Cheap Company

Chapters

I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI

I

The foreign skies above Fähnriche 1st1 Class Kvetoslava Shalev were choked with smog. His feet were damp, even through his waterproof clothing. The sweat pooled in the soles of his boots so badly he sloshed when he moved. Every part of the chemical suit covering him head to toe squelched and gathered in pools under his joints.

His breath misted past the filters of the beaked mask on his face. Each exhale came out shallow, mingling visibly with the greenish yellow chlorine gas that hung around in the foxhole. It swirled around the dead Feldwebel beside him, patterns spinning and twirling amidst his rotting carcass. The last words out of the poor squad leader’s mouth formed the punchline to an unfinished joke.

Let’s bucket this gas out of the foxhole like those Navy boys do with water, hm? Then he slipped on the mud, and scrambling back up, a stray round caught his mask and shattered it, and the gas did the rest. Kvetoslava couldn’t help him, try as he did. The Fähnriche prayed to the Saint above Saints2 for the poor bastard and clutched his rifle closer to his chest.

In another foxhole, a pair of soldiers shared words with hand signs, laughing raucously with each translated joke or turn of phrase made into a crude hand gesture. Geyfreyten Knechten Rébecca “Emil” Emilienne sat across from Gefreiter Achille Anne-Sophe in their foxhole. Emil had a tube canister of ammunition in her lap, a cloth belt of rifle cartridges stringing its way across the foxhole to Achille and his bulky, water-cooled machine gun, which sat on its tripod, lowered below the lip to avoid being damaged by stray shots.

Occasionally, Achille would grab a pocked helmet from nearby, put it on the end of his shotgun and put it over the lip of the foxhole. A whipcrack of gunfire, and Achille snagged it back down the silence was perforated by gunfire. A quick observation, a hand gesture that simply meant ‘yep, that’s a bullet hole alright’ then a toss of the thing into the foxhole. The two machine gunners then watched the cloying gas waft through the hole in the helmet as the oxygen found its way out and the chlorine found its way into the bowl.

On another side of the frontline, Hauptegefreite Nat Zahariev took delight in the way her flamethrower’s pilot light went click-click-click, dousing the air in noise before the donut-shaped flamethrower tank on her back burbled, and a stream of jellied napalm came spitting out the nozzle, cast alight millimeters away from the muzzle. She watched the burn pit of corpses with a sense of hawkish awareness. Her assistant trooper, a nasally voiced soldier in training named Kalin Rylee, kept fingering his shotgun nervously, an action which required her only to turn her head to him before he straightened his back and kept his eyes trained on the bodies. A slight twitch from one, and his shotgun raised and discharged buckshot. The snapping boom of the scattergun made the shooter jump in the recruit’s arms, and he nearly dropped the thing. Nat shook her head with disapproval and prepared a second waft of flame. Click-click-click.

The story repeated itself over and over across the frontline of the Craviist3 border war. Bodies piling up with exotic diseases passing through them, enemy combatants firing at entrenched soldiers with poison gas shells popping overhead at all hours of the night, so that nobody could sleep, lest they turn over and die in their sleep from asphyxiation.

This was the Craviist way of war. There were few soldiers quite so decorated in its methodology as the 107th Khantaran Demons Regiment of the 10th Sanitar4 Division. Three Battalions within the regiment, and four companies for each battalion. Each carried their colours; a flag, stowed in a hay-packed wooden crate in the back of a truck. Each victory put another detail on the flag; a ribbon for each battle, a line of golden stitching for each war, a mark for every hundred killed in a battle.

When the fighting stopped, and the formations of troopers were stood in blocks on a beaten airfield so politicians and generals could declare the end of things, it was always the banner of the 107th’s second battalion which glimmered the brightest, and the triangular section at its peak, the section dedicated to Company C, that drew the most eyes. Its glimmering lines of stitching and ribbons flapping across its berth drew the attention of jealous captains and boastful generals alike, and so the worst of the worst and best of the best became the reinforcements, and the cycle repeated.

Company C “Cheap Company” was renowned for its fighting. Its officers, appointed by those boastful generals, happily stand at attention with chests full of accolades and ribbons denoting great battlefield victories, while its infantry stand ragged and tall behind them, rifles, shotguns and machine guns at their sides while the wind whips through the tears in their chemical suits and whistles off their bird-faced respirators with cracked lenses and stapled rips in the leather.

Kvetoslava Shalev was a long-time veteran of the company. After the fighting at the border ended and with it the Battle of Orange Butte, or by the crude moniker of the infantry, “Battle of the Goddess’ Unwashed Arse,” he had been promoted from the officer cadet’s rank of Fähnriche. He had supposedly ‘done right by the boys and the company,’ according to their captain, Yeruti Roman, and was fast-tracked to be the man’s executive officer at the rank of Oberleutnant. It was a position Kvetoslava had to justify taking over beers with his fellow troopers, but one they all ultimately decided he was best suited for, despite his arguing for the contrary.

