Fallout Equestria: Steelhearts
Written By: CyberDutchman
Edited By: JC

Chapter 5: Past and Blood

"That's how they getcha... they're under the god damned ground."

"NONONONO, NOT LIKE THIS, NOT LIKE THIS! SARGE, HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEE-" the panicked scream cut off suddenly as the bleeding Initiate was slammed into the open mouth of the monster by no less than three of the writhing tentacles. I watched in horror as his body disappeared into the mass of greenish pink flesh before the toothed petals of the mouth closed shut over him. The body of the worm pulsed sickeningly as he was swallowed down.

"AHHHHHH SHIT! CINDERBLOCK!" Birch bellowed from inside his armor as he sprang up from where he'd landed.

We'd had no time to run or hide after the thing burst from the ground. The doomed Ranger had been the closest to it and had been set upon immediately by a swarm of clawed maws. The fanged ends of the tentacles had pierced his legs and shoulder and lifted him high as we watched in stunned silence.

"Rangers, fan out by squads and fall back! Target the vines and keep each other covered! Civilians, get behind the squads and get down! MOVE IT!" Paladin Night called out, cutting through the screeching and yells. A change washed over her troops and they began clustering into groups of three or four, all the while firing their small arms at the mass of twisting death and decay. Where their rounds missed and instead impacted the body of the creature they either bounced off its hide or pierced the sores and spat yellow bile and puss. The smell coming off the thing intensified tenfold and I heaved up bile. The beast screeched in response and the tentacles flared out madly in all directions. I jumped to my hooves, or at least tried to, the dead weight strapped across my back making anything close to a jump a non-starter, and began running as fast as I could towards the forming ring of protection. A jerk on my saddlepack pulled me up short and I looked back in terror at the black trapjaw dug firmly into the back of the rivet gun. It began yanking me backwards while I clawed at the ground, screaming futilely for it to let me go. My hindlegs started to slowly lift off the ground and I hoped I was going to be too heavy for it to lift with the rivet gun. That hope was dashed as my forelegs began to lose purchase as well. There would be no reprieve, only a slower trip to my death than Cinberblock had gotten.

"Not on my watch you cur!" a familiar voice called. I looked up just in time to see Manesworth fly overhead. He began hacking at the fanged jaw with his saw blade, the armored tentacle flicking away from the blows in agitation until his blade scraped past the armored head and bit deep into the stalk behind it. With a horrible wet wrench the saw jammed almost halfway through it and stalled. The tentacle released it's vice grip on my pack at the same time that it gave a spastic heave.

"Oh bugger-" Manesworth shouted as he was flicked off the end, sailing through the air in a graceful spiral. I began running as fast as I could behind him, tracking his arc as he plummeted. A few moments later he slammed into the ground and bounced once before getting his repulsor under him and arresting his slide. He lifted up two of his eyes, the left one hanging limply next to a large dent in his plating. Below it his flamer was bent at an angle from his arm. I breathed a short sigh or relief when it failed to leak or explode.

"Oh blast it all," he muttered as he lifted up his saw arm. The arm itself was fine but the cutting blade had been warped beyond use and was almost bent over entirely. "Master Gear, I suggest we depart as soon as possible. That foul thing has quite the right hook. Or would it be a left? Cursed tentacles, they're mangling my metaphors!" He waved his dented saw at the monstrous thing. I felt the sudden urge to give him another, much deeper dent in his chassis when another fanged tentacle came hurtling towards us with a screaming hiss for his trouble. Just before it reached us a swarm of bullets turned the whole thing into a wet rain that splat across both of us. I blinked once, then gagged at the smell that consumed my world. I hadn't thought there was anything left in my stomach after I puked in the Stable. I was very, very wrong.

After a brief retching, sneezing, and general moaning session I looked around, trying to ignore the feeling of something wet and slimy dribbling down my coat. The entire worm had bent over towards the group the last second fire had come from. A set of three snaking jaws shot towards Night in its center only to be cut down by a fusillade of fire from the rest of her squad as they slowly regrouped around her. They writhed back and up into the thing's gaping, screaming maw, dripping yellow gore over its meaty throat. Before my hope could even begin to recover the end of each spasming tendril erupted in a bulbous protrusion. They each split open to reveal new fanged jaws where the destroyed ones had been. The damned things looked even more armored than before!

