Steelboy

by J. Finch

Rating: teen
Tags: Gilda, Adventure, Human, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe, Other
Length: 10465

A HiE second-person adventure into the depths the heart of mankind, and the flame that burns within.

The last thing you remember was being blown out a hole in the side of a crashing star cruiser, catching fire in the upper atmosphere and falling to your death upon an alien world below, yet there you are, whole and mostly unscathed and without a clue how you got there. But just because you survived the crash, it doesn't mean you're anywhere near out of the woods yet. With nothing but your power armor, rifle and wits to guide you, can you survive the depths of the swamps and forests of Everfree? And even if so, what about beyond?

[Second Person POV] [Sci-Fi]

Published 2012-05-25 18:54:01 UTC
Last updated 2012-06-22 21:42:25 UTC

Intercession Zero

Disclaimer: I don't own MLP, not will I ever, mostly because, well, damn, how could you ever live up to that awesome? I mean, really.

Man has always been Nature's ultimatum. For as Nature is Life, surely, then, is Man it's Antithesis:
Intercession Zero

This is a Bad Place. That's the first thought that flutters through your mind as you feel your eyes drift open. You don't know why, or how, but you just know it. Like a rock in your gut, it sits there, churning about, making you feel uneasy as you lift yourself from the thick, clay-laden mud.

You check yourself. Suit's still sealed. Limbs are intact. Helmet overview is in the green. You're fine. You don't even ache, really, and that's a good sign. Too good, because you know that you should be hurting. Your last memory was of you getting blown out the side of a falling cruiser that just broke atmo over some godforsaken backwater.

You fell out, and you remember the burning sensation of catching fire as you pierced the bottom layers of the upper troposphere, of the massive pressure of having been ejected via tactical micro-missile through a softpoint in the hull, the peppering of shrapnel as it hammered against your kinetic barriers and the distinct feeling of weightlessness as you became one with freefall.

All logic tells you you should be dead. Even at it's best, powered armor was never designed to keep you alive through that, but it did. You're pristine, and even your suit isn't sporting a single scuff or dent, much less a breach or crack in the ceramic plating. You know, things that would happen from impacting the ground at terminal velocity. But there you are, and you're not only alive, but intact. How? You don't know, and none of those thoughts are easing the sinking fear you're feeling in your gut. Something is Wrong Here and you don't know what, and it has you scared in a way that you haven't ever felt.

A glint catches your eye as you look around, wary of the shadows around you. You're in a swamp, a deep one, with puke yellow water and massive trees that blot out the sky, but it sticks out of the muck, clear as day, and you can't be happier. Whatever happened, wherever you are, you aren't alone. Reaching down, you lift it up, and grip it tightly in your hands. It's your Mod-W, your rifle, dirty and grimy, but still fully functional.

It's a godsend. Eight weapons in one, and fed off of a micro-fabrication plant in the gun's stock, it was made as hardy as your power suit, capable of firing frozen, caked in mud, in vacuum or under water, it was designed to outlast you with minimal maintenance. Good thing, too, considering your career over the last twenty two years. That gun had been with you since you graduated the CWA and got shipped off to your first assignment, and has been your most trusted friend ever since.

Good thing you found it, especially considering the fact that not seconds after you picked it up, you feel something hit you in the back hard enough to send you sliding back into the mud and leaving a two meter trail in your wake. Your first thoughts are jumbled, wondering what the hell just hit you, but a flashing red light on your HUD wakes you from that just barely fast enough to roll out of the way of another strike.

Five centimeters from your faceplate you see a massive spine jutting into the ground, attached to a segregated tail that was as thick as a tree trunk. The impact it makes in the ground leaves a crater twice the size of your head, and the stinger at the end is dripping a viscous poison that sizzles when it touches the ground. You don't have a chance to look at what's attached to that tail, though, because it's already risen high. Your eyes focus in on it, and in a panic you do the only thing you can think of.

The thrusters attached to the back of your pack ignites, and you feel it kick hard into your abdomen, enough to leave you breathless and gasping, but the result saves you from being shishkabobbed on the end of that suddenly much larger than you thought stinger. It kicks you across the ground, causing you to skid wildly like a skipping stone across a pond. Luck is still with you, as you miss the nearest tree, giving you precious meters between you and whatever it was that just tried to kill you. Whatever it was was apparently surprised by the sudden burst of life-saving flames, because you hear it roar in shock rather than immediately chase after you. Granted, the roar was enough to deafen you slightly, even through your helmet, but it gives you precious seconds to get to your feet and take your first real glance at what just tried to kill you.

Looking at it, you can't help but struggle to try to understand what you're seeing. It looked like a lion, one of those extinct predator cats from Terra, but it was... wrong. Standing three times higher than you are and outweighing you by a conservative two thousand or so kilos, it's a mass of muscle with a mouth full of seven centimeter long teeth with claws twice that, along with a meter long spike sitting at the end of it's tail and two massive bat wings sitting flush at it's sides.

It's staring at you with hungry eyes, and you know that it wants that chewy man-flesh inside your armored carapace. You'd seen that look before, in a dozen hostile alien species across a hundred worlds that were full of nothing but giant predators and... worse...

You lift your weapon. This isn't the time to be lost in thought, and already that mass of death has covered half the distance between you and it. It doesn't fear you, doesn't hesitate, doesn't stop. It just takes one massive step after another, claws digging into the soft ground below, looking like it wanted nothing more than to gut you with it's stinger and crack you open like a clam.

You won't give it the chance. Dropping to your knee, you open up with your rifle. Point three seconds pass between your first trigger pull and the first muzzle flash, and in those three seconds your weapon's fabricator takes a sliver of mass, converts it into magnetized tungsten, charges it with alpha waves and sends it flying down the magnetic coils of your rifle's barrel. It travels the point six meters of your weapon at roughly four times the speed of sound, leaving a gossamer white puff of discharging neutrons as it passes from the confines of your gun into the open air of the swamp and transverses the eight meter distance between you and the monster in less than a half second. It impacts the creature's left eye with the metric force of five hundred kilos per square micrometer, and the eye pops like a grape under a sledgehammer.

