Spoilers for Fruitbat Factory's sora, because this story takes place in an alternate universe that is ponified. Will also contain some spoilers for SUGURI and Acceleration of SUGURI by default. Takes place... well after all the MLP seasons. All of them, except Season 9 which will be ignored. Props to Hailspider for fonting the old cover art, and Achronic Pony for proofreading! Also, new cover art!

Flying over a moonlit plain one night, a young military-trained pegasus named Sora finds herself tangling with a grounded adversary—one who, admittedly, is a little bit on the deranged side of the fence. Having attracted strange cloaked ponies that seemingly want said adversary dead, Sora decides to act and takes her foe to be detained for her crimes—taking into account her worse-for-wear state.

Yet with disapproval from a whole army's worth of ponies in uniform, especially those few in a high position of power who order her around—or, perhaps, in spite of it—Sora stubbornly clings to her decision, and it's one that would be ill-advised in most other circumstances. This is something that she does know could spark either an event as harmless as a dischargement... or lead to less than favorable consequences—though such things she has taken as seriously as she would her duty to said lofty few. Regardless of what happens, it falls under one simple truth: it will be up for her superiors to decide. Whatever the result, she'll have to make do, as will her adversary and anypony else who decides to get involved with them.

But there is a wise saying of ages long lost, one Sora follows to the letter—it is short, simple, and much to her chagrin, the particular predicament she's wound up in. As a wise soul once said, all those countless ages ago: "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."