Me and My Pony

Ever since the old world ended, I never had normal dreams.

I don’t know if anyone else dreamed the same way I did. I never really spoke to another human about such things. After everything happened, most people just make me…edgy. And you don’t open up to people you’re edgy about.

Thankfully, the dream was…muted. Not in the way of sound, but in emotion. Despite the scenes that played out in front of me, I felt more as if I was watching a bad documentary than reliving what was without a doubt the scariest time of my life.

If that was Luna’s fault, then I owed her whatever the hell she wanted. And I mean anything.

It starts the same way it always does. I’m in the New York Historical Society, looking at some painting near a window. But the picture was never stuck in my mind well enough to give me clear picture, All I see is one big blur.

There is earth rumbling explosion that came from outside.

I look out the window and see it.

The thing that destroyed the world. An explosion of color. A dancing wave that turns the night into something resembling the Northern Lights as it spread across the sky.

I stand there looking at the thing in amazement with dozens of faceless people crowded behind me to see what was going on. And then, everything goes dark. The lights simply went out all around us. In the room, the hallway, on the street, all of it just disappeared.

The world simply ceased to be for a moment.

Then I blink, and I'm outside in the chaos-filled streets. Beside me, there was a car that had knocked over a fire hydrant, carried into the thing by its momentum. No water shot up. There was no water pressure.

A shadow falls across me, and I look up to see one of the old great means of transportation falling from the sky much too fast.

For the second time in a little over ten years, I see a plane slam into a New York city building not all that far away.

The faceless people run around screaming. There’s more screams than there are people. I just see the few that catch my attention: the mother yelling into her dead cell phone for her son, people asking a nearby policeman is it’s a terrorist attack, other people are climbing out of their cars. Some of them are even fighting with the people who rear ended them.

I blink, and I’m standing in an alleyway.

I remember that I had ran away from the busy street as things had started to become ugly. Riot ugly, or maybe something even worse.

I turn down the back alley and see three figure standing over her, and I just stand there. Like the people on the street, the faces are blurred, only half remembered pieces of clothing a visible. The matching colors stand out the most.

Disbelief holds me still. I had just made my way down a dark alley, the three men were members of a gang of some sort. But I didn’t focus on the three people standing next to a big blue trash bin. The only thing that held my attention was the little blue unicorn with wings that was looking up at them.

Luna speaks.

The one in the middle kicks her in the face.

Luna falls down.

I shout at them.

They see me.

One pulls a gun. It’s a revolver.

I freeze.

Luna asks them something from the ground.

The second one kicks her again.

I tell them to stop.

The humans demand my wallet.

I pull it out.

When the human with the gun looks at it, I toss it to the side with a flick of my wrist.

His eyes follow it.

I grab for the gun.

The gun goes off. It hurts my ears.

But there’s no hole in my body.

The distraction lets me take the gun and hit the human in the face with it. There’s a snapping sound. It breaks his nose.

The other two attack me.

I fire the gun right in the face of one of the humans. The muzzle flash blinds him and the nose hurts his ears. Then I jab barrel into his eye as hard as I can.

He screams.

There’s a sharp pain in my side. I’ve been stabbed.

The third guy stabs me again, and again, and again, all in the stomach.

I fall down on my back.

The third human stands over me to say something.

The big blue dumpster crashes into him and continues on into the wall.

I hear bones crutch.

Luna stands over me. She asks if I’m okay.

Everything fades to black.

I opened my eyes to the familiar sight of a silver-blue mane that belonged to a pony with a slightly darker blue coat. The familiar feeling of her breathing blew against my ear, and I stayed as still as possible to keep from waking the pony using me as a cushion. Instead, I focused my mind on the lingering remains of the dream that had kept me busy at night.

It had been a long time since I last dreamed of the day we met, when the rainbow lit up the sky and people had thought the end of the world had come. And despite the stab wounds and being scared half to death by the revolver that had been pulled on me, I knew I numbered among the lucky ones.

I remembered that I had been in New York because I had won a crappy trip up north off some radio show a week before everything happened. Since I didn’t have anything else to do for the holidays, I went up north for some cultural experience. Although if I was really being truthful with myself, it was more like I just had the damn things laying around, and didn’t want to let them go to waste.

The Historical Society looked like a lot better option than Ben Stiller had made the Museum of Natural History seem. More people stuff, less nature junk.