Kvetoslava Shalev was a mustang—an officer promoted out of the general enlisted infantry rather than one who had gone to an officer school, and at that, he was the one that had gotten Cheap Company through the worst trials of the Butte. His father had passed down a decade of knowledge from his time in the trenches of the independence war. Kvetoslava passed that down to his men, and it saved many of their lives. Some couldn’t be helped—the ones who couldn’t learn how to handle the mud or to avoid the shell-holes, or whose masks were faulty… the usual tribulations of men and women who weren’t cut out for the fighting. He made his peace with their deaths as best he could and moved on.

His overseas volunteer work with foreign militaries, like the Omelese5 and the Escalians6 had taught him the basics of offensive fighting, and how to fight aggressively with the new water and air-cooled machine guns which were proving to be all the rage with the armies of Craviisto-Gradd and abroad. It garnered him respect, and his competence earned him a place with good pay as an officer. Had he not been pressured by his comrades and enlisted men to take it, though, he never would have.

Looking out at the passing scenery from the bumpy self-driving carriage with its heavy-duty double-wide tyres and half-treaded rumblings like an armored car, Kvetoslava Shalev felt like he was undeserving of the privilege of sitting with a feathered helmet in his lap in a weather-regulated carriage, cigar smoke flooding his nostrils while his siblings-in-arms sat in a bumpy horse-drawn in the long caravan behind them.

“The cultists are expected to be gathered in the village, it’s built in a murky swampland and we’re expecting them to be well-armed…” The voice of Hauptemann Yeruti Roman was thickly cushioned by the man’s fat neck, and Kvetoslava found it disgusting. He was a posh officer without much combat experience. The Butte had forced the man to lose weight, and it had been no small amount of amusement to Cheap’s troopers. Being amused by one’s commanding officer, however, was not the foundation of good leadership and loyalty. Kvetoslava had to shoot a man and a woman during the worst of the fighting for trying to desert, and out of all the deaths he had experienced, they were the ones whom would not be leaving his mind’s eye any time soon. “Are you listening to me, man? For the Saint’s sake, pay attention.” The jowly voice of the upper-crusty captain snapped Kvetoslava back into focus.

“My apologies, sir. I was musing on the…” his eyes fell on the battle map lain before them on an overturned crate. He swore. “Swamps, evidently.” Yeruti Roman gave him a sympathetic, but too heavy-handed slap on the shoulder. Kvetoslava toughed it out as the man rumbled with jolly laughter.

“My boy, if these Sanitarii can survive the worst that those damn Yascaids7 could throw at us on the Butte, they will survive these marshes. Besides, they’re going against a bunch of angry farmers with pitchforks and possibly a psykic or two. We’ll do just fine.” Kvetoslava frowned inwardly but kept his professional mask from slipping.

“Sir, if I could speak freely?” The fat captain gestured with a sweeping arm to get on with it as he sucked on his cigar. “Fifty years ago, we were the farmers with pitchforks, fighting the imperial invaders from Siqul.” The captain’s face fell at the sound of disagreement, but he kept his ears open as he leaned forward. Kvetoslava mirrored the act and began articulating with a gloved finger at the map between them. “They have shotshell scatterguns, percussion muskets, some revolvers most likely. It’s enough to fight off the wildlife, and enough to deter me from a full-frontal assault.” The captain scratched his bushy moustache and nodded along. Kvetoslava pushed his luck, and kept at it. The oil lamp burned for many hours as the two plotted a plan, and the fresh Oberleutnant felt some sense of relief at being listened to.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll survive long enough for their contracts to run out. Then we’ll all go home.

The Everfree Forest was dark overhead. Twilight’s muscles ached as she trotted her way through the forest. They had managed to lose the Timberwolves, but her heart was still pounding in her chest. Everfree Castle loomed overhead, and Twilight spared only a flick backwards before moving forward at a breakneck pace. A snapping in the trees set the drake on her back to stir.

A crumbling stone turret loomed overhead as Spike’s head perked up. He was clinging to her neck for dear life, and she could scarcely blame him. Twilight’s mind was awash with panic. They were well and truly lost. She didn’t know the way back. She knew the way into the Castle, though.

It would be safe there. So, she sidled forward, past the walls, into the hallways, and she found her skin itching under her fur. The dust, it must be the dust, she told herself.

Hours went by. Spike whined; she whinnied her assurances. She would keep him safe no matter what. As long as she lived. The hours turned to days. Panic took hold. She couldn’t focus. Everything itched, she was so thirsty. Spike’s words became mumbling, dull and distant in her ears. She could barely move she was so tired. So itchy.

It would be fine. Everything would be fine. He asked her if it was good that they were at the old castle. She told him they would go back in the morning. Days of retching black bile out a window later, and they still weren’t home. Things weren’t going to be fine. She had to focus. She had to focus.

We just need to get home! It’ll be fine! I just need to focus!

