Rex wasted no time in arranging his first raid. They were to enter a known fortified pony settlement and take all of the ponies out, no survivors. I wasn’t to partake in this first raid, though, and due to Rex’s “new procedures,” only members of each raiding party would be privy to what their mission was. Nobody but Rex and the members from each individual team know where they were going or how long it would be. Rex knew ponies were clever and he wasn’t taking any chances. The chances of a pony capturing one of the pack and actually trying to interrogate them seemed pretty slim, but Rex didn’t want to come back with his tail between his legs.

My job, until I was given further orders, was weapons preparations. The first task was to pull out twelve of our finest condition energy weapons. They would be used for Rex’s double sized raid party. Rex, along with twelve other hounds made sure I knew exactly how much they would need them as they followed me to the weapons storage room where all the currently functioning guns were kept.

“No care what get, except pink pony gun,” Nico grumbled to Fifi beside her.

“Pink pony gun not bad! Shoot straight, dust ponies good,” Fifi replied extolling the virtues of the weapon.

“So long as biggest gun mine, is good day,” Strike said, weighing in on the conversation.

Rex turned around at the comment. “Bonehead! Alpha gun biggest, is always biggest!” he growled at Strike, who’s ears drooped so fast it almost seemed like they had been chopped off.

We arrived at the weapons storage room, located conveniently across from the weapons repair room. I rummaged through our stock of weapons and placed the very best on the table. As I pulled them from the racks, the entire team became visibly excited, tails wagging furiously. Rex looked like a pup who had just found their very first vein of gems. With a glance and a nod from Rex, the team formed an orderly line behind their Alpha. Despite earlier appearances, Rex had picked an obedient and loyal group of pups. This energetic team knew when order was called for.

Rex looked over the table, sizing up each of the weapons to determine who would get which one. Starting with the only non-inherent-energy weapon in this stash, he picked up the Spark Sledge, a modified super sledge. It had been created at Rex’s request, well his threat to tear out my claws. Years ago he had been looking for a weapon that could kill anything in one hit, but what he got was much more dangerous than he could have imagined. On contact, but only when both safety switches have been depressed, it consumes three entire energy canisters and simply vaporizes whatever it touches on contact. Living, dead, or inanimate. Indiscriminate vaporization. It was deemed too erratic, and as a result kept out of the arsenal for a while.

The first strike against the Spark Sledge’s usage was when it clipped the arm of a party member. In mere moments, the clipped party member dissolved into a pile of dust. Strike number two was when it took out the main structural pillar in a large stone building bringing three floors of stone and steel down onto the heads of an entire party. The weapons were recovered and repaired although Rex asked for the Spark Sledge to be shelved. Hopefully this mission wouldn’t result in strike three. Rex handed it to the next dog in line who then kept passing it until it reached Strike at the tail end. Strike is our resident simple projectiles expert and is quite fond of anything capable of delivering blunt trauma.

The next weapon off the table was a sniper rifle lovingly painted pink and customized to the original owner’s taste. It featured fluorescent pink dots on the crosshairs as well as a pink cover to disguise the energy canister under a slope that made it look sort of like a pink lightning bolt. While technologically unimpressive, it was in fantastic condition since most of the dogs left it alone. Those that took it on missions took it because of the condition and knew how to take care of it to keep it that way. All I’ve ever had to do is buff out minor scratches. It’s never needed so much as a tune up. Fifi was the most familiar with the gun and she hadn’t missed a shot with it since she was a puppy. She stood second to last in line and her eyes lit up as it was passed her way.

Next up was a tri-barreled shotgun. Initially found with the energy redistribution unit cracked in two pieces and missing components, it was modified so that each barrel fed off of its own energy canister. That made for an incredible room clearing gun. A total of 21 shots could be fired before reloading. Triple shots were devastating, although overheating was a common issue when using all three barrels that many times. It was handed down to Tank, who stood just in front of Fifi.

I gave out all but one of the remaining weapons, knowing they were to be used as simple side arms for the claw fighters. They likely wouldn’t be fired a single time between now and when they returned to the store room. Various rifles and pistols were taken from the table, passed down the line and placed in holsters or strapped onto backs.

The last gun on the table was a gargantuan thing. Rex simply pointed at it and Nico walked over and picked it up. She then took her place in line directly behind Rex. During this whole event, not a single word was spoken. I realized a few moments after Nico had gotten back in line that Rex was looking at me expectantly. He held up a single claw and I scurried into the back room.

As quickly as houndily possible, I scurried over to the weapons repair room and returned with Rex’s gun. I had meant to give it to him this afternoon before messing about with the reel to reel but I had let it slip my mind. The world exploding in front of me didn’t help the situation. Rex took it from my hands and tilted it back and forth so that he could see it from every direction. The light shined off of the perfectly flat polished surfaces. He liked it better than the matte anodized finish that most of the other guns had. Despite his incredible love for the look, he was never able to keep up the polish and it was in need of constant work.