Point three seconds later that round is met with it's brother, repeated over the course of eight seconds.

You let go of the trigger as the creature thrashes and the micro-motors in your arms lose their targeting lock. The creature is still alive, kicking wildly while it's massive paws grip at it's face. You can hear it's roars of pain echoing through the swamplands as it's tail knocks over a tree thicker than you are. The reaction is stunning to watch, like a natural disaster in local format, but you're amazed at the simple fact that the creature is alive. Those rounds could cut through two inches of ceramic plate armor like it was rice paper, and you had scored at least a dozen direct shots to it's face, skull and upper body.

Yes, the bullets left blistering and bloody wounds, but the simple fact that it lived through that has you terrified. It was alive and well, and the simple fact that it was alive meant that as soon as it recovered, it was going to be pissed beyond all recognition. It isn't even a question that this thing needed to die. Just a question of how.

Flamer. It's the only word you need to say as you grip your weapon in hand and lift it to your back. A servo hand grabs the gun, holding it steady as a section of your backpack slides open, revealing well over a dozen separate components. A whir and a snap later and the upper part of your gun is removed and replaced with mechanical precision. You don't even need to let go of the handle as your pack switches out what you have for what you need. A moment later and your HUD is reading a charge percentile instead of a fabrication mass count, and you're ready to rock and roll.

Mankind has always had an intimate relationship with fire. It was our shield from the primitive dark, our forge for our iron, our light in the shadows. As time passed, we refined it, made it burn hotter, made it more flexible, more powerful, more caustic and effective. We mastered it, and in doing so created an ultimate weapon against the horrors of the cosmos.

Horrors like the thrashing beast before you, for example. As such, you have little issue with lining up your weapon to the downed creature and letting loose with a burst of ionized plasma, a sticky napalm derivative made from mixing fabrication mass and purified hydrogen taken straight from the air around you, coating it in what could be described as liquid flame. Hot enough to melt a titanium bulkhead, the plasma napalm does it's job, and the monster screams for only a moment before the fire melts through it's chest and destroys it's inner organs. In a flash, leaving nothing more than an overcooked carcass of blistered meat and bone.

That's when five more of the creatures step out of the shadows behind the dead one. All of them are slightly smaller, two about three fourths the size of the one you just downed, the others around half that size, and all look at you with a disturbing amount of sentient hatred in their eyes. Mates and juveniles, maybe? It doesn't matter. They're hostile and unfortunately for them, you want to live.

You grimace, and take a moment to look at your HUD overview. Seventy-eight percent charge left, and the flamer, as powerful as it was, was neither built for sustained combat or range. You let loose a soft curse.

You have to get away, to get some space between them and you, long enough for you to switch to something better suited and not get ripped apart in the process. A moment passes, and you toggle your thrusters, letting their roar drown out that of the creatures' as you jump high into the air. Your backwards cam is tracking the monsters as they follow you into the sky, already gaining, but for you that isn't an issue. You gun your thrusters a second time, but this time you angle down. A simple maneuver, useful for a shock and awe impact drop, or in your case, to gain some breathing room .

It works well, as your sudden departure leaves the creatures reeling, earning you enough time to switch out your flamer for something with a bit more... kick. As you palm your weapon, a semi-automatic armor piercing combat rifle, you can't help but take a second and let your HUD run a scan over the creatures. Technology being what it was, your suit comes with a full-on tactical analysis AI, one that was designed with the idea that as a soldier, you would be facing into the unknown, and as such, meeting new and dangerous things that find man flesh to be quite delectable. As such, the Powers that Be graced you with the software needed to tag, analyze and break down the things that wanted to kill and eat you so that you might live long enough to not die horribly. The upgrade had increased the average battlefield lifespan of a ground assault trooper by a whole eighteen seconds, from six to twenty four.

Normally.

Regardless, it takes barely a few seconds for your AI, (which you named Rupert) to designate these creatures as “Manticores”, an old-school mythological man-eater from somewhere called Persia, and start trying to find out the most effective way to kill them. Fire worked well, you noted.

The roar of your battle rifle meets one of the juveniles as it tries to dive bomb you. The heavier rounds hit hard enough for it to knock the creature off course, sending it into one of the trees instead, but you can't stop the other four from almost grinding you into paste as they come in moments behind the first. You roll to the side desperately, letting the power-hardened joint servos jettison you harder and faster than your mortal form would allow, barely avoiding the razor-sharp talons of the rest as they gouge the ground you were just standing on.

You barely recover fast enough to avoid a second and third swipe, and scramble for the trees. Sparse as they were, they're just enough cover to force the manticores to the ground, but at the same time loose enough to avoid boxing you in. Still, the pungent mud of the swamplands slows you more than you'd like, and your kinetic fields flare to life as a set of claws catches you across your back. You stumble, but manage to roll onto your back as you fall, facing the female that struck you down. It roars at you, and you respond by shoving the business end of your weapon into it's mouth before pulling the trigger, sending it's gray matter across the juvenile behind it in a fantastic spray of gore.

You have to roll hard to avoid a set of stingers from all three as they converge on you, escaping the worst of it but still taking one in the shoulder. Your shields hold, barely, but the impact is jarring and pins you in the mud. Your rifle reports again and again as you fire into the segregated tail, ripping it in two as you kick the manticore in the face with your reinforced boot. The hit knocks out some of it's teeth and stuns it long enough for you to empty a few rounds into it's chest, killing it and sending it to the muddy ground with an anticlimactic WHUMP.

