-Equus, Ponyville, Equus Tianhuo-

It was a peaceful day out, but I still felt the tension of not knowing what was happening with my beloved ewe.

I calmly fed Ruff, Ruft, Woof and Puff their meal, I appreciated the company of the Canis Minor while I stayed here in Equestria. I miss my home in the dragon lands, but I hear tell that the Tenko is doing a good job with making sure our household was still running properly.

The four puppies appreciated my presence as well with happy nuzzles, I had forged a tighter relationship with all of them than I previously had.

All we could do is wait, but Pom has already survived so much… we believed in her.

Blighter, the pink shade wolf rose up from my shadow and yipped cheerfully and I sighed, then I simply hugged the mass of wolf shaped energy and poked them in the nose with a hoof. Blighter seemed to enjoy it and affection fed him quite well as did hugs… a three second hug kept him fed for more than half a day.

When I had first heard of Dolly Dalmatian… well I wasn’t upset. I was more relieved than anything to hear Pom has a canine companion to work with. That she even recently somehow recovered Dormarch as well soothed some of the nerves that Pom was not in a good place and was slipping into total despair, but my worries would not flee entirely as she has actively been through more than three war zones at this point and would go into one more if she deals with her current trial.

Tambelon was going to be quite a war zone in and of itself, but at least I would finally be there for her ‘when’ she made it that far.

The only things I could do was prepare and rest while Pom was out of contact, I flexed my muscles slightly and tried to relax.

“Hey Tianhuo have you my future descendants T-Bone and Razor, they got in a mess with a magical necromantic time traveling piece of work with a pocket watch phylactery and got a little stuck in history! My sister Jacky would help them, but she’s dealing with a cursed island that keeps spawning evil flying monkeys made of durians and green furred evil orangutan witches that die in water and somehow survive despite the constant tropical rains going on around that island… I’m wondering how she got that lucky…” Sighing at the sound of Jaded’s voice, I couldn’t help but put my hooves over my face and shake my head. “Oh and they are not brothers, just best friends that are exceedingly distant cousins. Maybe brothers in arms at the very least. I’m just here showing them around Ponyville… not silently plotting the downfall of Saddle Arabia or anything like that.”

That last part was a bold faced lie as anyone that knew the name ‘Mirage’ would know.

I turned to look at her innocent wide eyes and enthusiastic wide smile, it was a little too wide. I looked at the two muscular toms near her looking around at all the colorful houses and blinking a bit dazedly… they were quite tall for Abyssinians.

Why was 'the ever annoying' Jaded coming to me with… oh she was trying to distract me from my worries like a good friend, I’ll let her do so just this once. Though I think she should really take the problem to the time police like Dr. Time Turner Whooves of Capture Bridle Defend, he’s the foremost expert on time anomalies after all.

Really the CBD wasn’t hiding very well. Not when Pinkie Pie was a member of the organization with her anomaly capturing parties always somehow working in an anomalous manner, everyone says that Pinkie is the most anomalous pony in Ponyville and they’d be wrong.

That title of most anomalous pony goes to the Muffin Cultist ‘Director Derpy’, who is apparently still allowed to lead the Ponyville branch of the CBD despite calling the anomaly known as Muffinthulhu on purpose. Said anomaly was now rendered safe or inert forever, because it no longer existed after being eaten by a bunch of cultists… of which Jaded was notably one of them.

Derpy kind of outed the CBD as an organization, without somehow outing her foodie cultist activities and nobody in Ponyville would believe or hear talk that Derpy Hooves was in fact a cultist leader, but apparently being the leader of an anomaly hunting organization with a side job as a mail delivery pony made perfect sense. It made ponies actively want to fund the local CBD more, given Ponyville was a large hotspot for constant weirdness and anomalies.

“See, Ponyville is the weirdest forever!” Pinkie said as she popped op out of a blueberry pie on a nearby windowsill and then licked some of it off of her hoof.

“Nobody said it wasn’t Pinkie.” Jaded said lazily with a dull look in her eyes, before looking over her shoulder. “That is Pinkie Pie just being Pinkie Pie, don’t think too hard about it.”

