Rider on the Storm

THWACK
KRACK
POW

The attacking quartet of storm beasts were flung away in all four cardinal directions, thrown to the four winds by the power of your arms alone and rolling out as they hit the floor.

“Nice try,” you chuckle darkly, really getting into the act, “But when it comes to CQC, I’ve got the upper hand.”

Not deterred in the slightest, the four jump right back onto their feet and come out swinging at you again.

Brings a smile to your face, seeing them taking their training so seriously.

And train them, you do. You train, and train, and train. You train those four until they physically can’t train anymore, and need to be carried away to the medical team by the next quad of boys in line to train. And then you train the everloving snot out of them, too. And the next four after that. And then the next four. And honestly, you lost count of the lineup of quads after 20.

With every quad, you take note of their improving skills and teamwork. With every quad, you see your efforts bearing fruit. And with every quad, your pride swells more and more, your entirely well deserved ego growing in lockstep with it.

But eventually, as all good things must do, today’s session comes to an exhausting, satisfying conclusion. Time might have flown while you and the troops were having your fun, but the clock doesn’t lie; this was another session that lasted for 12 straight hours. For the fourth consecutive week in a row. Hot damn, does it feels good to be back on schedule! Just you, your boys, and some hardcore parkour training, just as God intended! You couldn't have asked for a better end to the streak.

Your eyes scan across the room full of storm beasts, all of them straight plum tuckered out. Even the storm beasts who had started earlier today and probably could go another round didn’t, knowing they’d overextend themselves by doing so. Some of them learned that the hard way.

As for yourself, you’d be lying if you said you weren’t in the same boat. The bodysuit under the armour really lacked in the breathing department on account of the weatherproofing, leaving you once again as one thoroughly sweaty bitch. But hey, you love training in accurate conditions. And besides, it makes the shower afterwards so much better!

“Alright,” you announce with a clap, “I think that’s a wrap for today, ladies. Hit the showers and start windin’ down, and I’ll catch you all tomorrow again at 0600, sharp!”

Hurrahs and salutes in varying stages of exhaustion ring out, and the boys filter on out of the room. As per tradition, you wait for them all to leave and for the custodial boys to come in before taking off for yourself.

First port of call, once again, is your quarters. And just like the last two weeks, thoughts of the now very near future whirl through your head as you make your way up there.

Only three more days left until the assault begins.

Three more days before all of ponykind gets put under your thumb.

Now, what you’ll do with them once they’re under said thumb is still an open question, but God damn it, they were total cuties. You’ll find a use for them!

Oh, and of course, three more days before the first phase of your plan begins. And only one element was out of place so far. Only a minor, optional element, sure. But still a good insurance policy to have kicking around for Plan B. Or at least he would be, if he actually fucking met up to confirm his status any fucking century now. Motherfucker better come through, you swear to Christ. You really don’t like it when your pieces start getting uppity.

You mean, it’s hardly surprising when they get uppity; that’s just the nature of the evil biz. It’s just disappointing.

Finally making it to your room, you see Cid once again on standby, this time with a nice, fatty folder full of paper. About time that dossier you requested came through. Waving at him in the universal sign of “I’ll get to you in a second”, you hit the bathroom and strip down, jumping into the shower in short order.

You know, a lesser man might have thought that your showerhead was making more hissing sounds than usual this fateful early evening. You, however, actually know what spatial audio awareness is, so it’s easy to deduce the added hissing is in fact coming from off to the side.

And you knew exactly who was doing the hissing. It was pretty easy to tell, given that you’ve worked with him before.

“Well look who’s finally decided to show his metaphorical face,” you say, not bothering to look in the noise’s direction.

“It’sssss hardly my fault that the Ssssstorm King changed his routesssss,” comes the almost comically serpentine reply from the noise’s general direction.

Funny, considering the guy the voice belongs to is only serpentine in the loyalty department.

“And here I thought you’d have been prepared for that.”

“If he wasssss lessssss paranoid, maybe...”

“Eh, I’ll grant you that,” you click, continuing to lather up with the bar of soap. “Now, I sure hope you’ve got some good news for me.”