The remaining female roars at you, and before you have a chance to right yourself it comes down on you hard, knocking your weapon away into the murkiness. You roll hard, your feet finding it's stomach and pushing with all the force you can muster, flipping it off of you as you use the momentum to right yourself. You look around, and find your weapon, but it's behind the recovering female, who at this point is foaming at the mouth and promising you a very painful death with the glare in it's eyes.

You clutch your right hand into a fist, and from it two blades fold out of your wrist, each three times the length of your hand, the knives opposite one another. The outward blade is razor sharp, made from a folded titanium plate and machine sharpened to a monomolecular edge, the inner blade serrated and notched for superior ripping power, and both begin to glow a molten orange as your suit redirects power into them, heating them to two thousand degrees in a matter of seconds.

You clutch your left and a solid rod extends out, cylindrical, but just as long as the blades on your right. Instead of glowing red, though, it starts to crackle with electrical energy, lightning wrapping around it as it dances across the hundred or so prongs that line the body of the taser as it hums up to fifty thousands volts of straight electrical energy.

Your leg drops back, and your arms come up into a traditional boxer's stance. Silence for just a moment, and then...

In an instant the manticore leaps forward, bringing it's massive tail down at you, venom dripping like acid from the tip. You take the hit, crossing your arms in front of you, but the impact sends you stumbling back. The creature moves in for a swipe as you recover, but you slide your leg back fast enough to not lose it in the crosscut, responding with a slash of your blades. The knife nicks the cheek of the creature as it jumps back, the wound instantly cauterized from the heat, and the manticore lets out a yelp. You try to attack it while it's distracted, but the monster is surprisingly nimble for being twice your size. Nimble enough to parry you, anyway, and counterattack with it's tail again.

You roll in, close to the monster, missing the stinger by millimeters, and instead spin around hard, your blade flashing in air, leaving ozone in it's wake.

The creature screams as it's tail splits in two, the stinger still pinned in the ground as the rest flies into the air, waving frantically as you slam the taser rod into the shoulder of the beast. The sound of a thousand bug zappers fills the air as the monster jerks around wildly, one of it's paws impacting you hard enough to send you skidding across the ground. Your suit locks up for a moment as you recover, so as not to accidentally murder you with your own weapon, before letting go as you fall back into control and roll to your feet.

The manticore is visibly limping, slowed and stunned by the sudden and brutal shock. It looks at you with palpable hatred as it tries to recover, but you notice that the fight has dropped you next to your rifle. With an audible SHINK the rod and blades deactivate and retract into your gauntlets, and you reach down and grab your weapon. The creature is trying to stay standing, but stumbles and falls down, it's nerves fried. You look on dispassionately as it limps up, and stares at you, even as you raise your weapon.

You can see resignation in those eyes. The gun jerks. The manticore falls, dead, like it's mates and it's cubs, And for a moment you feel a flicker of something, before crushing it ruthlessly under your heel. It tried to kill you. It died. You lived.

The end.

You let your weapon slip back over your shoulder, the switch engine sliding the mud-caked components off the rifle and flash cleaning them internally, before replacing it with it's assault rifle variant once more. It takes a moment, but in that moment you hear the rustle of leaves behind you.

You spin sharply, and point your weapon at a beaked and feathered face that stares at you in utter shock. It freezes, and you take a moment to examine the creature as it cringes slightly. You notice it's eyes are ringed with a kind of pinkish-purple paint, that it has feathers that hang over it's face dipped in a similar dye, styled, apparently, in that fashion. But what's more, you notice that it's wearing a flimsy looking plate chest piece with sheet metal shoulder guards and chain mail, of all things covering it's arms, which ended in bird like talons that apparently acted as fingers and had opposable thumbs, were clutched around a longsword and punch buckler. It's frozen in a kind of mute shock, it's mouth hanging open and it's eyes wide.

It inches it's sword up, but you put a stop to that by putting a burst of rounds into the tree next to it's head. The sword and shield couldn't have hit the ground faster if they tried.

Congratulations, you've just made first contact.

~end~

AN: Well, here we are again. Trying something new this time, as this is the first piece I've ever written in second person format, ever. Depending on the response I get, I might even opt to continue this piece, though I genuinely don't know. I can't tell how well or how poor this one is because, to be honest, I don't have the right frame of reference to work with. Hopefully it wasn't fail.

That said, this piece was intended to be a bit of a breather for me. I've been dancing around with the whole Human in Equestria genre for a few weeks and I'm really enjoying it, which is what spawned this particular abomination. Love it, hate it or generally feel blasé about it, I'd still like to hear back from you. Criticism is always welcome.

Also, this chapter was written without the help of an editor, so please forgive any issues you might find. I'll be looking to do post-release edits as best as I can.

Anyway, I've run out of things to say, so I'll end it here. Hope to see you in the next chapter. You know, if there is one.

~Finch

Intercession One

Disclaimer: If wishes were fishes then they wouldn't be ponies and I still wouldn't own MLP:FiM.

Humans have always believed themselves right. How else could they justify the horror of their existence:
Intercession One

You know this feeling. It's that kind of sickly, bedraggled feeling that you get when you wake up tired and sluggish and overheated, like being punched in the gut. You're gasping for air, air that tastes sickly sweet and humid even though it's been filtered through your armor. It tastes like decay, like old meat and vomit, and it sticks in your craw. You can almost chew it, that dense, sick flavor as your palms sweat, gripping your weapon tightly as you keep a bead on the alien creature before you.

The mud under your feet is constantly shifting, drawing you down into it, so you shift to balance yourself. Microstabilizers whine in your knees as you move, the hydraulics pulsing and pounding as they lift the ten thousand kilos you suddenly feel on your shoulders, even though nothing is there. Heart rate is elevated, pupils are dilated, biometrics are off the charts, but you don't know that. All you know is that you're scared and nervous and you aren't sure how to handle any of this. Blood is pounding in your ears, sloshing around with a deafening silence. You know it's all in your mind, but this place unsettles you. Not just the aliens or the hostile fauna, but it feels like there's something very... wrong with where you are, and you don't know what.