“Did she just…” Razor started to say while pointed at the fact that pinkie pulled the rest of her body from the pie and then proceeded to eat the pie afterwards. He looked like he was fairly intelligent, yet he was about to actually question Pinkie Pie's existence.

“Don’t, just don’t.” The much wiser T-bone muttered and nodded at Jaded in understanding.

-Moon Cell Realms, Midgar City, Upper City, inside a parking garage several floors up, Dormarch-

We had managed to get out from the power relay station without a fuss, mostly because we didn’t stop to fight anything and were flying full tilt out of dodge. Its destruction probably caused the other surrounding power stations to falter somewhat, but I’m fairly certain the other cannons throughout the rest of Midgar were still in working aside from the ones over the entryway.

It was raining and hadn’t stopped since we exited the tunnel network through a train station and entered the nearest parking garage. I think the dark clouds and constant raining was just a constant in the Upper City of Midgar.

Our forces in the lower city were relieved of being bombarded from above, but that didn’t help with the fact that Moon Cell’s forces held a tight grip over the airspace of the upper city. Whether it was aquatic or mechanical, the flying EPs were like a hive of buzzing bees up here and there was absolutely no way we were flying through the storming sky full of death at a few thousand feet in the air. Plus we had no idea where Moby Dick currently was.

There were just many Brute EPs running around on the ground as there were EPs in the air, those golems were definitely becoming a highly common raw power elite and it made fighting in the streets a guarantee they’d show up within a minute no matter where you were in the upper city. Moon Cell Watcher’s hovered around the buildings at varying heights and were everywhere looking in all directions trying to spot us. There were gunships the further inward you went from what little we could make out through the torrential rains, enough that they could probably quickly turn Metal Hound 002 into a vague mass of metal chunks if they concentrated fire and enough of them were around.

The massive tower at the center of it all had our goal of Merak. The guy was going overkill as far as being protected was concerned, there was no we could approach that building without drawing attention or being spotted.

Generally when we beat the main servant of a given realm, we tended to take control of the realm. Merak was already proving to be bad, if not worse than the previous two servants as far as tactical strategy was concerned, he could keep us away indefinitely unless we press forward under the harshest of conditions. Guess Moon Cell figured that throwing raw power at us wasn’t working when it chose Merak for this position, now it was more numbers and varying levels of quality.

It wasn’t hard to tell that Merak intended to beat us outright with sheer attrition and was, scarily enough, succeeding at it. If he was as lazy as Elise said he was, then I wonder where we’d be if he was actually trying.

We didn’t have nearly enough forces to take Midgar City and as such we had to take Merak, who was the heavily defended king on a ridiculously lopsided chess board. I doubt that even with half the PLANTs in the lower city under our control, we wouldn’t be any close to victory before we had them as Merak was prepared for most of what we would or could do. I doubted he could account for everything though, since as long as Mom breathes… there’s an inordinately large amount of uncontrollable chaos to be found.

The parking garage we took shelter in was safe, well as safe as it could get… arguably we were safer than our friends were in the city underneath this one. Whoever built this place could be said to be making a statement that they were the center of everything and above everyone while having control of the entire city and the lives in it, wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest from what I’ve seen of that rather sketchy underground facility with a prison with implied unethical things going on.

Mom was silently working on a plan for how to draw Merak’s attention as much as possible, we needed to flip the board and then some. We were not going to survive attacking that massive tower ourselves, maybe we could get some help from that guy with the strange swarm of robot spheres hovering around him protectively?

I glanced at mother, resting against the wall nearby, hoof left hoof had a tight grip on the shaft of the paralance. We had no idea what that thing was capable of, but I think Mom had a better idea than most at this point.

Checking on her body, I noted something that would be a problem in the near future… it was a problem that both Dolly and Shanty would be facing as well when they woke up.

The endless battle that was known as hunger, the need for sustenance. We were going to need food soon and we didn’t have anything from the supplies that Ocellus airdropped in the lower city. At least Canard and Jeanne would be doing well on that front.