Then the terrorist attack happened, or at least what a lot of people thought had been a terrorist attack. Hell, I had thought it was a terrorist attack. Considering it was New York and planes were falling out of the sky, it was a pretty safe bet. The Aurora…hadn’t really been anyone’s primary concern with everything falling apart.

Back then, I had no idea where I was going. I was a tourist in New York without GPS that had taken the subway more than three-fourths of the way to where I was wanting to go. I had just needed to get away from the panicky mob that was demanding answers from a policeman who didn’t have any.

As for my brilliant decision to tell the gang bangers that kicked the talking pony in the face when it simply asked what was going on…I had already been in shock long enough to switch half my brain to auto-pilot. And I’m one of those idiots that just can’t seem to let street thugs kick seemingly defenseless aliens around. Otherwise, I probably just would have counted the numbers, took note of the gang colors, and walked away to avoid that knife in the gut.

Instead, I made the best stupid decision that gets a knife put in you ever, and woke up the next day in a subway bathroom that Luna had dragged me into. Then we spent the next several days surviving a city-wide riot on our way out of New York.

A loud yawn drew me out of my thoughts, and I shifted my eyes over as Luna smacked her lips a few times while blinking her eyes.

“Morning,” I told the pony.

“Morning,” Luna replied before she moved her face close to mine and nuzzled me. Then she stopped, and sat up just a little. “Aw, why’d you have to go and shave?”

My face went into restrained annoyance mode at the question. “Because it feels weird when you rub your face up against mine when I have whiskers.” More specifically, it felt uncomfortable. But there was no way I was going to tell that to her. Weird sounded better. Nicer.

Luna rolled her eyes. “Well I think it feels nice, and it’s the woman’s opinion that matters,” she told me with a raised hoof, as if she was lecturing to me.

The pony’s words made me sigh, and I decided that I would have to get physical to win this argument. So I reached up and attacked one of the few weak points on her body. I moved quickly to dig my fingers into the soft spots, and began to scratch both of the marks on her flank.

“Mmmm, that’s not going to distract me from your bald face problem,” Luna told me while raising her head up in another pleasurable moan.

But it did distract her enough for me to roll the two of us over so I was the one on top. Once I got the sheets that protected her exposed belly out of the way, I struck at Luna’s most major weak point, and just watched her go limp.

“Oh! Oh yeah, that’s yes,” she breathed out while I worked her pony stomach. “Mmmm, I could just-” all of a sudden, Luna’s body tensed, and her eyes shot open. “Oh crap! Let me up.”

I froze. “Uh, what?”

“I said let me up!” she insisted before pushing me away hard enough I rolled off our bed and barely looked up in time to see her clear away the blockade by the door with magic. “And don’t think this means you’re off the hook.” She nearly tore it off the hinges in her rush to get out. “I want my scratchy whiskers back!”

And with that, I saw Luna rush to the door across the hall and rear up to kick it open with her hooves before she ran inside. We had long since learned not to do something as stupid as use the toilet in the same room were we going to be sleeping in.

It was two hours after sunrise when we got out of the city. Two, terrifying hours spent in the air, with me clinging onto a little box of wood for dear life. All the while wishing I knew where I could find a parachute.

Then came the long walk home. A process that I absolutely loathed.

Although I wasn’t crazy enough to walk around in full combat gear, it didn’t mean I wasn’t carrying anything. A large backpack that held most of our camping stuff and other basic supplies was strapped to me. It wasn’t like the ones I wore when looting, the kind that a school kid would use. No, what I carried on the old black road was a full on camping pack, the kind that had places for the sleeping bag and went up higher than my head as well as providing a sternum strap to help keep it all from jostling around. That, on top of the pointy things I carried around in an old bag in case something needed stabbing added up to a pretty fair-sized load.

While the benefits of me being Partners with Luna didn’t make the load too difficult, the hundred-fifty or so pounds I was lugging around combined with our pace had me straining not long after the first hour. Three hours in, and it was time to call for a break.

I could have gone longer, but it was better to pace yourself when it came to travel by foot. And the one good thing about the Aurora was that it made travel by night pretty easy. So all I had to worry about when the sun went down was the comfortable drop in temperature, which was nothing compared to what I had been forced to get used to up north.