"Paladin! There's too much radiation around! We're not going to stop it with small arms! We need to retreat!" Lily called out as her minigun shredded a tendril swiping wildly towards her. It writhed even more madly, spraying more yellow bile mixed with dark crimson blood across the broken ground, then retracted back into the maw with a whip-like crack. Night paused in her firing to look around then snarled and quickly returned to hosing down every inch of exposed flesh she.

"Unless we damage it enough to wear it out it'll just trail us anywhere we go. Keep firing, try to focus targets by squads. Cut deep and bleed it out!"

Her command might as well have been to throw rocks at it. All of the wounds on its body were superficial at best and the reaching jaws continued to grow back ever more armored. They smashed into the ground all around the squads, trying to break them up into smaller groups. Initiates shouted in pain as flecks of debris shot into their skin and eyes with each blow to the ground. A few unlucky souls cried out as swinging jaws crashed into them before being driven back, breaking legs and ribs. It was a war of attrition and the increasingly heavy tentacles were starting to gain ground.

I took another step back and nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt something stop me. I spun around to find the corroded hulk of a large farm cart lying partially covered in the dirt. I started to look back when a glint caught my eye. Next to the wreck was an equally ruined toolbox but inside that was a plastic case containing a pack of pristine nails. A nail was basically a small rivet when you got down to it right?

I jammed my foot down on the plastic hard enough to crack the case open. There were at least twenty or more of the ersatz projectiles inside and I felt the first bit of unrestrained joy since that morning. If this worked I I was going to start praying to the Goddess of Fasteners and Nails for the rest of my life.

"Manes, I need a claw!"

The robot helper swung an eye towards me, causing the various pieces of black and yellow meat hanging from it to swing wildly and throw a few more flecks of foul liquid my way. I held back another heave behind a hoof then gestured at the nails in the toolcase and my rivet gun's hopper.

Manesworth saluted with his undamaged claw. "Right away sir!" He grabbed clawfulls of nails and dropped them in one after the other. The hopper was full a little before he was halfway through the box. At least I'd have another shot after this. Probably. Hopefully.

"Manesworth, get behind me and make sure I don't go flying. I don't know what this is going to do but I've got to try."

He didn't say anything in return, only floated behind me and used his claw arm to steady the gun from the back. I aimed up at the bent over head of the giant mutated worm and waited for the targeting feature of my Pip-Buck to- nothing happened. I blinked, hoping that would somehow bring up the targeting spell-thing that had taken over before, but still nothing happened.

I glared down at my Pip-Buck in disgust. The one time I ask for it, actually ask it, to shoot something for me and it takes a break. Typical. I grunted and aimed up at the open maw as best I could, leaning my head over the barrel as far as I could to aim. I could do this. I'd already killed one monster, I could kill this one. I could beat every monster that came at me. I could beat this nightmare of a wasteland. I pulled back and clenching all of my muscles and saying a prayer to Luna and Celestia bit down on the trigger pad.

It took all of maybe a millisecond to realize something wasn't right. I jerked forward instead of back while a cloud of metal shards rocketed out of the modified tool. The dark fog blazed over the creature and instantly became darker still as chunks of flesh and black armor blew off it. It screamed loud enough to make many of the ponies surrounding it fall to their knees, clasping hooves over ears and yelling incoherently against the overpowering sound. I barely noticed though because of the massive ringing and shaking coming from the gun immediately after it fired. Smoke poured out of the open hopper along with sparks and motes of magical energy. I coughed and waved away the fumes, trying to see what had happened to my cobbled together weapon. Tears stung at my eyes as the smoke dissipated and a terrible sight made it through. The front of the gun was a near wreck with shattered nail pieces embedded around the opening of the breach. I cursed silently to myself. I should have thought of this. The tool had never been made to fire more than one round at a time. If I'd thought for a second instead of trying to shove as much mass into as I could like an idiot this wouldn't have happened. Even one at a time would have been good if what it had done with a heavier rivet was anything to go by. Now it probably wouldn't fire again... and the damn worm was still alive. Even if it was wounded far worse than it had been those wounds were starting to close up every moment with new, hardened skin. The jawed tendrils began searching madly, swinging this way and that. The bottom dropped out of my stomach as they all slowly came to a stop pointed at me and the body of the beast flipped back over to point those terrible fanged flaps towards me. Then it reared back and roared, the sound compounded by each of the smaller jaws as they opened wide and screeched and hissed before lunging for me.

