fresh rad-yak dung clinging to the hooves that carved my path through the impenetrable whiteness that lay around me on all sides. Other ponies, those without the intensely sensitive faculties of the night Pegasus race, would likely have lost their way in the howling blizzard and died, their corpses frozen standing upright like grisly, tortured statues, buried underneath a snow drift over time and lost to all but memory. I knew it was the height of summer here in the valley because of the periodic crunch of an ice berry underneath my hoof, the prose-purple fruit about the size of a peach gushing its blood onto my boots to smear me in its scent and colors. This was a good thing, as the rad-yaks would pick up on the tangy sweet odor as I approached them, the dumb animals likely breaking away from their handlers in search of a quick and easy meal. This would bring said handlers following along after them, allowing me to finally make contact with the New Cannonites that lived and worked in the outer edges of the valley, like my parents had done more than a decade ago before they’d been lost to flying lead, rusted, biting chains and the deadly cold of the region.

Putting the memory out of my head once more, I trudged onwards through the snow as I had for the last half hour- marking the time from the first berry I had stepped on- my keen gaze cutting through the flying frost to mark the mountains on either side of me, their featureless peaks a set of thrusting spikes that plowed up into the sky, devoid of trees and disappearing from view well before their apexes became visible. Monuments, all of them, torn from the earth and vaulted upwards by the explosions that had rocked this part of the world after the spells fell, turning the frozen badlands north of the Crystal Empire into an even more volatile and unlivable area. I fondly recalled the stories that mother had told me when I was younger and happier, listening to her voice in my mind as she once again spoke to me of how the region had come to be settled before I inevitably drifted off to bed in her arms. Father always sat in the corner on his favorite rug as mother told me the story, with his time-dulled armor glinting against the firelight, that same armor’s weight and sturdiness protecting me against high summer’s chill.

“The New Cannonites have always been a hardy people,” she told my younger self in my mind, cooing in her soothing voice as she gently coaxed me off to sleep. “They came from the South after the end days; ponies, zebras, brahmin, minotaur and other races that had grown tired of all the pointless war and conflict, longing for a land of their own where princesses and Caesars couldn’t do anything more to hurt them. In time, they found The Factory in the Eye, and claimed it as their own, building a strong, quiet village amongst the wreckage of the ancient machinery, slowly repairing it to make their livelihood and living safe and secure from the outside world.”

My remembrance was cut short by a yelp of pain and the sickening, familiar feeling of a hot bullet punching through the soft cloth that lined the shoulders of my father’s armor, the 9mm slug lodging itself into the skin of my upper-right torso and carving a scorching hole deep into my flesh. That would prove problematic.

Stupid. Stupid! I let my own memories distract me from my senses. Even if I wasn’t under attack, that error could have cost me greatly. It already was, my blood spurting in deceptively gentle rivulets out of the wound and spattering onto the ground at my side, staining the virgin snow crimson and melting it by the smallest fraction before freezing again and becoming one with the ice. It was beautiful, in a strange, macabre way, but I didn’t have time to admire it now. I had guests to deal with.

“And what have we here? Little lost yak lost his way in the storm? Or something a bit juicier~?” came a smoker’s voice as its owner appeared from behind the curtain of white, the reek of his unbathed body giving away his position a few moments before that. He was scrawny, and badly dressed, his leather armor taped over a layer of raw yak skin- I swear I could see the veins wiggling loosely every time he moved- his right eye bugging sightlessly, too far out of his face for the socket to possibly contain. It had ruptured at some point, then frozen in place, a disgusting memento of whatever event had damaged the organ and pushed it out of his skull to hang like that. In his mouth, he gripped a shoddy pistol, badly rusted and barely working from the way he kept racking the slide with his hoof, trying to get another round into the chamber.

“Hold still just a bit longer, meat, then we’ll be all set for supper!” he cackled with manic glee.

“Sorry, not interested,” I replied in a low, even voice as I reached down and closed my mouth around the grip of my own pistol, my mother’s ebon-black revolver leveled at the raider’s face without any more preamble. The sight of it, usually intimidating to individual thugs, bullies and raiders, didn’t seem to faze him all that badly. He took a step back and flashed a nervous look around at something before he steadied himself, and allowed a small Cheshire grin to grow on his features.

“’Fraid you ain’t got a choice, fatty,” the raider said, his grin growing wider as several shapes began to rise from the snow around me, like the valley had given up its hold on the dead and given them new life once more. The new raiders were just as poorly dressed- and just as disfigured- as the first was, several of them missing chunks of fur and flesh from of the visible parts of their bodies. One of them, a unicorn mare that had possibly been pink at one point, had so much gone from her face that she looked like she was descending into ghoulism. There might have been ten in all, and I had no idea if there were more lying in wait. The fact that they had me surrounded like this was a bad sign. I’d probably expended more energy hiking through the valley than I could afford, if I was so distracted and tired that I couldn’t tell they were there before I'd blundered into their trap.