“Good, Spike. Love shine,” Rex broke the silence that had been going on for minutes now.

“Thanks. Took a lot of work to work out the dents and get it so shiny.”

“Four mega pony. Play toss with it.” Sure, okay Rex.

Rex turned around to address the murmuring single file line.

“Heads up, pups!” The line of hounds went silent and all ears turned towards Rex.

“First mission tomorrow. We leave at sunrise. Dismissed!”

The line dissolved and the dogs started to chatter between each other. Most of them seemed quite enthusiastic with their role. Some hefted their guns around and motioned as if they were shooting at a target. Everybody eventually left but Luna. My heart started to race.

“You fix gun?” she asked.

“I haven’t had time to fix it yet. I can probably get something worked up if you sit tight for a few minutes.” She nodded and sat down on the weapons table and started to examine the unfamiliar pistol Rex had assigned to her.

I rushed off to my room through the freshly dug tunnels and nearly tripped on an exposed piece of stone a few times in my haste. All at once, the tunnels ended and I was outside climbing up the side of the blast radius until I got to my, now exposed, den. I scanned the room quickly for Luna’s gun and saw that it was sitting on top of the pile I had tossed it into. Hers was clearly marked with a very tiny horn on string. In my head, I tried to picture the horn as just a tip that got slashed off in battle, but the alternative seemed a bit more morbid than usual. After picking it up I noticed that Luna’s gun had been dented by some loose debris during the explosion. Damnit. A few other guns of the same model made it with me back to the weapons repair room so I could simply swap out the damaged parts instead of replacing each individual broken component. I made sure that at least one of them had the correct housing parts I needed in case I couldn’t bang out the dents.

At the weapons repair room, I set Luna’s gun down on the bench and started disassembly. Screw by screw, it came apart. By the end, it had become an exploded view of the insides. After identifying the bits I’d need to replace, the charging board with a blown capacitor and the focusing arm holding up the main focusing crystal, I started disassembly on a second gun to use for parts. This one was done a little bit less orderly and the parts were placed into a pile on the corner of the workbench. One of the focusing arms must have gotten bent a few weeks ago causing her repetitive capacitor failure issue. I had adjusted it after the pistol took a tumble, but I must not have caught that the arm had bent and was causing all this trouble.

The last thing to address was the newly dented casing. I just took one from the parts pile and transferred the miniature horn pendant to the new housing. Luckily, the pieces were the same variant, with some ridges and a few louvers that span the length of the receiver. Having done this in the past, I learned that she didn’t care about the housing itself, as long as it felt the same in her hands as she was using it. Finished with the repairs, I moved into the main room and handed Luna her gun.

“Thanks. Will keep both. Rex wants killing gun, I want trophy gun” she responded as I handed it back to her. And she was probably right, Rex looked like he had assembled a team that could eat super duper ultra mega ponies for breakfast. A gun that made pinholes was likely not something he wanted someone in his strike team to be carrying.

She walked out of the room and caught myself staring at the hallway where she had walked down long after she had turned the corner. I shifted my gaze to the piles of broken guns visible in the repair room across the hall. Time to get back to work…

Recently we haven’t been using all too many guns. That left a reasonably large backlog of weapons, sitting in piles beneath some ancient words scratched into the wall reading: bOrKEN, bAd WorK, FvKKEd. Most of the weapons that had been marked as “borken” or underperforming (“bad work”) were simply dirty or misaligned. Those made for quick work. Not everything in those piles were so easy to fix, however. The multi-gem weapons usually caused me significant issues to repair, and as such we never had many functional at one time. Today seemed like a fine day to try and get some operational.

Multi-gem weapons came in a few varieties. The first is a simple duplication of the normal mechanisms. The tri-barrel shotgun was a great example. Each barrel had its own trigger, power crystal, and focusing crystal, all stationary and fed from one power source. A second design I had seen for multi-gem weapons was a type that used the increased gem count to boost the rate of fire. A spinning set of barrels each containing a focusing crystal and an “excitation” crystal. Power crystals would sit behind multiple positions, usually four of them placed in cardinal locations. All but one would be set to a low power. These charged the excitation gems. Most commonly, the top was set to a higher power than the others. The calibration would be such that this higher power crystal would push the excitation gem over equilibrium and discharge all of the collected energy at once through the focusing gem and out the barrel. It would then have time to cool down and recover by the time it returned to the topmost firing position.

The final multi-gem design I had only seen once in an old bombed out building. Sat in a store room and missing numerous components, the gun was massive and I couldn’t imagine being in the way of it. Whatever it was designed to hit must have been the size of a tank. It formed a sort of tree. One long trunk down the center with precisely ground focusing crystals all lined up ready to merge the emission from a single power crystal into a single incredible beam. The details probably aren’t too terribly important, but it had hundreds of adjustment and alignment screws.