I could see my reflection in the night black carapaces of the jaws as they came closer and closer with each passing moment. I didn't move out of the way. I couldn't have. I was too stunned by the giant monster's focus on me and my failure to stop it. I could feel Manesworth beginning to pull me back but I was too heavy for his limited power to pull out of the way fast enough. Four sets of jaws all snapped open at the same time just feet from me.

A blur out of the corner of my eye slammed into me, knocking me out of the way and breaking my terrified paralysis. I hit the ground hard a yard or two away and stopped hard with my pack digging small trenches into the broken asphalt. I looked back and gasped. Standing exactly where I'd been just moments before was a towering steel pony, two tentacled jaws locked onto his minigun while the other two latched onto his back and shoulder. He gave a short cough as they crunched down as hard as they could, the ones on his gun not having much affect. The two on his body broke through the armor with their sharpened teeth and he grunted out a curse as streams of blood began flowing out of the holes.

"Birch!"

"Heh, well this isn't quite how I pictured the day goin'. Appreciate the help Gear, truly, but maybe next time tell us if you're gonna do something like that-" he said before the four tendrils yanked him back towards the worm, trying to lift him but failing to carry the weight of the huge stallion and his armor. I turned to tell Manesworth to help him when a hail of bullets tore at the stalks of the jaws, severing them from the worm. They shot back into the body as it stood straight up again, quivering; whether in pain, frustration, or rage I couldn't tell.

"Crusader! Your status?" Night said as she ran up to him. Lily followed close behind, continuing to power fire across the monster. Their squads slowly caught up, shepherding the rest of the survivors back and away from the thing and its reach.

"I'll be fine. Though I wouldn't mind if you could get these things out of my side, okay?" he said with a wet and raspy chuckle. Night nodded then motioned a couple of initiates forward carrying medical bags. She turned and looked over my rivet... nail... sharp-pointy-metal gun then faced me directly.

"Can you fire it again?"

"I- I don't- I don't know, it's-" I stammered, my mind blurry and unfocused. I was still running on adrenaline, an extra large dose of panic, and I might have even detected the slight note of med-x still floating around in me.

"Can. You. Fire. It? Nothing else we have hurt it much as you did, even when you fired it in possibly the worst way you could have. If it works we need to use it again. The right way this time. So, will it work?" she said slowly and calmly. How she managed that under the circumstances I had no idea.

"Maybe, I don't know! I just mashed a bunch of stuff together and hoped it wouldn't crush me, or shock me, or explode! I have no idea what it's-" I stammered more loudly until a metal hoof lightly bounced off my head. I winced and bent down, covering my pained head with both hooves. I looked at her through a narrowed, teary eye as she bent down and took a knee in front of me.

"Gear Heart, now is not the time to be like every other pony and panic. You've shown me you can do that, now find wherever that part of you is and bring it to the front. We need something that can hurt that thing and right now you're it unless you can get that weapon off for us to use."

I didn't want to. That thing was every nightmare I'd ever had in the flesh. I'd thought I could beat it but I couldn't. I'd tried and it had almost killed me instead. No, it had almost torn me apart and eaten me. It was an infinitely worse thought and I had to swallow hard to not gag again.

"Gear, we need that weapon. The Rangers and your companions both."

Companions. They were all huddled together behind Lily and her squad of Rangers. Most of them were staring at the worm with wide, unblinking eyes. A few were sprawled on the ground with their hooves over their head, muttering to themselves. I knew they were praying it was all just a dream. I'd been muttering that same thing in the back of my mind since I'd laid bleeding out on the floor of the Overframe's chamber. I'd been shouting it when I dropped into the Gallery. I'd been screaming it when the worm broke the ground under us.

Sun was huddled next to Titan but most of her was missing. No jokes about my awkwardness, no offering anyone sunflower seeds, no warmth, no glow. Her eyes were unfocused and she was close to hyperventilating. I know that for one or two in your group it would have been a mercy to leave them down there... the Wastes... they'll change you. I wasn't going to let that be Sun. I was not going to let that be Sun!

"I'll fire it."

Night popped open her helmet and cracked a tiny smile. "Good, you found the other Gear. Whatever you did last time, it acted more like a shotgun. You're going to need to get in close this time. We'll give you cover, keep its attention off you. How long do you need?"

"A few seconds," I replied then turned to Manesworth. "Manes, fill it up again."

"Sir, you really think that wise after-"

"For everyone else, yes. Load up."

