Forgotten Legacy

I couldn’t believe how awesome this felt, the wind rushing around me. I could actually feel every feather being ruffled by the air current around me, and the feel of my coat being brushed also was a new but exhilarating feeling. Given the rocky start I had after passing through the mirror, once I had figured out just how to balance the new body weight distribution I was flying even better than back home. It seemed like it was almost easier with this body.

“Hey!” I heard a voice shout over. “Pay attention, rookie.”

I was yanked back to the present, glancing over at another Pegasus flying near me wearing almost identical looks as myself. We were almost mirror images, which had surprised me and my friends. Everyone…everypony? I didn’t know which term to use at the moment.

All of my friends when they had passed through had come out looking different from their pony counterparts with the exception of myself and Pinkie. For whatever reason, we looked practically identical to our twins with minor differences.

“Sorry,” I called out, turning my gaze back to the ground as we flew a circuit over the border of the capital city of the Crystal Empire. I scanned the ground, finding it amazing I could even make out the details I could from as far up as we were.

Pony-Dash shook her head. “You’re trying too hard, Hot Shot,” she said, using the nickname I had chosen to help differentiate between us. “Patrols like this are something that you should be able to do while flying much faster.” She pulled to a stop, hovering in midair. “Tell me what you see.”

I also pulled to a stop and glanced down quickly.

“Besides the troops doing a patrol of the shield wall? Not a whole lot,” I said. “Seems pretty quiet.”

“How many troops were there?”

“How should I know?”

“Twenty,” she said, crossing her forelegs. “Twenty troops, and there was another squad of twenty approaching from the east, the way we came.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, as awesome as it is to have someone that even approaches my level of cool,” she said. “I’ve been doing this my whole life almost, and you learn to keep an eye on everything when you fly: Potential threats, obstacles, cloud formations, updrafts, downdrafts, and safe landing sites in case you have to make a quick landing.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a lot to take in.”

“Like I said,” Pony-Dash said. “I’ve been doing this a long time, so its second nature to me. But if you’re going to be trying to fly like us regularly, you’ve got a lot of catch-up work to do.”

I smirked. “I got a rad teacher, at least,” I said, knowing compliments would work.

The smirk was mirrored back to me.

“Yeah,” she said, head suddenly whipping to the side. I thought I had heard something myself and followed the look. I could barely make it out.

“Skirmish,” my counterpart said, taking off quickly, a rainbow-colored streak in her wake. I took off, catching up to her.

“What do we do?” I asked.

She angled slightly upward before rolling into a dive, the changes in direction hard to keep up with.

“Go in and start swinging after the strafe,” she said.

To her credit, the rookie wasn’t too bad, all things equal. Sure, she wasn’t the most attentive of Pegasi, but she had a leg or two over Muffins. Probably three. If she had gone through flight camp at the same time I had, I probably would have been evenly matched.

It's a shame we were at war, I would have loved to see how she would hold up in a race, along with Sunset and Sunshine. Those ghostly wings were actually pretty cool looking.

The ground raced up to meet me, flashes of fire leaping into clarity as we got closer. I altered the angle of my dive slightly and sensed Hot Shot do the same. Her reaction time was improving, possibly even becoming instinctive on her part.

I tucked my wings in a little tighter, picking up speed before flaring them out again just as we approached the ground, the angle I held them at making me skim the ground, my rear hooves held slightly forward to crack into the skull of a Unicorn zombie, shattering it with the impact. I heard the body collapse but was already pumping my wings for altitude as a steel spear tip was thrust my way, twisting around it.

I arrested my forward momentum and saw Hot Shot buck backward before shooting straight up. The kick didn’t have a lot of force to it since she didn't have anything solid to brace against, but it did force the corpse back into a gout of fire sent out by the troops.

She came over to my side as I surveyed the fight. They seemed to have it contained now, but it wouldn’t hurt to do a few more strafes.

It was over in five minutes. I stood on the ground, stretching my right wing from a glancing blow I had taken in the last run. My double came over, a frown on her face.

“You ok?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably going to have a bruise, but that’s about it.”

“So, what’d you think?”

“Not bad,” I said. “You wouldn’t make it into the Wonderbolts, but you’d probably beat your average Pegasus.”

I saw her puff up a bit and couldn’t help but give her a good natured rib.

“But you need to be about twenty percent cooler to beat me.”