“Your plan isssss ssssstupid and ridiculousssss, hasssss no chance of sssssuccesssss, and isssss going to end with you turned into a decorative ssssstatue. Ssssso of courssssse I’m ready to do my part.”

“Well golly gee willikers, I sure appreciate your honesty. Y’know, you could just ask me straight-up about how dumb you think my plan is instead of just fishing for answers.”

“Fine. Why isssss your plan ssssso insssssane?”

“Well because if it wasn’t, it would never work!”

“You’re ssssstupid if you think you can top how insssssane he is, commander.”

“Always saw ‘nevers’ as challenges, I’ll be honest. Besides, you say that as if that ever stopped you before.”

“My risssssk wasssss calculated.”

“But man, are you bad at math,” you snigger.

The voice sighs with the weary exhaustion you’ve come to expect from him.

“I hate your ssssstupid jokesssss.”

“Plenty more where they came from!”

“Anywaysssss. I will be ready for the meeting. Ready to sssssee you never ssssshow up on account of your invasssssion plansssss failing.”

“D’aww, you’re starting to sound like my parents!”

“Jussssst don’t doom too many of your forcesssss. I want to have sssssomething to take posssssesssssion of when everything isssss sssssaid and done.”

“No seriously, you’re really starting to sound like my parents! You take up spirit channelling while you were gone or something?”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Aight, smell ‘ya later.”

The hissing sound moves towards the bathroom vent, the fan groaning slightly in protest due to the added resistance. The fan soon returns to normal, heralding your surprise visitor’s departure.

You chuckle to yourself, rinsing the last of the soap off before shutting the water off and stepping out.

You already knew that Strife was going to backstab you, and you were already prepared for that outcome. Plan B didn’t need him there to be his usual backstabbing shitstain self, but it was a very welcome bonus. And it’s definitely still a good thing that he’s just as stupid as the last time he tried this; certainly too stupid to see what his real role in your plan is, that’s for sure.

Still, that takes care of the last piece on your board, so that’s a huge load off all the same!

Once you were towelled off and in your bathrobe, you step back out into your apartment and take the folder offered by Cid. Then you make a trip to the living room, sliding the glass doors to the outside deck open to get the sweet sound of rain and thunder filtering in before finally plopping your ass down on the couch to get your reading on.

One thing you had learned really quick during your time with the Storm King was that it wasn’t his style to learn about the places he wanted to invade before he invaded them. He much preferred the “blitz now, ask questions never” approach. And to be completely fair, it worked out for him most of the time. But you knew that Equestria was gonna be a different animal altogether, especially on account of your co-commander hailing from the place.

So after the King flatly refused to learn more about Equestria for some bafflingly fucking stupid reason or another, you had Wedge tag along with the away teams to troll around the world and pick up any and all information he could about Equestria on the DL. You were hoping for the deets on their defences, but honestly, anything beyond “four princess ponies to succ the magic out of” was gonna be a win.

And the resulting dossier did not disappoint you. The information here was great, much better than you were expecting. Wedge had once again outdone himself like the champion you always knew he was. In fact, the info was so good that it exposed a major potential issue with the plan.

Celestia. Luna. Cadance. Twilight. It was nice to finally be on a first-name and a special talent basis with the ladies you were gonna be screwing over. And most of them had some real impressive resumés, like controlling the fucking sun and moon. And you believed it, too. Having lived on this crazy-ass world for so long, you knew better than to doubt outlandish shit like that.

More importantly, they also had a bit of a track record of getting caught with their metaphysical panties down whenever a big bad rolled in to snap necks and cash checks. So, realistically? You were going to absolutely fucking steamroll them with barely any effort.

What you may not be able to steamroll, at least nowhere near as effectively, were these so-called “Elements of Harmony”. Equestria’s open secret weapon, made up of the purplest princess of the bunch and her five other decidedly not-princess friends. If your report was correct, they were the ones who actually solved a majority of Equestria’s problems, more than the actual military did. Like, for example, spanking all of those aforementioned big bads.