Losing more blood by the second didn’t help.

“You gonna come nice and easy, or is little piggy going to squeal like a bitch in heat before we have dinner?” the first one asked in a low, hungry voice.

I sniggered in black enjoyment as his teeth smashed inwards like a rock through a brittle screen window when my bullet stole his grin away from him for good, what remained of his diseased brains flying out of his newly ventilated skull. They fell in meaty, wet chunks that rapidly hardened to pink, grimy crystal in the frost. His eyeball, barely hanging on even before I’d shot him, whirled up and out of sight for a moment before falling down and landing in his ruined mouth, the dead raider’s hooves pawing weakly at the air from the twitches of his dying nerves before he started to stiffen and loose his bowels right there in his ugly snow-suit. I and the other raiders stared at the sick comedy for a moment, lightly amused at the ignominy of the bastard’s quick and painless death.

The smell of fresh shit, mingled with new blood and old yak puke, was our signal to begin.

Their strategy was simple: Pile on top of me en-masse and beat, bite, bludgeon and otherwise bash me to death with a collection of lead pipes, bumper swords, brass hooves and other simple-but-effective implements of barbarity. Five of them never got the chance. Two on the immediate left and three on the right fell as mother’s pistol sang out, the thick, heavy .45 caliber slugs slicing through their skulls with surgical precision as they struggled and shoved through the same snow that had impeded my journey onward. Some punched cleanly out the other side while others lodged in their respective targets. It didn’t matter to me, so long as they were dead.

Unfortunately, that left four more of my assailants to deal with, and I was out of ammo. As thick as the snow was, and as good as it was at bogging a pony down, it wouldn’t give me enough time to reload the revolver completely, and I’d always hated fighting from shot to shot with the loading gate hanging open off to the side. The old-fashioned way, then. I turned to face them after I slung mother’s revolver on my leg once more.

The first one to get close, the pink ghoul-mare, swung a sizeable bumper sword at me, trying to slice me cleanly in half from above, her rotted horn flaring awkwardly as she struggled to ignite it against both decay and the debilitating cold of the valley. I reached up and roughly batted the dull blade away with my right gauntlet, knocking it out of her weak magic and burying it in the snow. I dove through the snow, my longer legs making the task comparatively easy to the effort that normal-sized ponies had to expend, tackling the ghoul to the ground and placing both of my forehooves on her face.

I felt a momentary flash of guilt as she screamed, at least until I wrenched her head to the side and broke the upper vertebrae of her spine. She’d had a voice like Sunny Love’s before she was ghoulified, I could tell. She was probably a sweet mare, once, maybe, but now she was just another victim of the valley’s endless winter.

Her skull exploded into paste as one of her compatriots brought a rusty sledgehammer down onto it, trying to kill me with a strike to the head while I was still bent over their companion’s body, a sloppy roll to my rear the only thing that saved me from losing my brains all over the remains of her face. This put me on my back, leaving me helpless, or so the raider must have thought as he ran over to me, still brandishing his hammer as he tried to pulverize my head again. He paid for his lack of discretion, approaching me from the direction of my hind legs, his testicles crushed from a savage kick when he made the foolish mistake of trying to straddle me like a sadistic lover. A second blow, this time from my right forehoof, smashed into his throat and broke at least one bone if the sick crunch was any indication. The raider gasped out his final breaths as I rolled out from underneath him, grunting in pain as ice clung to my wound, the pony bleeding from nose, mouth and crotch as he lost the strength to do anything but scrabble weakly and paw at his damaged windpipe. A third blow, brought down on his spine after I reared up on my hind legs, put him out of his misery.

The remaining two were smarter than their companions, their faces going pale as I rose up to face them, flipping open the gate to my revolver and reloading it fully as they bolted into the frost, back the way I had come and completely out of sight. Even the smell of unwashed pony went with them, replaced with the acrid half-stench of fresh bodies being washed by frozen rain. I started to reach for one of the rolls of bandages I kept in my pack, hoping to stanch my bleeding before it could become truly problematic, the gunshot wound already stiffening up and and growing spiky with pain as the adrenaline rush of combat wore off. I started to feel heavy, woozy, even outright sleepy, my breath beginning to come in shuddering gasps as my exertions caught up with me, the bandages slipping out of my teeth and falling into the snow before I could catch them. Shit.

That was when I paid for my indiscretion.

The Pegasus mare, healthier, leaner, meaner and far more capable than her fellows, landed on my back so hard that I was driven belly-first into the snow, her combat knife carving a painful gash along my left cheek as she wrapped her limbs around my torso, her gangly frame like a great, winged spider with a wasp’s stinger attached to its face. She managed to cut me once, twice, thrice before I could muster up the strength to bring my hoof up and shield my face, my left eye only saved by the fact that the impact of her chest on my back had rattled her somewhat as well, loosening the knife in her mouth’s grip and making it hard to deliver a good thrust from the awkward angle.