What sat on my workbench, the multi gemmed rifle that Smasher had so graciously set at my feet, didn’t resemble any of those designs in the slightest. Never had I seen this technology implemented into a rifle before. And never with six distinctly colored crystals feeding into a single focusing gem. And never were crystals placed into a rotating armature. It all seemed so strange to me. And yet it was so simple. There weren’t many points of adjustment. The focusing crystal looked like it may have been omnidirectional. I simply had no idea what its purpose would be. Not knowing if I would get a better time any time soon to figure it out, I began disassembly.

The barrel was unique, it looked like a solid stick with a line of lenses, not gems, attached to it. At the base was the focusing crystal, intact but with no hope of reattachment at the moment. The mount for the six crystals and the rotating armature looked to be shared with one of the less common models of multi-gem shotgun that sat in the part pile. Grabbing one from the pile and comparing it to the strange Hexagem Rifle, they did indeed share a mounting system. My curiosity got the best of me and in just a few moments I had the strange assembly screwed into place on the old retired shotgun. The correct focusing crystal didn’t fit neatly into the old shotgun, but it would do well enough to see what this hexagem assembly was capable of. This gun wouldn’t be doing any killing until I test fired it to find out what it actually did. Satisfied with my experimentation and having wasted enough time already, I set it aside and continued my repair work.

“Mega pony sighted at bomb site!” Yelled somedog as they rushed into the weapons room and nabbed three pistols directly off the primo condition side.

“Need guns. Important.” Another two scurried over and grabbed a set of rifles. I didn’t argue. Who was I to get in the way of Rex’s grand plan? I’d be dead, probably. What’s that pony saying? “Best to let angry dogs be” I think it was...

I watched as the three ran down the hallway joining a group of three other dogs. Patriot, Scooter and Sky were each handed a pistol which they placed into their holsters. Ruby and Precious examined their rifles before throwing them over their shoulders. Huck readied his claws and ran them against a strop. He proceeded to slice a clean chunk out of the wall and toss it at Sky. She caught it and tossed it back, shattering on impact. Huck’s pride resided in his claws. Instead of a gun, his holster held a knife sharpener that he found as a pup. His claws were kept longer than most and most notably, he polished them. The claim was that it helped reduce sliding resistance, but it also didn’t hurt whenever he was showing off to find a mate. They turned the corner and moved out of sight.

I looked back to admire my work and noticed that the Hexagem Shotgun made from the odd rifle handed to me earlier was missing off the table. Running away from me down the tunnel was Lucky, the hexagem weapon in hand. I slipped a shotgun under my arm and ran after her.

“Wait!” I yelled as I started to chase her down the hall.

“Late to mega pony fight. Can’t talk”

“No! That gun isn’t…” Lucky had already reached the end of the hallway and started burrowing her way to battle. She wasn’t leaving an open tunnel, just a trail of broken rubble and softened dirt. I dug in right where her burrow began. It had already started collapsing and I was practically digging an entirely new path. The bomb that the ponies detonated had really done a number on the structural integrity of the rock around us. Fractures and cracks ran throughout the walls. There were numerous pockets simply filled with loose rubble. Normally, it was easy to follow another’s tunnel trail but determining the difference between a freshly collapsed burrow and the freshly shattered rock made it incredibly difficult to follow Lucky’s trail. Giving up on following her path, I decided to surface and see if I was close enough to the fight to call Lucky over and exchange weapons.

Upon surfacing, I couldn’t see any Mega Ponies floating around. In the distance, there appeared to be a flying pony glowing bright green and pulling a cart behind it. It looked terribly emaciated. I stared at it a bit longer. No, it wasn’t just skinny, it was also missing fur. Maybe it had mange. Could ponies get mange? Come to think of it, it looked pretty dead. I took a few moments to… oh, yuck. It definitely smelled like a pony ghoul! Flying ponies were pretty rare to see and I was not sure if I had ever seen a flying pony ghoul before.

I climbed up onto a mound and looked around to see if I could spot the recon team. The bomb had transformed the surface into a completely alien world. The ground didn’t even resemble what I had come to expect due to the ponies’ world killer bomb detonation. Instead of flattening everything around it, trees, buildings, and anything not made of solid stone, the damage stopped abruptly forming almost a perfect sphere embedded into the ground. Small holes could be seen lining the outer walls. Some pack members could be seen sealing off these exposed tunnels from the surface.

Reports of the mega pony likely came from this reconstruction team. They noticed me with the shotgun under my arm and pointed in the direction of the flying green ghoul pony. Jumping back into the dirt on the surface, I made my way closer. Following a flying target was much more difficult than one walking on the surface. With one on the surface, it’s quite easy to detect footsteps and surface close to it. I had to peek above the surface a few times to make sure I was still following the pony. The dead flyer stuck pretty low to the ground and occasionally went out of sight behind bits of building and stone that had been flung out by the blast. Eventually, we started to approach the forest. Ponies normally feared the Everfree so it seemed strange for one to be moving towards it. Maybe the dead pony was a few packages short of a shipment. Death isn’t very kind to the mind and the dead ponies are usually aggressive.