Ten minutes into our fifteen minute break, Luna flew down from the cloud she had been using to lounge around and keep a lookout with. Judging by the strained look on her face, I could tell she hadn’t just gotten bored and wanted to head out early. So I stopped propping myself up on my backpack and put away the book I had been reading in one of its side pockets. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a caravan coming,” she told me.

Not a total surprise, all and all. Dallas was one the biggest looting areas around. Not finding other people on an interstate highway would have been more suspicious than none at all.

I looked back towards our wagon and thought about getting things ready for trouble. “Who is it?” I asked, while mentally going over the usual list of suspects. Ponyville wasn’t the only place that had idiots like me coming to Dallas via the ground. At least until we hit the city limits. Of course return trips were always made on land, even the strongest pegasus couldn’t fly a wagonload of junk very far.

“I didn’t see any identification painted on their trucks, or any flags, old or new,” Luna replied.

Which made me a little worried. Nowadays, almost anyone who was smart flew some form of ID to tell other people that they had friends. Hell, even the people that didn’t either flew the old American, Texas, or even the Confederate flag to give everyone a basic idea of their baseline ideology. That alone could turn a prospective opponent into someone you could at least get along with. There were plenty of places around that held to traditional values, thought the apocalypse was a good time to declare Texas its own nation, or act like a couple of good ol’ boys never meanin’ no harm…aside from the multiple Confederacies I had run across in the past three years that decided slavery was in vogue again. Most of them weren’t much larger than a town or two in size, but in the age where most people didn’t go fifty miles away from their homes, places like that might as well have been a country.

Unmarked people like me either didn’t want to be noticed, or were up to something bad. And even I had an old Texas flag stashed away for quick retrieval in case people wanted the closest thing to ID there was these days. There were more New Texases than anything else in these parts after all.

“Ten people with two trucks being pulled by a pair of ponies. A unicorn and an earth pony,” she went on.

That worked to make me a lot less nervous. The fact they had ponies with them was a good sign. Unless of course they were enslaved ponies. That was what you would call a bad sign.

I really wished I hadn’t thought of that last part. My pessimism had a way of making things turn out badly whenever it reared its ugly head.

Still...it didn’t change anything. Either way, it meant we’d have to meet with them straight up on the road instead of avoiding them like we usually did with groups of pure human coming the opposite way. Just for the hell of it, I looked over to Luna to ask a question, even knowing what she was going to say. “So, you want to meet and greet, or run and hide?”

“Let us be open and civil,” Luna told me.

I sighed and looked back to our wagon that was tucked away beside the wall the overpass made just by being an overpass. “Well, might as well get ready for company,” I said before walking over to drop off the camper’s backpack and take off my boots to replace them with something I could move around better in.

A few minutes later, my boots had been replaced by tennis shoes. I had my light chainmail shirt over my normal one, and even went about the trouble of strapping a pair of vambraces on to protect my forearms with Luna’s help when it came to tying them.

Then came the weapons.

To be honest, my crossbow was something I had looted from a pawn shop on my way south, and was more for show than anything else. An expert on the things had called it a Raptor, and explained it was one of the cheaper bows on the market back when everyone was using paper for currency. Which meant it had less range, power, and not as much draw as most of the other things on the market.

On the other hand, it still had more power than what most people could put out with a regular bow and arrow, and crossbows were the number one choice of people who didn’t have time to either learn how to shoot with a normal bow, or try and risk using thrown weapons. They were just point and shoot, like guns used to be.

Sure, they took time to reload, but it was a pretty good bet the guy you aimed at close range would be dead after a little while of thrashing. Especially since anyone with half a brain these days added a little something extra to their arrows like poison to make doubly sure what they hit went down quickly after that first shot.

Once I had made myself ready for company and loaded ye olden trigger weapon, I took four of the spears out of my bag and tossed them out on the ground. Out of everything I used, they were the most custom jobs. Each one was a solid piece of 3ft long metal with a pointed blade at the end that added an extra foot, mostly made from old barbells that Luna had cut apart with her horn and reformed into something useful. Each one still weighed a good ten pounds, but the pega-corn’s Gifts helped compensate for that when I used them. In my right hand, I had the classic post apocalyptic chopper, a machete that I had picked up along the way. It didn’t know how many I had lost broken, sold or just plain thrown away in the past three years. But I was used to the general weight and length that they pretty much all had, so why bother changing?