We could split and eat the Sitrus Berry, but what Pom, Shanty and Dolly needed was something filling… I could survive off eating data and was fortunate to be able to heal myself. I was logically doing fine in this environment provided.

“Mom… do you care about theft if there’s no one around to complain about it?” I asked as I remember something in the garage a floor down as I looked at the parked Metal Hound 002.

“Depends, are you suggesting we steal food that nobody is likely going to be eating anyway?” The question Mom wasn’t asking as she looked up at me slightly forlorn and shaken was, would it be healthy to consume and would some of it be meat like in taste. “NPCs don’t seem to be very prevalent around here if you hadn’t noticed and they’d be the only ones eating the food if we don’t and they don’t really need it do they?”

“They do not… it’s not too bleak as you would think.” Though overly salted meat sticks, lots of highly sugary snacks, something coated in a cheese substance… all of it would be decidedly unhealthy to consume in large quantities to make up for lost meals from all the fighting we’ve already done over the last few hours. Very few things would be health in a vending… peanut butter based snacks would be nice, but even peanut butter could have too much oil in it.

“At least water won’t be an issue when Shanty gets up.” Pom looked to Shanty as she said this, Shanty could theoretically separate pure water from a mud puddle without any pathogens or bacteria being in the liquids. “Please be quick about it Dormarch and grab what you thing we can stomach, I’ll watch things here.”

Mom wasn’t going anywhere, but if we did get attack here she could hop into Metal Hound 002 to use it as an overly glorified turret.

-Fifteen minutes later and a completely raided vending machine-

Dolly and Shanty still weren’t awake, but mom was poking and prodding over the food I dumped out of my Digivice. Also some of the strange energy drinks called Potions, Hi-Potions and Ethers.

“Dormarch… why would a vending machine have liquefied magic in it?” Mom asked while staring at the bottle labeled ‘Ether’ as if she could see the magic in it.

“You do realize the things we see in these realms existed at one point right? So the local brand of drink might have been made for magical fatigue. Given the idea that materia was a part of this world, and anyone can use materia, I would say that Ether was made to stop the constant headaches from using far too much magic.” I scanned the Ether, it was vaguely safe to drink considering it had the consistency of a overly thick herbal remedy of some sort. The ‘Potion’ drinks were something I was a bit iffier on. “It should be safe to drink.”

Popping the cap on the plastic bottle open with a quick twist of her hoof, Mom quickly slung some of those liquids down her throat.

“… Honestly… tastes a lot like toothpaste and melted ice cubes.” Mom shivered a bit and clutched at her head with a hoof. “Whoa… why does everything feel so clear and happy all of the sudden?!”

“Mom, while I don’t know magical ailments very well, from what Ocellus has said of something like this you were likely suffering magical exhaustion.” I stated dryly, plus she was the one that pointed out its liquid magic and actually drank it.

“You mean I was suffering from magic exhaustion… good stuff…” Mom, then moved over to Dolly, opened her mouth and poured a small amount into it and made her body swallow it. Mom could feel what Dolly was feeling even when she wasn’t awake. She likely could feel what I was feeling if she tapped into our bond like she does with Dolly, even I could feel what Dolly feels if I wanted to as well. “Huh… Dolly won’t have a headache when she wakes up and it feels safe for her to drink. Makes for a really nice migraine cure.”

Taking up a potion, Mom took a sip and blinked.

“Lemon, seltzer water and… several other things mixed in. Really thick liquid, not full of sugar… oddly bitter, but appreciable like dark chocolate in a fruity kind of way.” Mom smacked her lips. “I’m going to say it’s as strong as a Sitrus Berry, because I think this drink heals physical injuries.”

Then mom tried the Hi-Potion, she pause… swallowed what little she took into her mouth and looked at Shanty and then poured the remainder of the Hi-potion into the goats mouth while rubbing her throat. Once every drop was guzzled down there was an immediate reaction.