He saluted and said, "Very well then!" He floated over, picking up the half filled case on the way, then began dumping the remaining nails into the gun, using his claw to align them as best he could and remove the slivers of the last shot still embedded in the breach. Night backed away uneasily as he worked then spun about and began calling out orders.

"Rangers, we're covering the civilian. We're going to try another shot of his weapon at close range. Focus fire on anything that gets near him and keep the bastard occupied!" she finished right as the worm suddenly bulged at the throat and erupted in a set of new, nearly club like jaws. "Go Gear! Now!"

I ran. I ran as hard as I'd ever run in my life. I didn't look up, didn't slow down, didn't worry that it was almost certainly aware of me. I didn't stop for the shadows looming over me as I approached. Didn't stop as the air rent in a giant ripping sound of a thousand bullets flying over head. I shoved down the small hiccup of tension as Lily and Night brought their miniguns to bear as well. I knew Night was right, that either this was going to work or we were all going to die. The thing was getting slower at healing, but it was getting to the point where the new flesh and armor it made was too strong to break through. Broken tendrils and bits weren't falling from it like they had before. This was it.

I didn't bother slowing down the last few feet and simply slid to a stop, gun barrel almost touching the putrid black skin. I spared an instant as I pulled back to fire to look up. The majority of the heavily armored mini worms were snapping and diving towards the Rangers. But two were coming from me. It was way more encouragement than I needed to bite down on the trigger again.

The barrel burst apart next to me, peppering my face and chest with shards of hot metal. Miraculously my eye was spared but I still cried out as a thousand sharp shards turned me into a pin cushion. It was nothing compared to what happened to the worm. I'd gotten the blowback from the barrel. It got the concentrated burst of screaming nails and death. It entered the beast's body in a hole smaller than my hoof. It exited the other side in a cloud of meat easily the size of Birch. The worm screamed, the tendrils thrashing madly without any direction. The worm heaved it's body and tried to squeeze back down into the hole it had made in the ground. A wet tide of blood, bile, and flesh poured out of the hole like toothpaste from a tube. The worm shuddered and the scream became a wet gurgle. Slowly, inexorably, it began to sway then fell over backwards, splashing its life's blood in a wide arc across the pale ground. There was complete silence for nearly a minute then-

"Hot damn, he did it! It's dead!"

Instantly ever Ranger was cheering and shouting. I was soon surrounded by a crowd of excited and relieved faces, all congratulating me and trying to shake my hoof or pat me on the shoulder. I was seconds away from a nervous breakdown in the crush of ponies.

"Rangers, return to formation. Gear Heart, well done," Paladin Night said as she stepped through a rapidly expanding corridor in the press of bodies. "Medics, see to the wounded and injured. Salvage teams, you know the drill. Everyone else, take a rest. You've all earned it."

An exhausted cheer went up from the rangers around her, most of them starting to crash from their sudden adrenaline high. I was on shaky legs myself and my mind was nothing but haze and confusion. I noticed some of the rangers pulling out long blades from their packs and beginning to hack at the jaws sprawled out around the mouth. Others were pulling plates off the worm's body.

"We make use of whatever we can, and those plates should do well at stopping small arms fire," Night explained. "You did well Gear. Take pride in what you accomplished. If it hadn't been stopped we would have had try to run to the Burbs and it would have been a bloodbath."

I smiled uncertainly at her. I knew I could probably use a bath right then but I didn't think blood was going to get more blood out of my coat. Unless that's how worm blood works?

"Gear? Are you- medic!"

Huh? I wasn't a medic, I was a robot technician. Though I guess that was a kind of medic. What we really needed was a technician to fix the lights in the Stable. Everything was getting really dim-

I awoke to a facefull of asphalt no more than a foot or so away. Funny thing was it was moving, but I wasn't walking. I blinked and shook my head to try to clear some of the fuzziness. I succeeded only in giving myself a short lived headache. That having been tried I then tried looking around. Ahead of me was a shiny steel flank. Not what I had been expecting and not what I had been hoping for either. Steel flanks weren't something you got in Stable 63. That meant... damn.

"Birch, he's awake."