So with bow in hand and machette sheathed, I crouched down on the balls of my feet to wait for the company to show up. When they did come up over the dip in the land, I set down my sword and pulled a pair of small binoculars out of my pocket to get a somewhat better look at the guys coming towards us than my eyes alone could provide.

Unfortunately, the things I was using didn’t work like the movies said they should have. They did give me a closer view of what was coming, but the magnification was maybe only twice as much as my eyes alone could have given me, three at most. I wasn’t able to count the number of hairs on their stubble-covered faces.

Still, I did see a few things a bit more clearly.

Like Luna had said, there were ten people in all. What she hadn’t mentioned was that they actually looked like they knew what they were doing. But then, most people walking around three years after an apocalypse probably weren’t going to be a bunch of idiots. I didn’t even know if we had any of those left with natural selection back in full swing.

Four of them were carrying bows. Normal ones, not crossbows. The pre-Aurora type that let had wheels to increase the strength of the draw and a place for three or four arrows actually on the bow. The rest of them had a mix of other weapons that ran the gauntlet from fire axes and sledgehammers to machetes. Hell, the guy in front even had the cliché ninja sword that every nerd and his grandmother had bought for about fifty bucks at a samurai convention. He also had a round shield that was painted red white and blue in a very familiar pattern hanging from his left arm.

In all seriousness, the equipment told me plenty about them. While the machetes didn’t cause much worry, sledge hammers were still plenty dangerous to people in metal skins like me, while axes might as well have been the bladed versions of those things.

Then there were the defensive equipment they were wearing.

Blacksmiths that could actually make armor weren’t all that easy to find in the new world, so people had gotten creative in so many ways since there were only so many sets of US military combat gear, and kevlar vests hadn’t been designed to stop swords or arrows. Some people put a bit of metal like hubcaps onto cheap jackets to create a layer of protection that kept the majority of a vital area safe. Others used torn down street signs as shields. The list of ways people made makeshift armor was just endless.

This particular group kept things pretty basic. Each one of them was dressed in a thick camouflage hunting jacket that had been overlaid by a poncho made of interlocked chains. It was an…interesting approach to how someone could turn the stuff at Home Depot into armor.

It wouldn’t stop someone trying to poke a hole into their stomachs with a thin pointed object and didn’t cover their arms, but most people tended to go with weapons that cut these days anyway. So as far as stopping a slashing weapon, they looked pretty capable. The only downside I could see was that they were probably pretty heavy.

“Well, that is rather disheartening.”

I looked away from my binoculars and over to Luna. “What?”

“The green unicorn, she’s wearing a suppressor,” the pegacorn replied.

I tensed, and looked back through my binoculars, focusing on the mint green unicorn that was pulling the repurposed Chevy truck. For a few seconds I thought I could make out…something metal on her horn, but it was hard to tell with the distance between us.

Although if the unicorn’s magic was being blocked, then that told me everything I needed to know about this group of people and the ponies pulling their truck-wagons. The ponies were slaves, and the people were in need of a few air holes drilled into their bodies.

Unfortunately, there were ten of those people in need of holes, and only two of us. That made things a little slanted in their favor. Not that Luna wouldn’t even the odds, but we were still pretty outnumbered.

I did my best to assess the situation.

If I had seen them, then it was a good bet they had already seen us, so just waiting for the slavers to pass by as we hid somewhere close wasn’t really an option. Luna could carry us away from them easily enough, but that would have probably meant leaving most of our stuff behind so she could fly far enough away that they didn’t bother to go chasing after us. She hadn’t had that much rest after all.

So we could run away, but that meant giving up most of our stuff.

Then there were the ponies that were with them. We would have to leave them to their owners. At least until we snuck around after dark and got rid of the people that way before letting the ponies go.

But…

Well, there was a small chance that Luna was wrong. The unicorn could just be wearing her ring because of a cracked horn, or maybe she was engaged to the other pony. I had seen plenty of the quadrupeds adopt human customs over the years. If we just snuck up on them in the night and killed the bipeds in their sleep to find that the two ponies were just on a working honeymoon or something…that wouldn’t be good.

I looked over to my Partner. “So uh…what do you want to do?” I asked, knowing what Luna was going to say before she even opened her mouth.

“Let us meet them head on,” she replied evenly.

It took a force of will not to sigh. That was her answer to everything when it came to fighting. Sure, Luna was small and fast with the ability to do all kinds of crazy things that made it next to impossible for her to even be touched, so having such a cavalier attitude was affordable to her. But I was a kind of normal human being damnit! My kind tended to die when shot at!