“What be tasting like a fairy seltzer with a double shot of copper monkey rum with a hint of sugar malt?” Shanty’s eyes snapped open and she was sitting up and awake immediately, her injuries evaporating as quickly or even faster than when a Sitrus Berry is consumed.

That… someone made something feasibly as strong as a Sitrus Berry, I couldn’t even begin to describe what I’m feeling right now.

“Why am I not more surprised by this discovery?” Mom stated flatly with a half lidded gaze at the potion bottle she quickly decided to finish drinking. “Drinks to heal physical injury and magical exhaustion… also no Shanty, it’s not alcoholic.”

“It is still being quite the interesting taste though!” Shanty stated with a broad grin. “So what be happening?”

As she asked, I watched as Shanty began to tear into the unhealthy snacks I brought with wild abandon… probably wouldn’t affect her health in the slightest. I’d even dare to say she has more alcohol content in her body than an entire Irish pub after twenty four hours.

We’d definitely get in our eventual bathroom breaks while we were here, because afterwards we’d be fighting for our very lives.

We quickly got Shanty up to speed and Dolly woke up some time in the middle of it and started chewing on a jerky stick. Once we were all on the same page, it was time to decide on where we’re going from here, because we needed to somehow gain Merak’s ire in a huge way and keep his attention on us to stop him from hurting our friends any further and give them some respite.

Any distraction from our lower city foothold and Castle Alexander was likely to be a good distraction.

“Hm… good jerky…” Dolly commented idly as she gnawed away at the chunky rectangular stick delight, it was even cleaning her teeth as she ate it so that was a win in my book. “Though the slogan is corny as all get out, ‘Gau brand jerky, feed your wild child’!”

Some of us were laughing harder than others, but I don’t think Dolly got the reason why, considering she was the Dalmatian family’s wild child. Sure she wasn’t as wild around Mom and me, in fact she was quite downright responsible and I looked up to her for knowing when to be serious even as she tried to keep the mood up around us by staying positive when we’re not.

“Well at least that is better than ‘Potion, the good health in a bottle brand’.” I snorted out loud.

“Interceptor Bites, the flavor that will intercept your expectations.” Mom said while eating a bag of oatmeal cookies with a friendly Doberman on printed on the bag with some ninja man in black, said cookies were shaped like four pointed shuriken. Apparently it was dog friendly oatmeal cookies brand, just don’t give too much of that to a dog.

“Chunky Chocobo Choco Chip Cookies, they’re chirping cheerful?” Shanty asked with a raised brow as she downed a chocolate cookie snack from a bag with bright yellow bulky bird on it. She was a goat from Equus so chocolate probably wouldn’t affect her, but I noticed Dolly staying away from any crumbs that fell on the floor.

“I know the difference between carob and chocolate Dormarch, don’t worry so much about your big sis.” Dolly stated while waving a paw at me and Mom. She continued on to eat some peanut butter snacks by Cloud Crackers and Yuffie’s yummies incorporated. “I’m not super dumb, kind of wish that ‘Merry Lack’ guy was…”

Given that Mom wasn’t translating Dolly nor was my digivice, Shanty didn’t bother asking for a translation and idly wondering mumble if it was Dolly getting names wrong again.

Here we were surviving on off strange brand vending machine goods… like Red’s red hot hotdog flavored corn chips, Wallace’s walnut icing Avalanche cinnamon rolls and Rydia’s rice n’ ranch rum balls. I think only Shanty could stomach and enjoy that last one, even if most of the alcohol was burned off in the cooking process for the snacks the ranch part was a bit overpowering on the flavor.

Other brands include Dagger’s deathly delicious Danishes, with really nice cream cheese to die for and things like Gilgamesh’s gil pickle chips… with what looked like an oddly familiar personality on the bag and the factory fried and dried pickles tasted pretty good. Hopefully it wouldn’t clog anyone’s arteries.