As I kept following, I started feeling some notable vibrations permeate through the ground. The pack was certainly somewhere nearby. Some heavy stomping followed. Even a pack of inexperienced hounds wouldn’t make a vibration like that. This had to be the mega pony that had spurred the pilfering of my completely untested and unknown weapon. Really, for all I knew it could have originally been designed to apply makeup to soldiers from afar. The ponies had created much stranger things than that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the hexagem weapon was entirely non-lethal.

I decided that it was probably in my best interest to stay away from the threatening stomping until I could identify what was going on. My task was to ensure that functional weapons made it to the dogs going out to battle. I wasn’t quite ready to get myself killed over a fancy pony concoction. Swap the shotgun with the known good one and get out. I poked my head out and through sheer luck I picked a clear lookout onto the source of the stomping. It was not a mega pony at all, but instead a mechanical one. The feeling of hounds digging furiously through rock and soil was still present. My pack mates were quickly burrowing towards the mechanical creature.

The dead flyer approached a reasonably well made cover. The camouflaged shelter would not have been seen if the glowing green pony hadn’t flown directly to it. The steel pony was walking around and removing the disguise. Underneath was a passenger wagon, intended for carrying ponies. It was surprisingly large and I questioned how it had even gotten there.

Three more ponies emerged from the wagon. A grey and white pony was followed by a striped pony, a zebra? It’s kind of hard to not know about them, even if you don’t pay attention. The ponies put up tons of posters about how much they hated each other. The hatred made its way into books, magazines and audio recordings. Up to that point, I had not encountered a zebra before. Today was filled with quite a few firsts.

Next out was a second flyer wearing a hat, this one looked to be living. At this point, I realized that there was a pony sitting in the back of the dead flyer’s wagon. The grey pony, a much lighter grey than the one on the ground, looked pretty helpless and just laid on the floor. Maybe it was dead or severely injured. I couldn’t tell at my distance from the group.

Vibrations in the ground around me kept consistent with a group of tunneling hounds. I noticed Patriot poke his head out far off in the distance. I waved at him, but he didn’t see me. Observing the group of ponies took his full attention. Just like that, he ducked back down beneath the dirt to relay the information to the rest of the team. I was too late. I wasn’t going to be able to get Lucky a gun that she could rely on. Claws were crossed that the hexagem modified shotgun would do something.

Six of the seven recon team members emerged from the ground, ready for combat. I cautiously watched Lucky ready her shotgun. Ruby aimed her rifle at the group and took a couple shots. She didn’t seem to hit anything though. Lucky didn’t fire any shots. Scooter rushed in, making a swipe at the zebra. By the time his claws had reached where the zebra had been, it had moved and let loose a kick that knocked Scooter flat on his back.

By this point, it seemed odd to me that Lucky had taken no shots. Looking a bit more carefully, I saw her fumbling with the trigger and the safety. She popped the energy cartridge in and out again. No shots.

Crap. Crap. Crap!

The steel pony let out a burst of grenades. Enough of them connected to make Lucky drop the multi gemmed shotgun. Her fur looked quite bloody and she grasped one of her arms with the other as she lay in pain on the ground. This was not good.

It looked like the ponies on the ground were retreating to the now-uncovered pony carrier, Sky clawed his way up the side of the wagon. The hat-wearing flyer hit Sky with a very close range shotgun blast and Sky fell off the wagon.

Just when it looked like all was hopeless and the ponies were going to get away after mopping the floor with a team of attack dogs, a gleaming set of claws pushed up from the ground. In a single motion, Huck emerged beneath the steel pony and elegantly swiped his claws right through the metal beast. His perfectly sharpened and polished claws cut through the pony’s armor like it was clay.

The metal head dropped to the ground and rolled a small distance away from the now dead pony’s body. Having had their strongest party member killed, they fled. Both of the carts moved away in tow behind the flyers. One pulled by the living, the other pulled by the dead.

Huck, partially in celebration for killing the steel pony and partially in anger because they were going to get away, skewered the armored head, spun around, and tossed it at the green glowing dead flyer. The throw was good, but the ghoul pony moved just enough out of the way to dodge the hit. It smashed against the side of the wagon, splintering wood everywhere. Behind the cloud of splinters, I noticed that Huck looked pretty happy with the shot even if he didn’t kill any more ponies.

Not a moment later a glow emanated from the wagon that Huck had hit. The pony laying in the wagon shifted. It wasn’t dead after all and now it was clearly looking at Huck. The glow, now clearly originating from the nearly dead pony, became brighter and brighter. Seven layers formed in the light, one for each member of the recon team below. Huck, Sky, Ruby, Patriot, Scooter, Precious and Lucky all became surrounded by the same glow. The expression on their faces grew concerned and they wildly waved about. Claws scraped at the ground, but there was no traction to be found as they had been lifted off of the ground. Initially their ascent was slow but my heart nearly stopped as they suddenly shot into the sky. They flew higher and higher until I couldn’t see them anymore. Panic set in. I was next if I didn’t leave. I burrowed underground as soon as I lost sight of my fellow dogs.