However, as I knew Luna would just spend the next few minutes arguing with me instead of escaping, allowing the incoming group ample time to come at us, I just sighed and made my way to the back of the overpass where our wagon was parked to apply some poison. “Okay fine. But would you let me do the talking this time?”

Luna rolled her eyes. “Very well.”

Another minute passed, and the caravan finally arrived within fifty feet of us. As soon as it did, my hopes for any peaceful resolution to this whole thing went up in smoke with one look at what the mint-green unicorn was wearing on her horn. It was in no way shape or form, anything resembling a wedding ring.

Luna had called it right, the thing was a suppressor. Which was just a gentle pony word for any item that could be put around a unicorn’s horn and tightened to the point where they couldn’t perform magic. The pressure gave the poor creature a constant migraine, which turned into something much worse if magic was pumped through the pointed extremity. In this case, as with most, the item in question was a simple hose clamp that had been screwed on as tightly as possible.

That kind of made my plan to murder the ten people in front of me in their sleep all the more doable as far as my morality constraints went. Even if it was kind of off the table. What with them standing right in front of me and all. Still, the anger at seeing a pony in slavery and suffering helped calm my nerves.

Now that they were close enough to really see with the naked eye, I had to work not to let my habit of catastrophizing get the better of me. It wasn’t just their weapons and armor that marked them as experienced, the way they carried themselves put the point home. Even with me and Luna standing in front of them, the archers kept looking around for more people, and at least two pairs of eyes were looking up to the overpass at all times.

I glanced around to where the spears were laying on the ground, and then raised a free hand in greeting while my left thumb finished messing with the crossbow in my hand. “Hey there! You guys heading to Dallas? Better be careful, I saw some raiders a few miles back,” I said in the special language of people who travel around a lot. To a normal person it would appear my words were a friendly warning, but what I was really saying was ‘ just came from Dallas, and killed some people on the way back there. Don’t fuck with me’.

It was also a lie, but...they didn’t know that.

The guy in the front didn’t even bother looking at me as the four guys with bows pointed their sharp objects in my general direction. He turned his attention towards Luna. My annoyance grew at being ignored, but I did have to admit that Luna was pretty attention grabbing. Not in the hot chick kind of way, unless you were into quadrupeds. She was attention grabbing in that pony with wings and a horn kind of way. So I didn’t really begrudge the guy for getting distracted by her looks.

One of the men looked over too. “Hey boss, isn’t that one of those alicorn things?” the guy with the bow standing to the right of Captain America the samurai said.

Huh? I thought before looking over to Luna, who looked back to me with an expression that said she was just as confused as I was.

“Kill ‘em and take the po-” was about as far as the guy in the lead got before the order shook me out of my confusion and Luna’s horn lit up.

Four spears few out of the tall grass next to the road and slammed into the guys holding the bows. Two of them just dropped when the long metal sticks impacted the center of their chests, the other two actually flew back a bit thanks to the angle of penetration, or maybe their armor caught on the things. I didn’t bother to check.

The two of us were moving before their bodies hit the ground. We would have been faster, but…that out of the blue question really threw me and my pony off our game.

Luna drew out the two rapiers she kept under her wings. They were some really gaudy things with super stylish guards made of silver and encrusted with diamonds. We had looted them from the wall of some rich oil tycoon’s house. The damn swords were more trouble than they were worth, but Luna had practically squealed when she saw them and…I couldn’t really say no to her. So the pony was armed with killer bling that started about as many fights as they finished.

But as usual, she backed away and just took up a defensive position to guard our stuff. Despite everything she could do, Luna was still a pony. If they didn’t mess with her directly, she was happy to just let the guys run away.

As for me, I quickly surmised the angle I needed to shoot and let the bolt I was holding fly at the leader of the group a fraction of a second before I started moving towards him. Since the guy had a shield, he raised it up to block the attack that was heading towards his windpipe, too low and fast to just duck. The leader’s shield was tilted up a bit, so my arrow rebounded over him when it hit, doing no damage, but still fulfilling its job. Thanks to the presence of mobile cover, he didn’t actually see me go low and slice off his left leg until it was gone.