The last was a fairly popular pack of snack food among us called ‘Quina’s Quintessential Quagmire Questers packs’, which was full of dried fruit and vegetables which mom was Happy to see. Said pack was neatly separated into dried fruits and vegetables that just about anything could eat to survive in a dire situations. It was marketed with the slogan ‘You won’t get bogged down, when these snacks are around’ and had food that just about anything could and would eat, even Dolly liked it well enough and she was a bit picky about her food if she was suffering kibble withdrawal.

“Speaking of Merak… how are we going to draw his ire. We need to do something huge, something that absolutely can’t go unanswered…” I noted Mom reading the label to see the potions and snack packs didn’t need refrigeration and stowed some Hi-potions in her pack. “I hate drawing so much danger to us, but we need his undivided attention. We need to do something absolutely big, something that can’t be outright ignored. Also we shouldn’t try to rely on that random neutral servant we met that we don’t know much about.”

“Well the guy ‘Blares Ick’ is said to be lazy, a minimal effort genius right?” Dolly seemed to have an idea drawing my and Pom’s attention, Shanty was looking more at Pom since she’ll translate if it’s a good idea. The broad grin on Dolly’s face spoke of danger, insanity and the air quotes version of ‘fun’. Not a good combination by any stretch of the imagination. “I’m an expert on when and how to be lazy, well before I met Pom that is… she’s a lot of effort and worth having some responsibility for.”

“That’s sweet… in a back pawed kind of way.” I stated dryly.

“Yeah, but she wouldn’t be Dolly if she wasn’t able to pull off something incredible on a moment’s notice…” Mom smirked and Dolly looked cheerful, then Mom said the next part. “What we need to do is not think things through and Dolly is an expert in that territory.”

“Hey yeah, I’m pretty g… hey, wait a minute! But yeah, I have some ideas, it’s going to take some doing… first how’s Metal Hound doing?” Barked Dolly slightly incensed as she turned and started looking at the missing canopy and grimacing. “What I’m going to suggest is quick hit and run shots at the tower and pester Merak and the EPs in the upper city to the best of our abilities like crazy, what’s the distance on those shoulder missiles and can we hit the tower at the extreme distances through all that rain? I’m not expecting them to do much damage to the tower, we just have to poke that bear somehow.”

“That’s… not a bad idea actually… huh… the missiles are rated for multiple miles and are multi-targeting turn off the targeting system and they’ll fly farther, but will be dumb firing. We’d need a way to defend Metal Hound 002 from assault while we do the attacks though, so we can’t get too close.” It would need a calculating person that could measure both the range and distance get a firing solution to… oh… I could do that and maybe Mom as well. “Shanty, Dolly just gave us a very good idea, I would like your input on how well you can do thing involving rain water… Mom can you pilot Metal Hound 002 with all three of us working in concert? I need some time to plot some extreme range shots on the tower and Dolly can be the primary pilot while I take control of the weapons.”

We started quickly hashing out our seating arrangements and how we were going to pull this off, this was going to be a bit difficult to do… but not impossible.

-Twenty minutes later, Shinra Tower, Merak the ‘Lazy Laser’ Lemming-

What the hell was burrowing through the wall at three hundred miles an hour and leaving streaks of rainbow in the air everywhere?!

I rewound the visuals and to see the head of the green and yellow colored bullet at the head trailing rainbow of energy and paused it and was met with something weird.

I paused the screen right? It was paused, it said it was paused.

Yeah it was paused alright… then why were that tiny yellow bug bugged out blue eyes still rotating and the rainbow of energy still moving behind it?!

I’m pretty sure this should be a still image! It was not a G I F and was taken from a live feed! HOW?! I am not going to lose the walls to something so… so ridiculous! I decided to stop the taking of the PLANTs by setting an area ahead of the bug to detonate and stop it in a permanent fashion from causing any more problems in the direction it was traveling. Calculating a three hundred miles an hour bug was child’s play, there was no way that thing could out accelerate an explosion and it won’t take the walls out.

Now to check on other things.

At least the Thousand Gunners I sent were dealing with the mess the Bombs were creating everywhere, it is causing power problems in the lower city given the two reactors they blew up and most of the under city was on fire now. At least they were only causing problems in the lower city and were contained by the aerial forces. It was all well away from my upper city slice of pure technological gaming paradise.