THUD!!

The ground shook as something hit the ground. Just don’t think about it. They would be alright. Right?

THUD!! THUD!! THUD!!

THUD!! THUD!! THUD!!

I couldn’t feel any more movement in the ground. No ponies. No dogs. I sat trembling in my cramped little hole.

I don’t know how long I was there, but it was long enough that another team had been sent out to see what had happened. They found me a few feet under the ground, still shaking and bawling my eyes out.

“What happen?” A member of the recovery team spoke up after simply staring for a few seconds.

“P-p-pony threw them into the air,” I managed to squeak out.

“Impossible. They mangled. Crushed. Look like they fell from moon.”

“Looked like it was dead, but after we killed their metal pony, it…” The rest of the words got stuck in my throat before I could say them. The group standing along the open ridge of the hole all burst out into laughter.

“Must got hit. Spike crazy talk. Dead pony can’t-”

“It wasn’t dead!” I interrupted him.

“Biggest baddest pony we seen, even mega pony, can’t do that.” A set of paws grabbed me and lifted me out of the hole. They faced me towards the carnage but I closed my eyes and turned away. “Why you out here anyway?”

Before I could answer, a voice called from the drop site,

“Lucky still breathing! She live!” I took a look over, a supreme mistake. My lunch would have been laid in front of me if it weren’t for the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since the previous evening. Interesting electronics and mechanical devices swirled around my head and had replaced the desire to eat. Now I was sick and hungry.

Lucky lay in a heap on top of three dogs. All but Lucky had landed directly on the ground. The limp hound was lifted by her forelegs and hindlegs and carried away, upside down. Patch, who had determined that Lucky was still alive, walked around to the others and took a closer look. No more shouts were made and as he walked away, three dogs moved over and started to drag the bodies back to the caverns, two at a time. Boomer walked around and picked up the gun scraps, tossing them into a canvas bag. Moxie, who had helped un-dig my hidey hole, spoke up.

“Get shit together Spike. We need fixed guns. Claws not good enough for what Rex wants,” she started walking back with the others. “And if Lucky say super power pony did this, like you say, we got big problem.”

Boomer dropped the bag of guns at my feet.

“Don’t look too good. All broke.” I pawed through the bag. Broken pieces rattled around among the guns. The best looking one was the Hexagem Shotgun, the barrel warped and bent from the grenade explosions, but receiver and all six gems intact. I grabbed the bag and joined Boomer in the dejected walk back to base.

First things first, when I got back to the caves I asked about Lucky and was told that she wasn’t conscious yet. They had diagnosed uncountable broken bones. Patch suggested that she had lost enough blood from the grenade blasts that, combined with the shock from breaking her foreleg, it must have caused her to pass out when she was lifted into the air so quickly. Somedog rushed by with a container of clinking glass bottles, filled with purple liquid.

Usually pony healing potions weren’t something regularly used by hounds. Raids didn’t procure enough to be frequently used throughout the pack and many refused to use them even when offered, either due to pride or a phobia of what pony magic might do to them. Guns were easy to comprehend: point, shoot, observe the damage. Pony chemicals were unpredictable and sometimes caused disturbing or undesired effects. Some ponies also had the nasty habit of mixing their chemicals which changed what each of them did in strange ways. We had decided a long time ago it was best to just do without. But this was war and that meant going further and taking more risks than we had in the past two hundred years since the bombs.

Letting them tend to Lucky with the pilfered pony potions, I returned to the repair room and dumped the guns out on the table. Six guns spread out to an impressive degree when disassembled and placed onto a table, especially when bits became bent and parts were broken into numerous pieces. The thin facades that served the purpose of keeping curious claws from getting disintegrated and dirt from contaminating the beam path, didn’t stand a chance against gravity. Some of the guns looked like they had been landed on and were crushed nearly flat.

Surprisingly, the best condition gun seemed to be the Hexagem Shotgun. Immediately, I was filled with guilt and disappointment. I shouldn’t have made the strange modification to an already strange gun. Maybe if I hadn’t have done it, Lucky would have been able to make the shot and Huck could have taken on a different target.

The failure was now crystal clear. Two little tabs stuck out blocking the left and rightmost gems in the ring from getting charged. Pulling out the original rifle stock, it didn’t have these little tabs. Shutdown must have been enabled when the feedback circuits determined that two of the six gems weren’t powering up. I looked around for compatible parts. Many of them I found on one of the fully repaired rifles that I had worked on earlier. Any of them would have fit, but I had to transfer numerous wires and sensors over from the hexagem’s original base. That required option holes that most models didn’t have. Maybe it was an early variant that they phased out or maybe it was a new development that the new parts supported for cost reasons. Our guns had been taken apart and reassembled so many times that there wasn’t a single gun that contained all original parts. Every single one was an amalgam of other guns. It was a remarkable feat of engineering that over whatever production period, the parts stayed almost completely interchangeable.