I looked behind me to find a helmeted head watching me. "Lily?" She nodded once. I noticed my own flank was very close to her face and instantly I was more awake and on guard. I tried to turn to face her only to realize I couldn't move. Or rather I could, but it did nothing. My hooves weren't touching the ground. Startled, I quickly looked around. I was hanging between the two Crusaders from two long rods that I recognized as parts from the wrecked cart I'd found the nails in. They were tucked up under my ruined saddleweapon and letting me hang below it. I was suddenly reminded of a scene from the last Daring Do book we'd been read back in the Nursery where Daring Do was carried to a cannibal village in a similar fashion. It was not the kind of mental connection I needed at that moment.

"Welcome back there Gear. Betcha you're feeling pretty well rested now aye?"

When I turned back Birch was looking over his shoulder at me, helmet split open to reveal a huge toothy grin on the beige stallion's face. "You've been out for a solid four or five hours now."

"I feel like crap," I muttered, blinking hard against the faint breeze and the dust it carried. "Wait a second," I said as I pinched my brow together. He sounded way too "alive". I strained my neck to look at his side and back. The holes I'd expected to see weren't there and he looked perfectly fine. "How are you okay? You had two of those things dug into you and we didn't have any healing potions left."

"We didn't but my power armor did. Injectors hit me with a nice big shot as soon as they pulled the teeth out. Feels a whole lot worse than drinking one but works faster so there's that. I'll have to wait till we get back to the Castle to get those refilled. Had to add some junk metal to the armor's stock before it would fix the holes in itself too. Was running closer to empty than I thought after we took on those Sparkers in your Stable."

Damn, so they still didn't have anything they could give to Spell, not if they couldn't access the suit injectors on the go. Since I couldn't do anything about that I asked about my next most pressing concern. "Okay, and why are you carrying me like this?"

"Well, you were out cold and nothing we were doing was waking you up so Night figured it would be best for us to let you rest and press on. Only problem was no one could carry you with that collection of scrap hooked up to you." I hadn't noticed till he mentioned it but my rivet gun was, in fact, scrap. The barrel was gone, the casing was cracked, and most of the internals were now externals. An unexpected sadness took hold of me. It hadn't been a robot family member or anything, but that tool had saved my life and possibly the lives of everyone else who'd made it out of the Stable. Losing it was like losing a long time ally in everything I'd been through. "So, we grabbed some other scrap to hold you up and then Lily and I walked you out of there after the medics and scrappers finished up their work," Birch ended.

"Scrappers?" I asked as I look around. I realized what he meant immediately when I saw at least half a dozen Rangers carrying large pieces of Plunderwurm armor and teeth on their backs and in packs.

"Out here we don't have a lot to work with. Not a lot of bunkers or ruins or anything to tear down and use. So we've had to get creative. Even if it means tearing apart monsters. Every worm mutates differently and we were kind of lucky this one was a heavy bastard. We can shore up some of the Castle's defenses with that stuff," he explained with a nod towards an initiate carrying a large set of plates on either side of his body. They were so large her legs barely poked out from under them. Then I heard a familiar voice voice ring out over the muted conversation around me.

"Gear, you idiot! What the hell were you thinking?!"

"Sun!" I said as I looked over my shoulder again. She was trotting next to me along with Manesworth and a number of the other 63 survivors. Titan was still carrying Spell across his huge back like a filly I noticed. She looked much the same as she had before the worm ambushed us, weak and breathing lightly, but thankfully didn't appear any worse.

"You could have gotten yourself killed! Actually, forget that, you nearly killed yourself when your gun blew up!"

"Sun, I-"

"Don't go worrying about her Gear, we already told her why it had to be you when she started beatin' on the Paladin's chest, yelling at her for asking you to try," Birch said in an amused tone.

"Don't think I'm not still mad at you all for putting him up to it," she said in a low and dark voice.

"Was there another option?" Birch asked in possibly the most cheerful voice I'd heard out of him yet.

"Well, no-"

"Was there time to get the gun off him?"

"No-"

"Did he come back unharmed?"

"No! He was covered in cuts and passed out!"

Birch considered her reply. "Okay, gotta give you that one. But! Did he get eaten?"

"No..."

"Well there you go! If he hadn't killed it then he would have been eaten along with probably the rest of us. That was the biggest worm I've seen and I doubt it would have been full after swallowing all of us," he said with a glowing smile.

Sunflower shuddered and pointedly looked away from the Crusader and at me, earning her a laugh from the armored Ranger.

"Don't mind Birch, he was just last in line when they handed out senses of humor and all they had left was Schadenfreude," Lily said to Sunflower and me with a sigh.