The lead thug dropped to the ground screaming on his back, and I stepped forward to keep the blood from getting on me. With the way Samurai America was waving his amputation around, it was going everywhere. But the screaming did help me know where his head was so I could hit it with a low sweep hard enough to shut him up.

“And then there were five,” I said, ignoring the screaming muscles in my legs while I kept an eye on the remaining goons to keep from being surrounded and set the crossbow down. Each one of them had a look of fear in their eyes that would give me a few seconds. More if I milked it with some distracting words. I needed to keep their attention on me.

I kept walking, slowly circling the group as I talked. Didn’t want to get surrounded. If I put Luna at their backs, it would be over. If they got around me, it would be bad. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Never fought a guy Partnered with a pony before?” Which I knew was an impossibility in this day and age. “Or this the first time someone you murdered actually decided to fight back?”

While we humans weren’t as sheepish about violence as ponies, we were still pretty leery of it. Despite our omnivorous nature, we were hardly natural predators. Standing in front of five guys, I still had a nervous lump in my throat about what was going on, even with them kind of on the defensive.

Didn’t mean I didn’t think I wasn’t going to win though.

“Well let me give you guys a little lesson then,” I said before moving forward again, this time towards the goon with a sledgehammer.

I moved in slower than the first time, but still fast. He swung his weapon at me. It was the kind of hammer with a long handle, so I would have had plenty of time to duck. Instead, I struck out with my empty let hand and hit the thing right below the head with my palm to help counter the force of the swing, then grabbed onto it and yanked. The pull wasn’t hard enough to take the weapon away, but I did cause the guy to go off balance for a second. A second I used to deliver a chop to his neck with my short sword. Another yank on the hammer, and it was mine. I also slid my machete across the front of the guys neck as he fell to help finish the job.

Despite the pounding in my heart and slight headache I was starting to get, I walked forward and let gravity slide the hammer in my hands down until I was holding it at about half-haft. I also talked some more. Talking meant there was one more thing for them to focus on. “You see, when a pony and a human are friends, and they hang out together, eat together, sleep together,” I said before suddenly realizing just how that could be interpreted. “Not in that way! Just…you know…uh, the same bed and stuff.”

“It’s called cuddling!” Luna shouted in my direction, a little annoyed.

“Not helping!” I shouted back.

“I am so,” Luna replied from the other side of the goons. “I am providing them with a better description since you still seem to be of the mind that the two of us sharing a bed is somehow a bad thing to admit in public!”

Ever an opportunist, I took the second the guy closest to me was looking at Luna to dash forward. On my last step, I adjusted my weight and put my whole body into swinging the sledge into his skull hard enough to smash open the construction helmet he was wearing like an egg before I let it go to fly off to the side with the rest of him since it was buried in his skull.

“Do you mind?” I yelled back at Luna before going for the next guy. However, the warning was enough for him to actually be ready to stop me.

My attempt to put my sword in his skull was stopped when the slaver brought his own machete up in a swing to block my attack. Doing my best to keep my sword between his sword and me, I stepped forward and tilted back with my right wrist so our weapons were still locked when I got in through his guard to shoot my free hand forward in a palm strike to his face. The sound of cartage being pushed into the nasal cavity soon followed, and he flew back a few inches before going down.

With only three of them left, I looked back to my Partner. “Luna, I am kind of in the middle of something here!” I shouted.

The blue pony groaned. “Fine,” she said before the glow on her horn increased just a bit. The two swords she was holding zipped forward as fast as any bullet, slamming into two of the remaining people so hard and stopping so abruptly that the impact knocked two of them off of the blades.

“You!” she said harshly to the last human remaining, causing him to jump. “Drop your weapons, and start running back the way you came, and if we see you on the road again before nightfall, I will have William kill you.”

The man looked around at his dead friends and leader, all of whome were still leaving quite the mess, then to the road, the axe in his hands, and Luna. Then, he dropped his axe, and ran.

However, it wasn’t down the road like Luna had told him to. The guy sprinted over to the green unicorn standing in the middle of corpses that had once been the rest of his group, and pulled a knife from his belt to hold against her neck. Unprepared for it as I was, I didn’t have the time to stop him. “S-Stay back! Stay back or I’ll cut her throat!” he shouted in a panic. “You’re one of those horse fuckers, right? So you don’t want this little bitch getting hurt. S-So drop your weapons, and stop that glowing horn, or she dies!”