Holding a fully optioned gun with every hole stuffed with some feature or another, it looked complete. And this time, the correct focusing gem fit, polished to perfection! None of its facets looked damaged either. The parts that I had to screw into place looked mostly pawmade, er hoof made? Ponies... Imperfectly wound coils, carefully wrapped wires, and a lovely design carved into the housing that carefully disguised the cooling vents and also acted as a form of weight reduction. I banged out the dents in the original, all metal housings, and restored the brushed appearance that surrounded the wonderful carvings. Lighter, more durable, and more attractive, the rifle looked and felt fantastic. With the original housings transferred, it looked as it must have the day it was made, or maybe the day after when the casings had been engraved.

Having finished repairing this incredible feat of engineering, I just had to find out what it did. That meant giving it a test fire. I made my way down to the target range, located much deeper in the caverns. The range was a long hallway with drawings of ponies on the wall at the far end. I pulled out the once rifle, then shotgun, but now a born-again Hexagem Rifle and rested it on the barrier. After inserting an energy cartridge, I pointed at what was left of the pony drawing, turned the safety off, and pulled the trigger. It was locked. No movement at all. I flipped the safety on, same thing. Remembering one of the features that I wasn’t able to transfer to the shotgun was the dial on the back. Tiny little colored icons filled the dial. There was no dial to select any of them. I tapped the little panel in the center with the tip of my claw, nothing. I tried it with one of the pads of my paw and all six icons lit up. Nice! A touch powered on switch!

This time when I pulled the trigger, all of the crystals lit up and it looked like it was starting the charging process. A beam formed consisting of six colors, orange, blue, white, purple, yellow and pink. Nothing seemed to happen. The six continuous beams spiraled around each other and hit the target. They just sank into the stone and remained as long as I held the trigger. All this work for a gun that doesn’t do a damn thing!

As I was about to give up, the beam lost all but one color, blue. I could feel the beam in front of me heating the air. The target began to glow a dull orange wherever the beam touched. Then it exploded. Recoiling in fear, but with my claw still on the trigger the beam turned yellow and again it didn’t seem to do anything.

Thinking about what had just happened, I began to get giddy. A heat gun! How fantastic is that? Absentmindedly, I had kept my finger on the trigger while thinking of the possibilities. The beam had turned a bright pink in the meantime, still looking like it wasn’t going to affect the stone target. Lifting off the trigger, the beam disappeared and the target looked as it did before, minus the bits that blew out during the explosion. It looked practically ecstatic to be used as target practice. I chuckled at the thought of how useful a heat gun could be and returned to the storage room to drop the Hexagem Heat Rifle off. On my way out, I noticed that somebody had graffitied a smiley face on the target, how cute.

Enough time had been spent playing around with the strange rifle, I decided to check back up on Lucky. As I approached, I was told she was awake but that she was spurting the same nonsense that I had been about the mostly dead pony that single handedly lifted an entire scouting party above the clouds. Her version of the story mentioned a city in the clouds with ponies flying about. Flyers were not a common sight around the wasteland and it seemed highly unlikely that there would just be a city of them hanging out and not helping their fellow ponies down on the ground. Ponies always spouted about friendship and comradery, unless you were a zebra, or a diamond dog, or really anything but a pony…

I stopped by her bed and looked down at her mangled body. She looked over at me.

“Spike”

“I... I’m-”

“No. You tried to stop me. My fault” The accusatory thoughts still continued, it would continue to be at least partially my fault, but I didn’t bring it back up. Her limbs had been strapped to sticks and attempts had been made to straighten them, but they simply didn’t look right. The bleeding, however, had stopped.

“Are you-” I tried to get all of the words out but some just got stuck. She turned her head to look at me to make sure I could see the expression on her face.

“No. No good. I like this forever, what Patch say. No more fight Rex’s war. Can’t move, but will try help,” I really had nothing to add, but I felt compelled to say something.

“Let me know if you need anything, okay?” What the hell could I provide to help with this? The offer was there, anyway.

“Want rest now.” I hoped I hadn’t overstayed my welcome. Was she actually angry at me? I wished that I had the friendship experience of a pony. Maybe that would make this all a little bit easier to parse.

On my way out, I bumped into Luna. She had returned from Rex’s first strike team mission. Looks like she was wearing some new gear that they must have found on the trip.

“You made it back! Glad you are okay!” Her expression didn’t change.

“New helmet?” Nothing. She walked closer.

In a swift motion, Luna lifted me off the ground and slung me over her shoulder like I was a fresh kill. “Um, Luna, are you feeling alright?” I asked as I tried to wiggle free of her grasp, but her grip was like a vice keeping me firmly attached to her shoulder. Which I sort of didn’t mind, but something felt wrong about this. Luna still hadn’t said anything as she continued to descend down to the main cavern. I had given up trying to break out of her grasp a few tunnels ago, and when we got to the main cavern I saw several other dogs all bound up in rope. Luna stopped and unceremoniously dropped me to the ground, and set about tying me up as well, and dragging me over to the others.