"Hey now, I also managed to snag some gallows humor while I was at it! Don't forget about that!" Birch called out cheerfully. Lily sighed more loudly and shook her head. I couldn't see her face behind the helmet but I could almost perfectly picture the put-upon look.

"Thanks Lily, I'll remember. Gear, how are you doing?"

I looked at my current near-hog-tied state and arched an eyebrow at her. She rolled her eyes and said, "Apart from your pride is anything else hurt?"

Ouch, my pride was hurting more now. Still, she had a point. I flexed around as much as I could strapped into the pack. My back leg ached a little and the brace seemed to be catching a bit when I flexed it to its full extent. "Nothing too bad, but I think your leg brace is on its last legs."

She glowered at me and said, "For that pun you will not be getting a new brace."

I felt a familiar chill run down my spine. "Sun, hold up just a second there, I didn't mean to make a-"

"Oh would you two just buck already?" jabbed Birch.

I froze for a second. Sunflower almost did as well then stumbled and looked away quickly. Some of the the other survivors from the Stable winced and looked away or gave me sympathetic looks. Some snickered or rolled their eyes. It didn't matter to me, I was never going to do anything with them like that so they could think or say what they wanted. As long as they didn't try to touch me it wouldn't change anything I had with them. The discussion ended then and there as everyone tried not to look at anyone else for a bit.

"Uh... shoot, I did stuck my hoof in it again, didn't I? But... what did I say?" Birch asked in confusion. I was still looking back at Sunflower which let me catch Crusader Lily shake her head then quietly mutter, "When are you not sticking your hoof in it Birch?"

We walked on in uncomfortable silence for another minute or so and I became more and more anxious for anything else to think about. "So...ummm... c-can you put me down now?" I asked, looking to change the subject.

"Honestly, we'd rather not. We had to move slower because of your pack before the worm and now it's damaged along with your brace so we'd be slower still. Just hang with it until we get to the Burbs, won't be long" answered Lily. I wanted to call her out on the "hang in there" pun but her tone was so cryptically neutral most of the time I couldn't be sure she'd even intended it. Instead I just opted for another sigh. I was getting really good at those.

Lily hadn't been exaggerating about not having to wait long though. Just one short stretch of flat road and a small hill later found the Paladin holding up the group for a moment as they crested the rise.

"Rangers, well done. Welcome home."

I leaned over to the side as far as I could. The sight that greeted me was incredible in a number of ways. Down the other side of the hill and stretching away into the distance were small patches of farms and tiny groups of huts and houses, lights flickering in their windows, most of them looking to be the remains of old Pre-War units. They got denser the farther one looked until they the eye finally passed over the real draw of the view. A city, or at least the ruins of one, stood out against the darkness of the perpetually clouded Wasteland, the dilapidated buildings and ruins lit from below by the light of fires and search lights. The buildings got higher and higher the closer they got to the center until they appeared to be a single, giant block. Then I realized that's exactly what it was. In the center of the old city a group of four or five buildings stood above the rest by a quarter to half their height. Between them ran a network of free hanging corridors, bridges, and plazas, which appeared to have been part of the original design. Below and sometimes above each of these was a solid wall of metal, wood, and rubble. There was no mistaking what it was.

"Cloudway Castle. Always good to see it again," said Birch wistfully.

"We've got maybe another hour till we hit Whinnetonka and the rest of the Burbs. After that it'll be a short, safe trip to the Castle. Everyone, you've made it your new home," Night said, addressing the group of survivors and facing each of them quickly in succession. "Welcome to Whinneapolis."

As I looked out at the city and the surrounding communities I couldn't help but begin to feel a rising sense of hope where none had been before. Till now the wastes had been worse than I could have imagined. Now, spread out before me like a net, was a vista of civilization and structure, a bastion against the chaos we'd just trekked across. It felt like a new start and I did my best to quell the anxiety and hesitation I felt deep down at what this strange place would have in store for me and everyone else.

* * * * * * * * *

New Perk: Scavenger Rank I. You've got an eye for useful things. You now have a greater chance to find useful scrap and items in containers and other places.

Author's Note

Well would you look at that! It isn't dead!

Yes, it's true. Steelheart is now going to be updating again after a brief pause while my other ongoing story was hashed out to satisfaction. I'll be working both in tandem, popping back and forth as each has breakthroughs in my mind and so on and so forth. My is hope to keep the release schedule roughly the same with the expectation that downtime for one will mean work for the other instead of just pausing completely like I was previously.