The creature before you shifts uneasily, like it can sense your fear. For all you know, maybe it can. It wouldn't be the first Sensitive species mankind had ever run into, or the most for that matter, but the fact remains. Right now you have a First Contact species in your cross hair, one that looks to be from a sentient, middle-age period society, complete with armor, swords, possibly bows or crossbows, if history serves, and no real knowledge or understanding of complex mechanical technologies. From it's response to your firearm, it doesn't need to know what a gun is to understand the fact that whatever you're pointing at it is going to hurt, probably because it either saw you in action or saw the results of what your weapons can do.

It's scared of you.

Looking at it now, you can understand why. It's thin, gaunt, like it's not eaten in days. You can see it's ribs sticking out from the sides of that shabby metal plate it's taken to wearing over it's breast. It's arms are thinner than what seems healthy, and as you look at it, you can tell that it's wings are rough-cut and harassed. Chunks of feathers are missing, and it's coat is sickly in coloring and shine. Your AI is running strings of biometrics on it, scanning it, breaking it down, but you don't need it to tell you that the creature is suffering from stage two malnutrition. Given the societal and physical nature of the creature, you can assume it's not of the upper class. Maybe a serf or a deserter. Something low ranked in the eyes of it's culture and easily forgotten if they, per say, walked into a swamp and vanished.

Poor, probably starving, it might have been out here hunting or foraging. Given the examples he'd seen of the local wildlife, though, it seems like it would be a stupid decision to be out here at all, but then... desperation leads people to do stupid things, take real risks, and get themselves killed in the process because of it. You know what that's like.

But that is neither here nor there. And you're faced with a decision.

Killing it and moving on is definitely in your list of options. The cold hard reality is that this creature, to which your AI has tagged as a “Gryphon”, has seen you, in action no less, and is now facing down your weapon. If you let it go, it could run off, alert the local villages, and/or lordship of your presence, start panics, rumors and witch hunts for you, causing you to, at best, flee. It could attack you outright when it had the chance, if it were desperate enough, or worse yet, bounty you out. Medieval societies weren't known to taking things like him in stride, after all, and over the two millennia that mankind has roamed the stars, it's had it's fair share of negative first contacts, many of which often devolved into needing to call down a pacification fleet to rectify the planet.

But you knew that it could be even worse than that for you. Your comms node wasn't picking up a subspace relay at all. As far as you knew, there wasn't any way for you to contact civilized space without one, and even if you re-purposed your scanners into a jury-rigged distress beacon, the chances of someone finding you were miniscule. Space was big and empty and a lot of it was still unexplored. If you found yourself trapped between an angry mob and the local wildlife, with no way off the planet and no way to get help, even with the technological advantage you would eventually go down. Barriers and powered armor and modular weapons were very effective, but you needed silicone for repairs to your suit, and hydrogen to power it, carbon to make munitions blocks, food to convert into ration bars and worse, you still needed sleep. Too many vulnerabilities, too many risks.

Killing the gryphon would solve most of those issues. Dead men tell no tales, after all, and without the pressure of having to deal with a hostile society you would have the time you needed to study them, to approach them from a stronger position, or to set up a distress beacon and maybe get into contact with the Coalition, and with it, evacuation.

You dismiss that option offhand.

Logically, it was the smart choice, the easiest option, but at the same time? You might have been a killer, but you weren't a murderer. If it attacked you, or threatened you, then yes, you would put it down, hard. But it wasn't. It was just a kid. A stupid, scared kid, probably late teens, who made a stupid decision and was desperate for nothing more than a full stomach and a chance for something better. You don't have any illusions about how you look to it. You're three meters tall, covered in thick, heavy armor and holding a massive weapon that, as far as it knows, spits fire and thunder, with burning claws and an electrified stinger wrapped in lightning, capable of felling groups of what you can only assume to be lethally dangerous predators with contemptible ease.

It's threat to you was visceral at best. Your threat to it was so much worse and it knew that. If you wanted to end it, you could and there was nothing it could do to even slow you down. It was helpless.

You knew that, and it put things into perspective for you. A lot of perspective.

You weren't a murderer. Not now.

Never again.

It watches you as you release the frame of your weapon, slowly, lowering it just enough to ease the creature a bit. Your guiding hand opens, balancing the barrel with your thumb as you hold the rest of your hand palm open to it. Simple gestures. Stop. Wait. While you lower your weapon even more, your gripping hand holding the handle as the gun goes vertical. Slow movements, slow gestures, you let the weapon work it's way down.

A sign of peace, and against all hopes, the gryphon seems to understand you.

With your weapon lowered, you slowly retract your guiding hand, moving it behind your back, where you open your rations processor and work out a food bar.

It watches you warily as you do, and you don't blame it. Years ago, you got the same generic First Contact and Diplomacy courses as every other serving soldier in the Coalition military. Simple training on how to build peaceful relations, how to read simple body language and the like. Nothing complex, because as a grunt you were supposed to bounce these things to your CO, who then bounced it up the chain of command. But that wasn't an option right now, and you figured you would have to burn that bridge when you got to it.

You were a Knight. If nothing else you knew how to improvise.

But that was neither now or then. Right now, you just needed to make peace. The rest would come in time.

You hold the bar out to it, and it looks at you with a strange glare. Hesitation, nervousness, concern and fear all pass through it's face. For something with a bird beak, it's surprisingly expressive. You motion your hand out again, with the ration bar held loosely between your fingers. It doesn't move.

“Food. Eat.” You say, your voice modulated through your helmet's speakers. It comes out mono-gendered, a simple trick that made it seem like you and your comrades were all one singular, faceless mass. Good for intimidation, but not so much for establishing peaceful relations. You almost curse as the gryphon steps back from you, hesitation clear in it's eyes.