And apparently, they solved it with the literal power of friendship. As in, they had the power to do some kind of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers bullshit fusion dance and blast the everloving shit out of their enemies with what you could only describe as a fucking Care Bear Stare. You admit, you had a harder time believing that tidbit of intel, but Wedge had included a metric fuckton of pictures in the dossier as well, erasing all doubt. He not only had pics of both - both - flavours of their mahou shoujo transformation sequence, but there were also pictures of some beefy, evil-looking red centaur tasting the low-orbit ion rainbow.

That changed your target priorities by a considerable amount. If three out of four princesses were going to be the Worf-tier jobbers that this report was making them out to be, then you could honest-to-God just leave Tempest to solo them. Locking down Twilight and friends was going to need to be your highest priority instead.

And you were going to need to pray to the Lord Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that they wouldn’t be able to pull some major-league bullshit and find an opening to blast your ass. Granted, you knew how this game was played; despite your vastly superior abilities and tactics, they still had the immutable upper hand in everything. You knew the chances of them not giving you the bullshit express runaround were pretty well slim to none. But even so, you’re really hoping and praying that Murphy will choose to work his XCOM magic on them instead of you.

You didn’t yet have the tools to negate bullshit of that magnitude, and getting those tools was going to take months that you and Cid didn’t have. And you really, really didn’t want to use Plan B. Not if you could avoid it.

But you get the sneaking feeling that you won’t have much choice in the matter.

The next day...

KA-POW
WHAP
BAM

Storm beast after storm beast goes flying off to the sides as Tempest continues her practice, taking on what sure felt like all of them at once. She wasn’t, of course: she was taking on a dozen at a time. Still, this cram-school level of extra training was par for the course for her this last week.

Not you, though. You were taking it nice and easy, recouping some of your valuable energy before the attack kicked off. That was what most of your boys were doing as well, making only the minimum of effort to exercise while freely talking among one another. The same couldn’t be said for Tempest’s boys though, who were off on the opposite side of the training gymnasium and going real hard into their sparring and calisthenics, taking after their commander.

Still, there were a few of your boys that wanted the extra practice in, so you did your best to coach them. Grubber was one of them.

“Mnnnnaaagh,” Grubber strains, just barely clearing his 50th push-up. “Why did I agree to thiiiiiis?”

“’Cause errybody wants to tread the path of the swole!” you say, casually flexing your bicep with a few turns of your wrist. “And you can’t make gains without takin’ pains!”

“I hope they still have some muffins at the cafeteria...” he ponders as he takes his breather.

“If you’re fast enough with the next 50 squats, there might be--!”

THWACK

Whoa, nelly! You’re nearly knocked flat on your ass as one of Tempest’s training victims crashes against your back, sending the pair of you flying. Your S-rank reflexes allow you to land on your feet again without issue. The victim, not so much. You know it’s a bad hit when they’ve got the stars dancing around their heads!

“Ayo, Tempie-chan!” you holler towards the mare in question, half-joking and half-actually-tilted, “Watch where you’re aiming, girl!”

She boots the rest of her sparring partners away in one motion. Two of them come flying right at you, and this time you’re certain she’d done that on purpose. Dodging them is easy enough now that you were paying attention.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she comments, her tone full of sarcasm, “I didn’t realize I was interrupting your leisure time.”

A few of the storm beasts start “ooohing” in response to this.

“Hey,” you shrug, “If you wanna burn out before the big day, be my guest. It won’t be me taking flak from the King for crashing and burning!”

“Whatever excuse helps you sleep at night, princess.”

Now, you’ve been around her long enough to know that she gets very easily frustrated when she’s not being adequately challenged in something. And from her huge, major, big-time attitude copping right about now, you’d wager a guess that her attempt to cram in some combat exercise at the last minute isn’t quite as fulfilling as she had hoped it would be, even with her fighting a dozen people at once.

“Y’know,” you chuckle, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to start shit.”

“Oh, am I?”

“No need to play coy. I mean, I get it! Your boys are good, yeah, but not good enough for you, right? Maybe you should throw down with some of my boys, instead?”

More and more storm beasts from both sides were dropping what they were doing and listening in, waiting with bated breath to see what was gonna happen next.

“Mmm, you’re awfully quick to throw them at me, aren’t you?” she replies, dialing the sass up to 9. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were afraid to get your own hands dirty.”