The unbound hounds paced around as new packmates were brought in and tied up. Blood covered some of the newly arrived. Wimpers filled the cavern and there were some yells demanding that we all be told what was going on. None of the helmeted hounds responded. They didn’t say anything at all, not even to each other. Quickly, everyone’s attention shifted to the Long Hall, one of the main hallways that had been opened to the sky by the blast. From the dark emerged a flock of flying ponies in strange bug-like armor.

Growls, howls, and threats to kill arose from the tied up crowd. The head flyer, wearing a different outfit than the others, yet still resembling an oversized bug, sat down in front of an angry dog. What she was yelling was nearly indecipherable to me, the pony certainly wasn’t going to understand it. The pony stuck its face into the angry hound’s and sneered. She shifted her weight and tried to bite the pony’s nose off. She missed. The black shelled flyer pulled back without a scratch, turned around effortlessly and bucked the angry dog. Knocked backwards, she fell limp onto the ground. Silence filled the room. All anydog could do was stare at what had just happened. The head pony made a motion to the others and they all produced helmets like Luna’s. Simultaneously, every dog not wearing a helmet frantically struggled to remove the fetters that held them in place.

A commotion broke out behind me.

“Shit. One of them broke free,” one of the ponies spoke. The head pony responded,

“Cap it or kill it, I don’t care.” Three shots were fired. The first was followed by a yelp, the second by a thump, and the third by the distinctive sizzle of a target disintegrating into a pile of dust.

“Damn hellhounds. I hate these damned things.”

“Just get the helmets on and we can get back on track.”

The capped pack members grabbed handfuls of helmets from the ponies and moved through the crowd, placing them on all of our heads. Half of the pack had been capped by the time Luna made her way to me. I sort of hoped that she’d bend down and give me a wink to say that she wasn’t in on this, that she wasn’t really listening to the flying ponies and that at the last second we would turn on them and take them all out. Approaching exactly as I’d hoped, she leaned down but there was no wink. Producing a helmet from behind her back, she unceremoniously slipped it onto my head. It became hard to think. Unsure of what really happened, I felt like I had entered a dream.

I bashed down a door. Another hound pushed around me and slashed the pony standing in the room. I pulled out a gun and aimed at another pony. Mentally, I couldn’t pull the trigger. The gun went off. Pony fell.

My claw was wet with blood. A pony lay in the corner, shredded and splayed open. I pulled a dull carving knife out of my hide. Looking at the door entryway, a flying pony stood watching me. The damn thing grinned. I did nothing. I turned around and proceeded deeper into the building.

Mines were strewn on the ground around us. We placed more. Someone tripped. One went off. We dragged the body away and gave it to the flying ponies to dispose of. They took the claws off and dropped the body into the forest. We continued laying mines.

One of the attack pack had been downed. A flying pony had shot him numerous times. We burst out of the ground and started a synchronized charge. They hadn’t yet detonated any of our mines. Somedog felt the need to change that and planted one right beneath one of the ponies. The pony noticed and called out, alerting the rest of their herd. Its body lifted ever so slightly off of the ground. The mine did not go off. We stopped the charge and hid behind some trees, pulled the rifles off our backs, loaded them and turned the safeties off. One of our shots hit the pony who noticed the mine placement. It looked upset, but not too terribly hurt. Fire continued for a few moments.

The two hounds next to me motioned that they were going to move in closer. They wanted me to stay back to provide covering fire. I aimed at the gryphon in the pony party as it was the only one still paying attention to us. The others had turned to observe the phoenix that had just been turned to stone. The two others completed their advance and reestablished themselves behind a new group of trees. As soon as they opened fire, I moved out to join them.

For a moment, I was more lucid. I could finally think clearly, as if the dream had ended. While my own thoughts had come back to me and the terrible dreams I had of my packmates being dismembered had passed, I found that I was still standing in the same place where I was at the end of my least dream. The rifle I had used in the dream sat in front of me with the forcibly applied helmet placed next to it. Something felt off. The rifle and helmet seemed much larger than they had been in the dream. All of the ponies, as well as the one gryphon, were staring at me.

The two hounds in front of me were reloading. Looking down, instead of seeing paws and claws in front of me, there stood a set of pearl white hooves. I tried to slash at them, but they mirrored my movements and I couldn’t hit them. I must have still been dreaming. My two pack mates had turned to see where I had gone. They didn’t seem too happy with what they saw. Angrily, they started moving towards me. Panicking and unsure of what to do, I froze. I looked back up and saw that the lighter grey pony’s horn had started to glow. Unable to do anything myself, it pushed me backwards. The two hounds, now charging at me like they were out to kill me, collided with each other exactly where I had been standing.