It says something back, something almost musical to your ear. A flowing language, as it were. You don't understand a thing, but your suit's AI is already breaking down the whole of it and trying to translate it into understandable Common. While the words make no sense to you, it does help you discover something else. The gryphon is female. Higher pitch, with falsetto tones, something that can only be achieved through the use of estrogen as a primary growth hormone, or a significant amount of voice training. Given what you know about the gryphon, you doubt it's the latter.

You've reached an impasse. Communication isn't possible, and it has no idea what you're trying to imply using simple gestures. You have a problem that you can't fix conventionally, so you take the next best option, and improvise.

The gryphon jerks back a bit when you lower yourself to one knee, bringing it eye level with you, and almost flees when your helmet lets off a hiss as it's seal is broken. You aren't worried about the air, as your suit AI had long since deduced that aside from the high methane content in the air, it was safe to breathe, just not very pleasant. At all. You almost gag at the stink as the helmet of your power armor folds into the slot behind your head.

The creature looks at you oddly, and not for the first time, you see confusion on it's face. You ignore it's questioning glance though, and instead bring your gauntlet to your face, before taking a bite off the end of the ration bar and chewing, while making the universal 'Mmmm' sound, and nodding with a smile on your face. Honestly? Not the best acting in the world. Ration bars aren't exactly five star gourmet, and while they do have a bit of flavor to them, they still tasted like bland oatmeal. Regardless, though, the message gets across.

You hold out the bar once more, and the gryphon darts forth, grabbing it with a clawed hand before backing off some. You stand up once more, but leave the helmet off. Seeing your face might ease some of the tension you can see wrapped up in her body, and cause her to let go of some of her nervousness. A sign of trust, so to speak.

She sniffs at the bar and her head rears back a bit, giving you an odd look as she does. Either she didn't like the smell or didn't know what it was, but still she takes a small bite out of it. From the look on her face, it doesn't seem like she's very impressed with your ration bar, but still, it's a step in the right direction.

It's right at this point that a half-meter long bolt of wood and steel slams into your shield, roughly an inch and a half from your left eye.

000

Gilda was not having a good day. That much was obvious from the get go. She didn't have any realistic expectation of it being anything but, not since she'd woken up to find half a dozen swamp leeches sitting on her underbelly, or to find that maggots had made their way into her rations some time the night before, or that she'd been separated from her hunting party for the last three days.

Chased through the bucking Everfree swamp for the bulk of that time by a pride of manticores hadn't helped much either, but in all honesty they definitely weren't the worst things out in the wilds between the Gryphon Emirate and the Kingdom of Equestria, but they were in the top ten, what with their razor sharp claws and teeth, wings, and stingers full of acidic poison. Still at least they would only have killed her, instead of say... maiming her and dragging her off to a nest to be loaded up with eggs.

She shuddered a moment at the thought. Poor Swiftbeak.

In the months following her rather frustrating reunion with Rainbow Dash, she had come back to the Emirate and joined up with the Flight, one of the many military bands that served under the Master General, as a quasi-mercenary cum soldier that took on contracts too dangerous or costly for the official military to take upon themselves, and for the most part, it wasn't anything too difficult or complicated. At least not usually.

Not to say that the last few months were anything easy for her. Working as a recruit in the Flight had it's own list of headaches, aside from reduced mission pay to lower quality gear and housing, she found that the work itself was agreeing with her. Nothing let off excess rage like killing a cockatrice with a piece of sharp and pointy steel after all, and she wasn't ever wont for company (everyone liked a good war story after all, and mercenaries tended to have some of the best) but the training was brutal and the hierarchy ran like a traditional meritocracy, so she was still a ways away from seeing a promotion, especially after this little debacle.

The work also had it's own set of dangers to it. She'd earned herself a fair set of scars and injuries since starting out, most of them superficial but one or two meriting a bit of recovery time. Given how often she'd found herself wandering into Everfree with nothing but some split-plate and her sword at her back she was surprised she had come away as healthy as she had, but she wasn't one to scoff at good luck.

Good luck. If she had any luck at all, she wouldn't be lost in a Goddess-forsaken swamp in the flank-end of the world.

When she'd come to investigate the strange sounds coming from the east, it had been with some vague, strange hope that they were caused by her fellow hunters, or failing that, maybe an Equestrian hunting party or even one of the other associated races that tended to frequent Everfree. A part of her mind knew that the sounds she could hear weren't anything like she'd ever heard before, but desperation and danger made for foolish bedfellows at best, and what she wanted to find overrode her common sense, pushing her on despite her better judgment screaming at her about how flank-backwards stupid she was being.

It was right around the point where one of the larger manticores she'd ever seen slammed into a tree hard enough to make it's head pop like a balloon half a span from her that she realized that maybe, just maybe, she should have listened to that little voice that tried it's damnedest to keep her alive instead of rushing forwards like a berserk ogre with an arrow up it's... yeah. She didn't need that mental image.

Of all the things she'd ever thought to find, an ten span tall golem of some kind ripping through the rest of the pride. It moved like water, something that Gilda had never thought to see from something so big. Ogres, the closest comparison that she had to that... thing, were bulky, muscular but chunky all the same, and sluggish in a way that made them almost laughable to watch. Not this creature, though, not at all. It ducks and weaves, it's staff weapon roaring with peals of thunder.

Pieces of the manticores came apart. A stinger here, a paw there, the roars echo with the blood of the pride as it splatters across the ground. The manticores score hits, but against their claws and stingers a barrier of honeycombed blue light flashed into being that left no damage on the armor of the golem, the creature that Gilda is struggling to describe to herself. It's sent stumbling, and a matriarch slams it's staff away from it, sending it reeling, but that doesn't stop it. It crawls to it's feet, looking around. Gilda can only think that it's looking for it's staff weapon, but when she sees it, she knows that it won't be able to get at it with the matriarch practically sitting on it.