The crowd starts “ooohing” louder. You only smirk in response to her.

“Why, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were scared to tell me what you really want.”

“Am I, now?”

“C’mon, use your big girl words,” you mock, grinning like an idiot. “Mare up already and just tell me what you want, what you really, really want.”

The “ooohs” pick up at the supa hot fire exchanged, but they really reach a bipartisan crescendo when Tempest shoos away her sparring partners and nods for you to come the fuck over, cracking her neck as she does so.

Your grin upgrades from the lips-only smug variety to the Samuel Rodrigues variety in the span of a second as she issues her wordless challenge. Without another word, you swagger your way over towards the imaginary ring, the storm beasts hooting and hollering their little black hearts out all the while.

“I won’t cripple you too badly,” she cooly remarks, beginning to circle around you. “You still need to be useful.”

“Aww, you’re gonna hold back on me?” you shoot right back, circling her in turn. “C’mon, I want a challenge, not a warm-up!”

She narrows her eyes, glaring as you continue to circle around one another for a few moments, the chorus of the troops barely audible as you slip into The Zone®. Her stance betrays how little she thinks of your abilities. She’s gonna be in for a real rude awakening.

Her horn fizzles a split second before she makes her first move. She launches into a jumping attack at a pretty impressive speed, foreleg stretched out to deliver a punch. Or would that still be a kick? Yeah, you’re going with kick.

You respond to the move by sidestepping, but not before your hand shoots out to shove her hindlegs up from underneath as she passes you by, sending her spinning through the rest of her trajectory and making her crash-landing extra meaty.

She bounces right back up, but looks more shocked than anything, like she actually wasn’t expecting you to retaliate quite that well.

“I said I want a challenge!” you holler, stance fully shifted into fighting mode. “Not baby’s first ballet audition!”

She might not be taking you seriously yet, but she would pretty soon once you were done with her. You were already at 100% for this, stance shifted and ready to react at a moment’s notice. Knowing full well what she was capable of, you’d need nothing less.

Besides, this was shaping up to be real exciting! Who wouldn’t be at their best for this?

Snorting with anger, she runs at full gallop towards you, teeth bared and horn fizzling. But even as she launches into a flurry of blows, it’s easy for you to tell that she’s still not putting 100% into this.

THWAP-THWAP-THWAP

Which makes it a simple matter to block each of her blows, each powerful impact of her armoured horseshoes matched by each powerful parry of your own armoured limbs, giving as good as you got. When it became apparent after the seventh hit that she wasn’t gaining any ground, she ducked off to your sides to get a better angle, to no avail.

You wish you could say that this was fun, but the last person you’d lie to is yourself. The strikes become so predictable, in fact, that you wind up embracing your inner Neo, dedicating only one arm to the parrying game and folding the other behind your back.

“Are you even trying?” you deadpan.

The move clearly aggravates Tempest, who redoubles her efforts with a small snarl. The speed and intensity of her strikes increases, but not enough to require your other arm to account for them.

“Oh, get serious,” you all but groan. “Quit screwing around and hit me!”

And you mean it, too. Seeing her hold back for whatever reason was putting a serious damper on your ability to enjoy this tussle. She tries different tactics: darting to your sides to bypass your blocking arm, trying different kinds of kicks, but nothing she did warranted your other arm’s intervention as you matched her pace and reacted in a timely manner.

“Oh, I get it. You’ve been livin’ on easy street too long, forgot how to give it your all, is that it?”

Your blocking hand grabs her hoof instead of deflecting it, locking it in place.

“Then lemmie remind you real quick.”

She tries to dislodge her caught limb, but even if she had used enough strength to free herself, she’d still have been too late to dodge your follow-up. You take a deliberately big step backwards and pull her along with you, causing her to lose her balance. In that split second that her hooves leave the ground, you spin her around by her grabbed hoof a few times, waiting to build up enough momentum before flinging her off towards the wall.

You don’t stop there, launching after her a moment later with a long, high-speed jump. She recovers from her surprise enough to hit the wall on all fours, launching herself back towards you. She hadn’t accounted for your mid-air pursuit, however, and you clothesline her right under her barrel, knocking the wind right out of her and sending the pair of you flying back against the wall.

