"Appledrop, take the right flank! Dark Skies! You take the left! let's get these minotaur fuckers before they get us!"
The time was 3:45 AM, and while out on deployment the camp had been ambushed by a minotaur slaver party. From what we could gather, the party wasn't too big. 5, at most, but they had some fairly large guns, and we were taking heavy fire. So there we were, a squad of five against a rabble of 5 or more, and we were taking a beating. One soldier was downed in the first four minutes, Storm Barrier I think his name was...
"COME ON DICKHEADS, SEE IF YOU CAN DOWN ME TOO!"
And then there was this asshole. Privateer Hotshot (yes, that was actually his name) just had the sort of personality that made you want to turn on your own soldiers, just as long as they were him. Now where was I... Oh right! we were being surrounded by a group of minotaurs.
~
"Alright you pansy-ass armored bastards, lay down your weapons and surrender and we promise you'll only have a week in the mines!" came the shout from the minotaurian leader. Not fifteen minutes after the battle had started and we had been surounded and faced with this decision. Now, in the Steel Rangers, there is a certain unspoken rule; If you're going to go down, go down with a bang. I looked over to Melody Bomb, our commander for this outing, and she looked back, a certain glint in her eye that told me exactly what she was going to do. If you've never seen a pony look at you with eyes telling you to get the fuck back because shit's about to explode, then allow me to give a bit of a demonstration of what that feels like:
"GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE MOTHERFUCKERS, SHIT'S ABOUT TO GO DOWN! AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHUGHHH!!!"
Is the sort of thing you can expect. so, after the appropriate words being said, what was left of us dove for cover as Melody applied a bit of emergency voltage to her ammunition supply, sacrificing herself in a massive explosion which sent bullets every which way, our scanners detecting that at least 4 minoutaurs had been downed from the shrapnel.

Here's a fun fact about minotaurs, they don't exactly like when you use cheap tactics to escape their death circles, especially if they lose 80% of their forces when you do. The leader was a little bit mad. I could tell this fact from the 75mm cannon not 5 inches from my muzzle. Luckily, when you have 3 soldiers and they have one soldier, there are people there to shoot them for you. Not so luckily, we happened to have ditched our guns in the mad rush for cover and so only had knives in our available arsenal.
~
This is where shit really kicked off, because the tosspot I told you about earlier had evidently decided that a bowie knife is far superior to an AA cannon, and tried rushing the bastard. That's how he lost his left legs. Shot clean off, they were. Well, not clean, there was quite a bit of blood, but you get it. He no longer has legs on the left side of his body. The rest of us? we did the smart thing, we complied to the minotaur's request, and removed our helms. I had never seen Dark Skies without her helmet before, and she was stunning. A unicorn mare with a deep indigo mane and a coat as blue as the night skies.
Why is the fact that she's a unicorn important? Well, unicorns generally excell at a specific magic spell, and she was no exception, her special talent being a spell known as "Summon Night", which makes things generally four times darker than they currently are.

A bonus to having a suit of power armor? When you put the helmet on you have a night vision function, so we promptly re-wielded our helmets and ran to the outer of the circle, after all these minotaurs had guns, didn't they? Well, yes, but there was one crucial factor that we didn't account for, one vital point. The key ingredient to our would've-been success; They didn't use battle saddles, because they had hands.
~bzzzzrt~
"Tired, ol chap?" an unknown voice asks an even more unknown viewer.
"A little bit. With these orbs...it's like...you can feel what the recorder felt, and you can see what they saw...I just...I can't do this any more for today. Let's get some rest and get back to it tomorrow, please?"
"Alright Frankie, just gotta seal the door, wouldn't want the centarus to find us now, would we?"

Author's Note

WHO ARE THESE MYSTERIOUS CHAPS? WHY ARE THEY BRITISH? NOPONY KNOWS...*mysteriouspinkie.gif*
Anyway, sorry if this chapter's a bit short for what it is, but I'm too damn tired at the moment to write anymore, I jsut got back from a 24 hour pedal car race. I promise that things will start getting better and better soon, just hang in there a bit more!