So it clutches it's hands, and out of one a set of glowing orange blades slide out, the air around them hissing and popping from the heat, while the other forms a rod of what she can only describe as lightning sliding from the other.

Part of Gilda's mind told her to move. Part of her mind was screaming at her that standing there, gawking at the two like a pony would a hungry predator was a bad idea, the worst idea, really, but she couldn't bring herself to move. Clutched in her talons were her sword and buckler, but they were empty weight, hanging listlessly as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. The golem was fast. Faster than she'd originally thought. It weaved around the manticore's swipes, danced around it's stringer, unimpeded by the fact that the manticore managed to score a few hits of it's own, ignoring them without a sound. A slash here, and the glowing blades danced, opening it's enemy's cheek, and the manticore roared in response.

It struck with a speed that left Gilda shuddering, it's tail missing the golem by hairs as it rolled in close, and in one smooth motion, severed the stinger with one hand while slamming the other into it's body. She swore she could see lighting dance in the manticore's open mouth as it roared pitifully before falling to the ground.

The golem rose, and without preamble, walked to it's weapon. The shots roared through her mind as the matriarch died, slumping down bonelessly as it did.

Gilda watched as the golem placed it's weapon near it's back, watched as it shifted form, as pieces came off and were consumed into it's back while others slid out, changing the weapon from something vaguely stafflike to one more curved, altering it using a magic she'd never seen before.

Taking a good look at it, it was unlike anything she'd ever heard of, much less seen. Covered in head to toe in a sleek plate of some kind, the golem looked more imposing than anything she'd ever seen. It's chest, back, upper and lower legs, arms and head had some kind of shifting paint scheme that mixed and blended in with the ground surrounding them, looking like it was made of square granules of color that mixed and meshed randomly around it's heavyset body. That which wasn't covered in the solid metal was segmented and layered like scaling, shifting when it moved. A collar surrounded the head of the golem, one which started at it's chin and coiled around behind it, actually resting at the height of the back of it's head and made of the same heavy metal that the armor was.

It's head was solely unique, a construct that was flat and ovoid in shape and build, colored the same as the rest of the armor but clearly able to shift around as it drifted to the side distractedly by the corpse of the matriarch. It's eyes were different, terrifying in a way, narrowed like a serpent's but coiling around the whole of it's head, a crimson line that actually glowed with a bead of light that sifted back and forth connected to four slightly larger eyes that sat at the front of it's head, glowing with the same crimson as the rest.(1)

On it's back lie a box, presumably the one that it used to change out it's weapon from before. A round tube rested at both the top and bottom, segmented like they were designed to come apart, and lining the sides of the box were two strips of round, cylindrical extensions, six on each side and one larger one resting in the center of the box. What they were fore Gilda didn't know, but she wasn't eager to find out.

She decided that now was a good time to move. The fighting done, the shock that had frozen her had thawed enough for her to move back, move away, get away, but that falls apart on the vine as she brushed against the branches behind her.

The golem spun on her, it's weapon in it's hands as it lined up it's weapon with her head. For a moment, Gilda felt her life flash before her eyes. She wasn't stupid, regardless of what her actions today spelled out. She knew that if the golem wanted to, it could probably cut her down with minimal effort.

Damn. Damn damn. The little voice in the back of her head was screaming obscenities at her. How did she let herself get into this situation? She wasn't thinking. She didn't think and now she was going to die. She thought, just for a moment, that she could try to fight, try to catch it off guard and escape.

When it's weapon roared she dropped her sword altogether, and her buckler with it. The tree next to her head had partially vaporized, leaving the scent of acrid smoke and pine in the air as slivers and sawdust from the tree settle around her. It was so loud, much more so now that she was facing down the barrel of the weapon. It consumed her line of sight, gaping before her like a chasm.

Minutes passed, but for her, they felt like hours. The creature was just standing there, and Gilda was getting even more nervous. It didn't move, didn't shift, didn't give any sign of being alive, but the weapon followed her whenever she did, like it was waiting for something.

And then it started to lower it's weapon.

Slowly, at first, it put it's palm out to her, like it was telling her to halt. She didn't understand it. What was it trying to accomplish here, acting the way it was? She didn't know. It confused the fluff out of her, true enough, but it was lowering it's weapon. Maybe it wasn't looking to hurt her? Maybe it was a hunter from some long lost species or something? Whatever it was, it wasn't wild, and didn't seem malicious regardless of how easily it could kill her.

She watched it warily, her mind racing a thousand thoughts a second. What was it? What did it want? Why was it here, in the Everfree Swamp of all places? Clearly it wasn't native to the five nations, and the Everfree was right in the middle of them. How did it get here?

What was it doing?

It held something out to her, a stick that it had pulled from... somewhere, offering it to her. It didn't look special, just a lumpy bar of off tan that didn't seem to do anything, but didn't look like anything she'd ever seen. She hesitated, unsure of just what she was supposed to do here.

Then it spoke, and Gilda couldn't help but step back. It's voice was... cold. Empty. She didn't understand the words, and she almost didn't want to. Mechanical was the word she was looking for. It had a mechanical voice, one that was more electrical than even the words of an Elemental. Devoid of inflection and hidden by an unmoving face, her mind ground to a halt, if only for a second.

“Wh-what? I don't... I don't understand you.” She said, her voice shaky, uneven. Clearly it wanted her to take the thing in it's hand, but she hesitated. Never in a million years would she ever admit it, but this thing, this golem, scared her in a very fundamental way. Something about it was off, something important, like it was missing some vital spark that she and everyone else she'd ever met had. It was off putting.

Then it did something wholly unexpected.

First, there was a soft hiss and then, before she could comment, the top part of it's head slid away, popping up and eventually into it's high back collar. What she saw within shocked her, not because of how strange it was, no, but because, or perhaps in spite of, what she had thought, the idea that something alive was actually in that cold metal shell was infinitely strange to her.