You both impact the freshly re-cratered wall at the same time, your arm still around her middle. Just as gravity begins to pull you down and out of the crater, your other hand balls into a fist and strikes the wall right next to her head with a powerful SMASH, your arm buried up to the elbow in freshly atomized cinderblocks and providing a great handhold for you to keep her pinned in place.

Something in Tempest’s eyes snap at that moment, and you barely have time to smile in response, knowing that she was finally going to give it her all.

A deafening CRACK rings out, and you find yourself blown away from the wall by a blast of powerful, unstable magic, your chestplate bearing the brunt of the blast and glowing a dull red to show for it. Righting yourself in the air, you skid to a halt on all fours, each limb scalloping out long, deep trenches in the stone flooring, the exercise mats on top torn to shreds and lit on fire from just the friction. She launches herself from her smoke-covered position straight towards you, horn violently crackling and her anger now vocalized in the form of a loud battle cry.

Finally pleased with this turn of events, you throw your arms out and laugh.

“Show me a good time, Tempie!”

She blasts at you once again with magic before she can land at your position. You weave out of the energy’s way to avoid a direct hit, but the explosion it caused behind you kicked up a huge plume of smoke and dust along with a healthy shower of shrapnel. Nothing your armour couldn’t soak, but it still robbed you of visibility. Your arms come up in a defensive posture, ready to react at a moment’s notice.

Her hooves are heard impacting the ground next to you, and you just barely manage to react in time. Her foreleg comes out for another strike much stronger and quicker than she’d done before, strong enough to bat your arm away despite the successful block. Your other arm was already in motion, going for a palm strike. Unfortunately, that also meant you had nothing to block her other incoming kick. Then again, she couldn’t block your attack, either.

Both blows impact with the force of a sledgehammer, a heavy THWACK ringing out. The pair of you are sent skidding backwards, reeling from the impact. You recover faster than she does, barrelling down on her position. She looses yet another magic blast, but you inadvertently dodge under it on account of dropping into a slide kick, successfully landing a hit on her left foreleg and sending her sliding off to the side.

She instantly kicks the ground with a hindleg hard enough to crater it, creating a pivot point she uses to swing her momentum from flying away from you to flying straight at you, going for a dive kick with both forelegs. Still prone, you only just barely manage to flip around and launch yourself up and off the ground with one arm, but aren’t fast enough to completely clear the strike; her forelegs miss, sure, but her head was still on target. Realizing this, she quickly dumps more magic into her horn for a contact explosion that you have no chance of dodging.

Your side armour plating absorbs the blast, the force of it sending you flying out of the smoke cloud and towards another wall. Spinning through the air, your legs impact the wall, creating a massive crater and a huge web of spiderweb cracks all along the cinderblock structure. Those same legs shoot back out like a spring, launching you right back into the smoke cloud and collapsing the cratered wall behind you under the force of your launch.

Fist outstretched in the traditional Superman pose, you rocket straight through the cloud and out the other side, landing against the other wall much less explosively. Hand buried in the wall and anchoring you in place, you hang from your spot and turn around to survey the battlefield, catching Tempest blasting the shit out of whatever was behind the wall you had launched from. The air blasts from the explosions swept her dust cover away, revealing the very pissed off source of the blasts in all of her furious, still-adorable glory. Smirking, you press your feet back against the wall and prepare to launch yet again, this time towards her.

She hears you take off and spins around to blast yet again. She had opened fire with the expectation that you were shooting directly for her; you, however, were going for a spot a few yards south of her position, where you had impacted the ground before and left those drag marks. Her blast whizzes by overhead, obliterating the wall behind you. You roll out a couple of times as you land, your hands and feet carving out more of the floor as you dragged to a stop. Two messy rectangles were now carved into the floor beside you, just as you'd planned. And so, thrusting both hands into the corners of the shapes, you pull. Both rectangles pull out into huge, heavy slabs of stone, ready to use as you saw fit. And you had plenty of uses.