…

What in the world was that muscle bound crow monster and where did it come from?! Was that the thing that was inside of Ifrit!? It looks demented, like from the cover of a metal band and it was traveling up the highway towards the upper city.

I’ll look into that later and will send some patrols its way and get some data on the unknown entity.

Now let’s see what’s happening with my enemies down there.

Those gnats were holding on for dear life in the lower city and managing to hold their foothold and the power station to the cannons below seemed to have been taken out by Copen the Slayer Dragon, but they couldn’t last forever under the pressure of most of my aerial forces being right on top of them and slowly crushing them with the ground forces. They were living on borrowed time.

The ewe was in hiding, don’t know where she went, as was that Slayer Dragon nuisance still at war with Moby Dick. I had everything under con… what’s that sound? Why is the anti-air air defense going off and why were they still firing if they had already shot down the target? They shouldn’t be able to miss something big like a Magitek Armor flying in if my opponent had gone on a suicidal assault and…

My eyes widened as glass, rain and debris went flying everywhere from several explosions and launched me off my favorite floating lazy lemming couch.

The most annoyingly of all about the sudden attack of explosives getting through my defenses... the explosions, rain water and glass ruined my computer that I was about to get back to. Just when I was about to reach a save point in the game I had running on it too!

Did they want my attention or was that a serious effort at actually taking me out? I’m leaning more the former.

Well they just earned it, unfortunately for them I actually planned for this. I’m not going to let them plink away at my shields without reprisal. I needed to recalibrate the anti-air defense so that unauthorized things like that little yellow bug can’t get at the tower by air… the programming for that should take about five minutes considering how much area the towers guns covered.

To that end I’m sending out the Einhander Twins. Let’s see the ewe escape from my aerial hunters, because that missile attack has signs of that flying armor all over it and there’s no way it could outrun them.

The EPs will try to keep track of that armor until the Einhander's catch up to them and when they do... there will be no escaping them unless both of them are taken out. I really doubt that the ewe could manage that with the damage that armor has already taken.

-Above Midgar Upper City, airspace, Pom-

We were hovering above the middle of the city, between the out edge and the center of the plate just above some buildings and on the cusp of the range our missiles could fly.

We let loose a barrage of five arcing shots into the distance and saw flashes of gunfire trying to shoot them out of the air and they actually hit the tower. The damage to the large tower was minimal, but Dormarch had landed all five shots on it even if we didn’t know what exactly we were aiming at and he had them land wide spread over the upper floors of the building.

We managed to avoid Moon Cell Watchers and the helicopter gunships patrols from stopping our long range assault, but now they were on to us.

Dolly was flying the Metal Hound 002 piloting us through the torrential rain and the occasional thunder and lightning. Speaking of the rain, it was kept off of us by the Paralance propping up my spine and the back of the chair. Dolly was piloting through me, while Dormarch had his claws on the weapon systems.

Shanty was also idly pushing an amount of raining water away from us and even somehow using it to sense things moving in the storm up to a certain distance.

We were all awkwardly positioned in the Metal Hound 002’s seat. I’m pretty sure if anyone was looking at us right now they’d find our slightly cramped conditions funny, but we had to make do with what space we had. Dolly and Dormarch were thankfully not large, well as long as Dormarch didn’t digivolve while in the seat with us, but them and Shanty was a little bit hard to work with.

“Do you think that riled him up? Oh right, we forgot to have that discussion Shanty… we were so busy with our plans.” My mind was on so many other things at the moment, like how Dormarch was going to do the long range artillery strike without interception or incidentally eating the Gau brand jerky and finding it to be delicious and fairly chewy. The flavors were not what I expected to say the least, I really didn’t like the idea that I was craving meat or even enjoying it somewhat.

They had tried to intercept the five missiles and it was likely because of their small size that they even got through what looked like solid wall of fire lighting up the raining darkness with tracer rounds.