What she saw she would later describe as the face of an ogre with two eyes and no horns. It was pink like an ogre, but it had a mane like a pony of all things on the top of it's head, cut very short but definitely there. It had a refined nose, cheeks, and full lips, but no long fangs or tusks, unlike the trolls that made up the southern wildlands or the orcs from across the Equestrian sea. It was a mish mash, a mix of a half dozen different facial features from several different species, but with one significant difference. It's eyes were mismatched, but not in the way that one has two different eye colors, no. It had two different eyes.

Whereas the left was normal, at least as far as a normal eye that small could be, the right was... she couldn't describe it. It was like glass, pure red and glowing but... not. She could swear that she could see something flitting across it, but her eyes weren't sharp enough to catch what.

It put the bar up to it's mouth and took a bite, before offering it to her again. The noise it made, well, even she couldn't mistake what it meant. So that's what it was up to.

Peace offering with food.

It wasn't bad, once Gilda tried it. Not the best thing she'd ever eaten, but she could taste oats in it, and if nothing else, it was filling to her somewhat starved belly. A good sign, if she ever thought there could be one. This changed everything for her. Discovered a new species? With amazing magics and armor, to boot? And it seemed amicable enough? Gilda wasn't a politician, nor was she particularly devious, but at the same time? If she played her cards right this could work out brilliantly for her.

That's when the crossbow bolt hit, flaring up that blue wall around it's head once more, the spike itself deformed as if it had hit a stone pillar. Gilda was stunned. The bold fell to the ground like a rock, and with it a stone fell into her stomach.

It's eyes narrowed imperceptibly, becoming slits, before it's helmet snapped back into place much quicker than she remembered it coming off, and it raised it's weapon to the circling gryphon hunting party above them, apparently attracted to where she was by the pillar of black smoke emanating off of the manticore corpse in the middle of the grove.

Her thoughts were torn to shreds as the creature's weapon roared to life, drowning out everything save for the sound of it's staff, the only thing left in her mind was the repeating phrase, 'Oh Shit.'

000

You spit out a sharp curse as your helmet slides back over your head, sealing itself as you lift your rifle and open up with a wild burst of rounds. Your helmet is flashing a dozen hostiles in the air, with the one you were talking to marked as a tentative number thirteen. You shouldn't have taken your helmet off, shouldn't have tried to talk, or tried to open diplomatic fucking communications in the middle of a swamp without taking into account the idea that the one gryphon wasn't alone. You had made an assumption based on preconceived ideas and observations, and had it not been for your kinetic barrier you would have had to replace your other eye with a prosthetic, assuming it didn't just kill you.

Several crossbow bolts fly at you as you gun your thrusters forward, quickboosting away from their firing lanes and into the tree cover. Shots follow you, but you're too fast, and you can hear what you think to be cursing, orders, or a combination of the two as you slide to a stop, your helmet's audio filters canceling out the burn of the thrusters and boosting the words that your translation matrix has ID'd as their language. Targeting markers zero in on the sound using your sonar detection matrix, and your HUD lights up with a wireframe overlay that tags the one who's speaking.

You aim your weapon at it, and open fire at the wireframe through the tree cover. The bullets shred through the foliage like it isn't there, and the gryphon's armor doesn't do a much better job as the top part of it's body pops apart from the hydrodynamic force(2) of the rounds slamming into it, coating the nearest two in a gout of gore that you're glad you can't see through the tree cover. It takes only moments for the others to pierce the trees with a shrill cry, and you open up with your weapon.

Another gryphon comes apart at the seams, what's left of it's upper body kicks back into a tree as another closes in with a hand and a half sword, the bladed weapon impacting your kinetic shields hard enough to stagger you slightly. Several more are right on his tail, dive-bombing you with swords and spears. You fire your thrusters hard, sending you straight up into the air like a missile, narrowly missing the lot of them as they're blinded by your heat corona. One of the creatures was unfortunate enough to get caught in the thruster wake, and it's face ceases to be as you pass it by, boiling it in it's own skin.

A moment passes, and you're sitting thirty meters in the air. You reverse your thrusters, and fire down like a meteor. The impact is reminiscent of the manticores you killed earlier, the impact of you boosting into the ground enough to sent a gout of mud and dirt across the five gryphons, now four as one crunches under your boots. You don't even need to look to know it's dead.

The rest fly away from you, not retreating but regrouping. Clearly they weren't expecting this level of hostility, but a quick glance tells you that they weren't running, at least not yet. You watch as they fly up, above the canopy, and let loose with crossbow bolts at your current position, straight through the trees. Suppression fire, probably while some of their friends flank. You don't give them the chance.

“Shotgun.” The word is icy as it exits your mouth, you feel the familiar tug of your suit's mod scaffolding grab the weapon in your hands and swap out the fabricator and barrel apparatus for the bulkier feel of the compact cassette shotgun.

Nasty weapon, that. Semiautomatic, with several different shell settings. Buckshot, slugs, grenades, and in this case, flak as well. It's the last one you want. Flak rounds came about nearly a millennia ago, as a necessary upgrade against low orbit anti-armor drones. A block of fabrication mass mixed with an internal fuse detonator measured out via AI, designed to cause the shell to go off at a certain height, next to single or groups of slow moving aerial targets, sending out two millimeter long spine fletchetts in a conical dispersal. Catch 22 was that it ate up fabrication mass, but you could find it in your heart to live with that.

You fire three flak rounds right at the group of suppressing archers, and the sky rains gore when they go off. Flak rounds were designed to take out armored combat drones, so needless to say the gryphons wearing leather and scale mail don't so much as fall out of the sky as they do disintegrate.