I’d faced this kind of foe before, but not in the winters of the Scion River Valley, not while bleeding, groggy and tired, but I had to try something. I had come to the valley for a reason, and I was more than a little bit unhappy with the idea of my welcome wagon cutting the stay short before I’d even stepped foot into what had used to be my home. I reared up on my hind legs and flared my wings out as wide as I could, surprising the mare as they appeared seemingly from nowhere underneath the folds of my pack and my father’s duster. She squealed as I slammed my back down into the snow with her between me and it, sandwiching her hard enough to push the breath from her lungs and scrabble free as she let go of me, although I was disappointed to see that the impact hadn’t dislodged the knife from her teeth.

I had to give her credit, she knew how to fight, her roll back onto her hooves crisp, clean and obviously well-practiced, that knife slipping tighter into her jaw as she came at me again, too fast for me to aim at. I reared up and we clashed together, her forward momentum slamming into my bulk, the two canceling each other out and forcing a stalemate as our rear hooves struggled for purchase, our forelimbs wrapped together around each other’s’ shoulders in a violent dance of passion, desperation and lust for one another’s blood. Our faces were close enough to kiss, although neither one of us noticed at the time, her gleaming blade flashing in front of my eyes even as my canine teeth bit and snapped at the flesh around her neck, both coming centimeters from tearing the enemy’s throat out, but unable to connect with anything more hurtful than mosquito-bite nicks and scrapes. I’d had to drop the revolver. Thankfully, its heavy black frame would make it easy to locate when I was done with her.

Eventually, as we both began to flag, she grew desperate and heaved the both of us onto our sides, trying to gamble my surprise and fatigue against her speed, hoping to knife me in the face or gut as we crashed together in a hot, sweaty bundle of limbs on the freshly-blooded snow. Even though my shoulder wound tore itself open deeper than before, bleeding me out on the ground, I continued to fight, grappling with the mare as the advantage her surprise attack gave her bled away like the crimson that stained my upper sleeve. Ultimately, her gamble failed.

I managed to roll her over onto her back, her hind legs wrapped around my midriff as I shoved a hoof roughly into her jaw and dislodged the knife from her grip by slamming my metal boot onto the exposed part of the handle that jutted beyond her teeth. I noted in a vague, distant sort of way that her teeth were far too clean to belong to a raider, straight, pearly white and unsullied by the flesh and blood of other ponies. Hell, mine were dirtier, thanks to my steady diet of various non-cannibalistic meat and the sweet colas I chugged whenever I could get a chance at any watering holes I happened to be passing through.

I didn’t care. The raiders attacked me, she’d attacked me as soon as they’d turned tail and run. That meant that she’d had a death wish, and I was more than happy to oblige.

I pressed my right hoof down onto her chest and grabbed hold of my revolver’s handle with the left, slamming it into my teeth and aiming down at her as I tongued back the charging stud and then wrapped my tongue around the trigger. I would have shot her right there, without another word, if she hadn’t been smiling up at me in a self-satisfied, almost conjugally blissful sort of way.

I’d only ever gotten that look from one other mare before, the one I hoped was still waiting for me outside the valley, and it made my face grow hot in ways I still don’t understand, probably won’t ever understand if the mare I left behind isn't waiting on me when I get back to where I came from, long enough for someone else to sneak up behind me and bash the back of my head with something heavy, metal and flat.

I reeled from the blow, falling off of the leering mare and struggling to stay upright, the memory of a blonde mane and green fur running away into a dank, steamy forest flashing across my battered mind’s eye as the familiar sensations of a concussion set in. Dizziness, nausea, lack of balance and a ringing in my ears became the dominant forces vying for the attention of my senses, joined shortly thereafter by the coppery taste of fresh blood and the smell of burnt metal as a hoof smashed into the left side of my face and sent me sprawling. My pistol had dropped just in front of my face, and I reflexively tried to pull it into my mouth, failing as it was kicked away somewhere behind me, far enough that I couldn’t flex to see it.

As I struggled to stay conscious, I looked up and saw a second shape materialize out of the snow next to the Pegasus, this one radiating godlike authority with cold, clinical detachment added as a secondary flavoring to that overpowering aura.

“Search the bodies, then grab him and get him back to town. I want to know what this one is doing here, and why he’s wearing that armor.” I heard a deep, soft, feminine voice say. It was like good chocolate that had been filled with steel, soft and forgiving on the outside, unbreakable within.

The last thing I saw and felt before I blacked out was a bandaged fetlock rubbing almost affectionately against my cheek.

Author's Note

This is my first fanfic for both Fo:E and MLP as a whole. Constructive criticism is always welcome.