So yeah… that’s a big no go on simply rushing the central tower, where Merak definitely is, with a full frontal assault. Had we’d tried that, we’d be dead right now unless I jumped and used the paralance to dive past their defenses… we couldn’t exactly fly too high or the storm might have a chance of taking us out just by wind alone. Also there’s always Moby Dick to be concerned about unless I personally see it get destroyed, because I wasn’t ruling it out as well.

“It is being okay, I be thinking I am being alright with whatever it is going on with me and we can be having that talk later after we be finishing Merak.” Shanty suddenly sat up straight and narrowed her eyes as I glanced at her. “We be having bigger problems to be worrying about, down into the city we are being targeted by a lot of things that be coming this way!”

We saw this coming and luckily Dolly already had us dropping to start randomly going through the streets flying clockwise through the upper city at a ludicrously dangerous speed, all while Dormarch is making sure the flight pack didn’t burn out from stress.

We just kicked a proverbial hornet’s nest and now said hornets were coming after us for it in numbers we simply couldn’t handle outside of a running fight.

-Rooftops near where the fleeing Metal Hound 002 was being chased by a large number of flying EPs, Copen the Slayer Dragon-

Merak, that name… it itches at my brain… he was likely the reason I was here, given he shouldn’t be alive as far as what faint memories I have were telling me.

Couldn’t face those defenses yet and that mech pilot is certainly in trouble, but it was none of my business what they do even if they are the only life up here aside from Merak. I did not need to save them, they could probably save themselves if they were as talented as they looked in fixing that broken down ramshackle trash heap they called a machine.

My business was killing the guy within that gilded tower with more defenses than Lola could deal with at the moment.

My opponent was too lazy to move from his location, he had forces otherworldly and was a stain on this realm by his very existence. He wouldn’t be ready for me when I finally came for him.

“Come out of the rain Copen, its… cold…” Lola… I looked to the small battle pods innocent yellow eyes as she looked at me standing in the rain. “At least my temperature sensors say so.”

“Fine.” Territories were a resource and this world worked in odd ways, but I knew what my mission was the moment Lola repeated that name to me and I made my way inside to pick up my weapon.

No more aimless wandering and trying to figure out how to end a flying whale with very little resources, I had a definitive focused goal that was slightly more achievable now. Still trying to figure out how to kill the whale though, after all the trouble it's given me I'm not letting that thing live for much longer.

I checked my energy pistol, variable weapons system and the number of battle pods available to me on a refurbished computer. Refurbished to meet my needs that is.

A neutral servant... am I in a play and my part is reliving history of chasing down monsters and hunting them to their very last? Sounds like the exact reason I would show up, I’m here to slay a whale and a brilliant monster. At least things aren't boring around here.

I calmly stepped inside and took up a Hi-potion and chugged it down, did the liquids in these things have to be so darn thick?! At least my wounds got better the more of these I drank, I looked in the mirror at my wet form as my wounds closed up and slowly put my protective undershirt layer and armor back on.

Sitting down, I leaned back and closed my eyes, I was going to rest for an hour and then go out and deal with everything personally.

-Lola the battle pod-

Poor boss... he could stand to be a little more friendly and less lonely.

Author's Note

Q: What is an Einhander?

A: Basically a space/jet fighter with a single manipulator/grappler claw from the game of the same name 'Einhander'.

It is in the same vein as a Vic Viper from Gradius or an R9 Fighter from R-type, with a notable lack of upgrades.

It's main ability is the grappling arm's capability to take up large weapons it grabs off its enemies to use. It can block bullets with said weapons that the manipulator arm holds, but it chews through the health of the weapon that is being used as shield until the weapon is destroyed or it runs out of ammo.

Q: What does Einhander have to do with Final Fantasy, if anything?

A: Einhander appears as a creature you can use as an ally in 'World of Final Fantasy', officially making it a Final Fantasy character/monster and part of the Magitek Series of war machines. At least the automated version of an Einhander anyway.

Q: How dangerous exactly is an Einhander?

A: In the game 'Einhander', a single Einhander ends up destroying the equivalent of two militaries and stops an entire war between the moon and the earth by itself.