You cycle the weapon into buckshot, and turn to the flankers that had tried to sneak up on you. To their credit, they didn't turn or try to retreat when you face them, only push on faster, closing the distance with you while you draw a bead on the closest. A sword comes down in front of you, striking your weapon hard enough to send the shot wild and leaving a dent in the casing of the weapon, exposing it's internals.

You look, and it's the gryphon from earlier. She's turning to try and slash at you, but you kick her clean in the breastplate for her efforts, collapsing it like tinfoil and sending her flying back. The others have closed, and now your weapon is malfunctioning. You don't dare fire it, as a misfire would probably detonate it like a bomb, and you like your arm where it is. Instead you drop it, raising your arms instead and letting the gryphon with the hand and a half slam his blade into your armored foreplates. Your barrier kicks up, and the cut stops cold as the other two lash at you, one with a broad axe and the other with a spear to your back. Your barriers flair, and your blades slide out of your arm.

You boost back, away from the three, but they follow doggedly. Sword goes after you with a vengeance, but that's ended with a swift slash of your wrist blade, the metal of the sword parting like rice paper against the superheated edge, cutting it in two and forcing him back, but Axe has slipped around you, catching you in the back before retreating, followed by Spear as he comes down with a lunging attack from above, barely missing you by a centimeter.

A mistake on his part. Your hand lashes out, grabbing him by the forehead and lifting him high. Your fingers grip hard enough to cause the gryphon to screech as it drops it's weapon and scratches futilely at your wrist. In a smooth motion, you hoist it up, clean off of it's feet and then slam it down, as hard and as fast as you can, into the ground. You feel the slightest pressure as the bone resists the five hundred newtons of pressure coming down on it's head from the servo-assisted compress you call a hand before coming apart like a ripe melon.

Axe takes a step back, in tandem with Sword. You glance at them, and then back at your wrist blade.

The two looked to be ready to flee. You couldn't allow that, not now. They changed the situation, ruined a perfectly amicable meeting, and changed the equation because of it. You narrow your eyes. They can't be allowed to run, to tell the tale of what happened here. It would be better if they just... disappeared...

You shoot forward with enough force and power that your heat corona flash bakes the mud behind you into clay, your arm drawn back, tucked tight against your side as your thrusters cover the short distance between you and they in two point eight one seconds. In that span, the two gryphons have enough time to widen their eyes and gasp before you're upon them, blade forward in a brutal punch as your AI readjusts the output of your boosters, tweaking them enough bleed off excess speed as you slam the blade clean through Axe, gutting him like a pig while your thrusters set fire to Sword, the flames igniting him and sending him flying while you thunder into the air, your AI calculating where Sword was going to land, and coming down on him like the angry hand of a spurned god. There isn't enough of him to wipe off of the ground when you stand.

But you aren't done. There's still one more hostile to deal with.

The girl gryphon.

It doesn't take long for you to find her, curled up against a tree, gasping for air as the crushed breastplate of her armor presses into her chest, gagging her. Her sword is gone, nowhere in sight, and she's helpless, unarmed and probably nursing some bruised ribs. No longer a threat, not with her friends dealt with.

She shuffles back as you step closer, and her eyes go wide when she sees the glowing wrist blade at your side. You stare on impassively as she tries to move, but her arm, the right, seems to be injured. She's holding it to her chest delicately. Bruise or break, probably from when she fell on it after you kicked her.

You find yourself torn. You saw the look on her face when that bolt hit you. She was surprised. Wasn't expecting you to be attacked, much less by more of her own species. That was an honest response. As for the rest? You don't know. She fought to defend her people from you, and only attacked your weapon, not you personally. Granted, she probably would have, but still. She was a wounded enemy at worst, and even then, she was.. young, scared and hurting.

Killing her now left a bad taste in your mouth, but you couldn't let her go. Not after this.

Rock and a hard place. Regardless, it would be best to leave this area, at least for a while. The burning manticore carcass was bound to attract predators, not to mention the liberal bloodshed around the area. But moving with the gryphon would be complicated, especially with her both hurt and stuck in that broken armor. But you also couldn't risk her flying off. So, path of least resistance seemed like a good idea, at least for the time being.

She looks so relieved that your wrist blade's retracted that she almost misses the fact that your taser slid out, and by the time she does, you've already pressed it to her, and she knew no more.

~end~

1: I was inspired by this for the armor. Hopefully I didn't butcher the description too badly.
2: I'm fairly certain that's the term. It's basically referencing what happens to something full of water that gets struck by a powerful force, like a watermelon getting hit with a .50 Cal round, which then causes it to explode. Human beings are full of water and the like, so the effect is similar. I just extrapolated that most everything else works like that too.

Authorbabble: Okay folks, finally got this done, despite some... er... setbacks, I managed to get this out. Hot damn.

Anyway, this chapter really did give me a lot of issues, because, and I'm going to be honest here, I had no idea how to play up a first contact like this. This chapter went through so many iterations and reiterations and cuts and inputs that honestly, it's changed almost all the way through and back before I reaches something I would put my name on. That said, I'm still not happy with this chapter, but if I work on it any more I'm going to have my head pounding into a wall for the next month.

This is far from my best work, and definitely not up to the quality of chapter one, despite it's size, but I couldn't get the thoughts together any better, not with the direction that I want to go with the plot as a whole. That said, I am going to see about getting this show on the road just a touch faster for chapter three, and maybe iron out the flow a bit more.

Mechanically, I was torn for a while about jumping between character POVs like I did, but there's just so much exposition that I'm going to lose out on if I don't, so hopefully it wasn't too mind-shatteringly bad and once I get the party together it should even out with the transitioning. That said, I do plan to put in more dialogue, more polish and a bit more cleanup into this chapter post publishing. Any grammatical errors or spelling issues you find will hopefully be corrected with due time, but as you might tell, I really do need an editor. *sigh*

Anyway, enough of this self-pitying drivel.

I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and hopefully it'll be less than three weeks before the next one comes out. Until then, stay frosty folks!