Tempest, realizing what you were up to, targeted her next magic blast at the slabs in your possession. She succeeds in destroying one of the slabs in your grasp as you lift them into the air, but you quickly retask the freed hand to lifting the other slab, succeeding in launching it straight up into the air. She tries to blast it out of the air, but misjudges its trajectory and misses, allowing the slab to come right back down towards you. And just as it comes down, you give it the mighty foot with a spinning start, launching the chunk of debris straight towards her like a cannonball.

She hadn’t recharged enough to blast it out of the air in time, and the chunk succeeds in hitting her, the mare grunting with pain as it sends her sliding backwards. Before it can topple over on top of her, it’s split in half from underneath with a buck of her hindlegs. She spins back around to try and fire again, but you had since begun running back towards her, grinning like a total psycho. The moment you saw her prepping to fire, you tilt down to your side mid-run, carving another gouge into the floor as you go with a loud SMASH. Your gouging hand pulls forward through the rock and rockets above ground in front of you, flinging large chunks of the floor right towards her like a shotgun blast, the entire motion never once interrupting your run.

Her own armour protects her from most of the impact, but it disorients her enough to keep her from firing off a blast. Plenty of time for you to close the distance and launch into a flying roundhouse kick. She does manage to block successfully, but you were still bigger and heavier than she was, your weight knocking her off her hooves regardless. The two of you hit the ground, sliding along the surface on your respective sides. Shooting back upright, you both charge at one another, launching into a flurry of strikes.

And the rest of your fight...

No, it wasn’t really a fight by that point - more like an all-out fucking brawl.

The rest of your brawl continued in this manner for longer than you thought, but shorter than you would’ve liked, all pretenses of sparring having long since been flung right out the window and into the dumpster. You both traded blow after blow, pushing your armour, muscles, and reflexes to their absolute limits. She blasted away with her magic, and you responded with rock projectiles like the officially licensed and certified beast clergyman you always knew you were deep down inside. No matter what was used to attack, it caused an imperial shit-ton of damage; if not to your bodies and armour, then certainly to the surrounding environment.

By the time the melee had drawn to its close, the training room was completely destroyed, the storm beasts who had previously been cheering like football fans having run for their lives at some point. Craters, cracks, gouges and debris marred everything in sight, every surviving surface left as smooth as a teenager’s face. And that was assuming you could see any of it through the haze of dust that lingered over everything.

And smack dab in the middle of the warzone was yours truly, standing just over a yard away from Tempest. Your armour had been ruined to the point of uselessness, most of the plating discarded and the remainder hanging on by a thread. The black bodysuit underneath was torn to shit and covered in dust, the ripped sections doing a shit job of covering up the cuts and bruises underneath. Her attire was in much the same state, her mohawk having long since been reduced to a scraggly mess, the voluminous hair matted down across her neck.

The two of you were both panting like dogs and sweating buckets, the dust mixing with the perspiration and forming a gross film of dirt, marred with the occasional clear rivulet caused by a fresh drop of sweat rolling down. Neither one of you was capable of doing much more than standing, though even that was a challenge, your muscles burning with exertion and your limbs shaking, fresh off of the adrenaline surges. That pretty much left staring as your only remaining methods of attack.

The only real difference between you two at this point was the smile you wore. It had never once left your face throughout the entire fight.

Y’know, part of you wants to say something to break up the staring contest. But bushed as you were, you just couldn’t think up a good enough thing to say. At least not without it sounding like it came out of a shitty fanfic.

So you don’t.

Instead, you let out a deeply satisfied exhale, and sit your ass down on the ground.

And Tempest, ever surprised by your actions, finally loses the energy to stand and half-collapses to the ground, her front flopping down first. Trying and failing to stand back up, she unlocks her hindlegs and allows them to flop to the ground as well, the fight in her eyes gone but not forgotten.

“How duh--” she wheezed in disbelief, “When could you... S-since when...”

You only smile in response, cradling the back of your head with both hands. You allow your back to flop against the ground, a few loose chuckles leaving your throat.

That was, without a doubt, the best fight you’ve had so far.

And then, cutting through the comfortable silence like a wet fart at a fashion show, was the voice of the Storm King.

“What is going ON in here?!”

Leave it to him to ruin a great moment.