My whole body tensed as my mind tried to work itself into the panic at the thought of the green unicorn dying. I could see that the poor girl’s golden eyes were full of fear as they tried to look down where a blade was pressed up against one of her veins. She let out a terrified whine, but didn’t speak.

I was also a little angry over what he had just called me. Hadn’t I just explained to him that Luna and I were just platonic bedmates?

Luna did as ordered, and loudly circled around the guys back until we were standing next to each other. I dropped my sword too, and tried to reason with the idiot. “You do know there’s no way out of these for you now, right?” I asked while I tried to analyze the situation to find a solution.

“N-Now you guys are gonna start walking down that way and if I see you-”

“Then you won’t see us,” I said before he could finish copying Luna’s instructions. “When we come back tonight and get you, I mean. Maybe even before that if you’re not careful, or later…when you go to sleep, the bathroom, the second you drop your guard. I don’t know when it’ll happen, but it will happen. And unless you step away from her, it won’t be quick. I can promise you that.”

The man’s eyes widened. He was feeling the fear now, starting to really panic.

“I’ll torture you,” I went on while letting my anger at seeing a pony in a slave’s harness out. “Not the stupid little water boarding crap they use to do to scare confessions out of people. I’m talking about real pain. I’ll start by breaking your arms and legs so you can't get away. Then I’ll start a fire, get a knife, heat it up real good and stick it inside your mouth you won’t bleed to death when I cut off your tongue. I don’t want you begging to stop, because I’m not going to. After that, I’ll really get started by cutting out your eyes. Do you know the most sensitive nerves in a human’s body are behind the eyes? I heard it on television, so I don’t know if it’s true, but man do people scream when I stick a hot poker back there and swirl it around.”

As he broke eye contact to look around at his friends, I stepped forward and kept talking. “Or maybe you think you can take me,” I went on as I took another step and raised my hands. “I don’t have a weapon, and you’ve probably got some things in that truck’s forward trunk. You guys did take out the engine and everything else to make it a little trunk, right?” Everyone did that nowadays when they replaced the steering.

Another step when he looked towards the truck to his left rather than the one right behind him.

“Of course, after you just saw me kill your buddies, well…you know you’re kind of screwed there too, right?” I asked. “I mean, you remember what I was talking about earlier, with ponies and humans being Partners, right? The stuff that lets things the size of dogs haul around a couple tons of stuff and fly kind of rubs off on us. Sure, I can’t fly, and I’m no Hulk, but the chances of you actually being able to take me with, well...anything short of a working shotgun? Those are pretty slim.”

What being close to Luna did do to me was pretty special though. People who were Partnered with pegasi found themselves pretty resistant to the cold on top of gaining an increased reaction speed. Earth ponies gave enhanced endurance and some of their creepy super strength that allowed things that science said had no right to lift something the way they did. As for unicorns, being Partnered with one of them increased a person’s mental acuity and allowed the pony’s person a dulled magical sense. Luna gave all three.

“So let her go, or I promise that you will spend the last few days of your life in complete agony,” I told him evenly. “And it will be days. Trust me on that.”

One second ticked by, then two and three. The man’s eyes darted about wildly, his hands shook, and I was almost certain I heard a tiny whimper coming from his before he finally dropped the knife he was holding to turn and run in the wrong direction that Luna had told him to go, off of the road and into the bush.

I thought about having Luna toss me a spear so I could just kill him as he ran. From what I had seen, he deserved it. But a glance down at the green unicorn he had nearly killed made me stop. She was looking at me with the same fear filled eyes that had been on the human holding her hostage a moment earlier.

It was stupid, but…that was the reason I let a guy that had tied up and forced a pony to work for him go. It didn’t matter he had probably beat her every day until she was so scared she had to behave any threat turned her into a mass of tears. It didn’t matter he really deserved it. The creature he had abused was looking at me the same way she looked at him. Because of that, I let him go.

So instead of getting rid of the waste of air, I looked back at our wagon, unable to meet the unicorn’s gaze again. There was no need to, I knew she and the cream-colored pony were okay. “I’ll be right back. There’s a screwdriver in our wagon. Let me go get it so I can take that thing off your horn.”

On my way back, Luna joined me. “It would probably be best for me to do the talking to those two, and get that thing off of her horn,” she said.

I nodded in compliance. “Yeah.”

Then, Luna looked up to me with a little frown. “By the way William. What’s an alicorn?”