It really seemed like they were trying to kill me! Taking advantage of the confusion, I quickly turned around and I ran into the forest behind me. In the panic, I found myself yelling. No. This wasn’t a yell. This was a screech. The shrill scream didn’t hurt my ears nearly as bad as I had expected, though… I ran as fast as I could, but that simply wasn’t as fast as I wanted. The distinct crunching of heavy paws crushing twigs and leaves came closer and closer.

Brush covered the path in front of me. As I approached, I motioned to swipe through it. Instead of my claws, a dull hoof simply pushed the branches out of the way. The heavy footsteps became louder. With no time to find another way, I dove into the brush and did my best to push through it. Twigs, thorns, and thistles scraped at my face and body. I could feel them cutting at my coat, very unusual for such shrubberies on hard Diamond Dog skin. Without time to think about the pain, I powered through it, eventually reaching a clearing. In the clearing stood a lizard chicken. It very closely resembled the one that had turned the pony’s accompanying phoenix to stone. Having seen what kind of damage they could do, I closed my eyes and continued running. Maybe I could make it past safely. From the sounds of it, the two hounds had also gotten to the clearing. I was done for.

One of the hounds let out a yelp. There was a soft impact on the ground far behind me. Then there was a much more painful impact to my face. I had run headlong into a tree, one of the primary risks of running through the forest with one's eyes closed, I’d suppose. Having to open my eyes to find a way around the tree that had rudely interrupted my escape, I decided to take a peek at the commotion behind me. A hound lay on the ground, the bottom half of their body turned to stone. The other was trying to help them up. Now was my chance. I found a relatively clear path and ran down it. The scream of a dying chicken echoed through the trees.

Progress was fast, but not fast enough. Knowing how fast a dog can run was not a comforting piece of information at this time. Rumbling beneath my feet made me realize that I was not nearly as sensitive to vibration as I had previously been. Also, I was standing in a very bad position. Sidestepping out of the way, claws burst from the ground where my body had just been. The oddly gigantic hound looked down at me and approached slowly, ready to lunge at me if I made any sudden movement. All this time, due to the fog in my mind, I hadn’t really noticed who I’d been with. Now that he was staring me down and I was thinking just a bit more clearly, I could clearly see who it was.

“Brutus, it’s me!” I tried to speak to him. He didn’t respond. It was just like Luna back in the burrows. “Brutus, it’s me! Spike!” At the mention of my name, he seemed to pause. It wasn’t for long, though and he raised his paw and readied his claws. Sharp, shimmering claws descended towards my face. I flinched and closed my eyes. Moments later I opened them, surprised that my body was still intact. Brutus had been grabbed by a great black moss-covered hound. There were no claws on this creature, but its immense size towered over Brutus. It flung him backwards as if he were no more than a puppy. Brutus came to a sudden stop as he collided with a tree.

The impact had smashed his helmet. He took a moment or two to look around and then he set his eyes on me. It felt like he had just rediscovered my existence. He scrambled to his feet, but he had ignored the great moss creature that sort of blended into the surroundings. The large beast moved a paw down towards Brutus. By the time he noticed, it was much too late. The paw hit his body and kept moving until it pinched him against the tree he had hit. Brutus let out a yelp of pain. The great arm gave a second shove. The tree cracked under the pressure and Brutus was pushed further into the woody pulp. He let out a squeal and fell limp.

Having seen enough, I knew I had to run. I just hoped that this creature was as slow as it appeared. Moving quickly through the forest, the trees around me seemed to all be covered in a black moss. It appeared to be the same black moss that covered the great hound that killed Brutus. Maybe there was no hound, but it couldn’t have just been moss…. Tendrils of moss reached out and tried to touch me. One managed to skim my… Flank? I picked up the pace losing my orientation and in the process, losing track of where I was. Everything just looked the same. The moss seemed to have dispersed for the most part, though I kept moving just to be sure. Moments before I was able to collect my thoughts, I found myself running, then tumbling down a slippery slope. The slight grade was covered in muck and there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t get immersed in it. I was now a wet, dark brown mess. When I hit the bottom, I just laid there. I had been running for a very long time and I simply couldn’t keep it up. The trees were absent of any black moss patches, just the regular blue and green stuff.

The sun had set some time between when I started running and when I stopped running and now it was getting cold. The wind picked up and I moved to try and find some shelter. After a short search I found a tree with a small hollow, maybe big enough for a pony but certainly not for a Diamond Dog. Despite this fact, the opening was somehow big enough for me to slide inside. Blocked from the wind inside the cozy little hole, I started to warm up. A brief inspection showed that the hollow was actually pretty well hidden from passersby and unfriendly creatures looking for a snack. There also appeared to be no signs that the tree might come to life and kill me. Or so I hoped...

Footnote: New Character!
New Perk: Science! Rank 1 -- Take advantage of pony technology with access to base level and Rank 1 high-tech mods.

Author's Note

Updates will become more frequent from here on out. Life got crazy. Stay safe. ~Common Thistle

We've started to actually function as proper human beings just in time for the world to go crazy, so hopefully we can get a backlog started to keep updates on a six(ish) week time frame. - Elden Andel