She could feel the branches under her fur, under her skin. They itched, they ached, they hurt. She was so thirsty.

I just want to go home.

And she was gone in a flash, while he was left in the trees outside the Castle. Hell had wormed its way into her body, and she would carry it into Ponyville, and from there, it was only a matter of time before it spread.

Author's Note

Alphyrra's Almanac, Issue I

1 The ranking structure of Craviist-Gradd follows the same as its predecessor nation and the general beats of the other military bodies of their home continent. See attached image for in-depth details.

2 Saint above Saints: A common deity on the continent of Wraihohen. Worshipped by the Ludovican Church, the Saint above Saints is the entity which is believed to have given the church's namesake saint, Ludovic I, the ability to grant minor miracles, such as healing by touch, the drafting of illusions, etc.

3 Craviisto-Gradd: (Adjective Craviist, ex. "I am a Craviist from Craviisto-Gradd", "The Orange Butte is Craviist territory"), a country in the continent of Wraihohen, formed in 5.031 after bloodily seceding from the PRDK. They have inherited many of their methods of warfare and some of their culture, though their country is best known for a "Melting Pot" military culture due to the mandatory military service for foreigners to become citizens.

4 Sanitar: (Noun, plural Sanitarii), a type of combined Cavalry-Infantry unit native to the continent of Paigobrath, originally birthed during the Abominable Plague of 5.017-023 by the Peoples' Republic of Don Krasa (PRDK), and then exported to other countries during their brief colonial efforts from 5.026-5.036.

5 Omelone: (Noun, plural Omelese), a country native to the continent of Ukrea, known for its export of mercenaries and having involvement in most, if not all major and minor wars of the early 5th Era.

6 Escal: (Noun, adjective form Escalian), a country native to the continent of Paigobrath, known for its fine manufacturing work and the Prinz Ironworks corporation, with a frontier army that regularly hosts military exercises with allied and neutral nations.

7 Yascaida: (Noun, adjective form Yascaid), a country bordering Craviisto-Gradd to the North, a desert country that regularly has border skirmishes and minor wars with Craviisto-Gradd over territorial disputes and historic claims.

[6/3/2024] Going through a bout of revisions for clarity. I'm one person, and I have bad habits regarding second passes. Doing my damnedest though <3

II

The Church of the Cowled Widower1 quaintly sat amidst a dense, marshy swamp. Its buildings were made of planks and built on stilts, with duckboard walkways acting as roads—no vehicle could pass through the dense muck beneath the walkways without quickly losing traction and getting bogged down. The trees around the Church and the village of its worshippers loomed overhead and blocked out the sunlight, filtering it down as an uncertain teal glow that reflected off the mirrored lampposts dotting the walkways.

Kvetoslava and the 107th saw, perpetuated, and fought worse than cultists with shotguns and muskets. The freshly christened Oberleutnant ran a hand down the front of his fresh chemsuit, thin and rubbery, with the blocky refraction camouflage already looking worn in places.

The riflemen ahead of him were equally worn, but carried themselves with the tense professionalism his anxious mess of infantry always wore on the eve of a risky fight. They painted their helmets with mud and jammed twigs in with the mud before the final approach, and it helped obscure their silhouettes just that much more. Kvetoslava abstained from wearing the distinctive officer’s feather in his helmet for the same reasons.

Captain Yeruti Roman did not have the same self-control and decided to cram himself into his regal gorget and breastplate. The feather at the crest of his helmet waved in the very slight wind under the tree cover.

Past the thick foliage they were nestled into for cover, Kvetoslava mentally noted the positions and routes the scant patrol on the edge of the village was taking. A single villager, wearing the tattered overalls and a wide-brimmed hat that so many Wraihohen peasants were accustomed to adorning during the wild seasons. The watcher began to approach and Kvetoslava tensed up. He put a hand on the rifleman’s shoulder to his left, and the gesture was mirrored quickly by every soldier with them like falling dominoes, even Roman.

Glad something from his classes stuck, Kvetoslava inwardly jeered before lowering his service rifle to the ground as slowly and silently as he could, going for something shorter. Knife or sidearm, Slava. Pick carefully. The watchman stopped right in front of them, and Kvetoslava had to restrain himself from leaping out and attacking immediately. He’s armed, with a scattergun no less. Why get so damn close?

Then the watchman unbuttoned his trousers and Kvetoslava understood. The knife will do. Cortisol flooded his body, his muscles tensed. The knife handle was pulled into a white knuckled fist so fast the button loudly snapped. The watchman’s eye flicked to Kvetoslava. The distance closed, the knife went into his throat, a gloved hand cupping over the cultist’s mouth and nose. A muffled gurgle whimpered out, and he went limp.

Kvetoslava let the body down and made a little bird chirp with his mouth—signal to move forward. The riflemen of his company began to slowly emerge from the treeline, followed by the two machine gun crews. A trooper walked up to him. Slava identified them within a moment as their jack of all trades—combat engineer, blacksmith and armourer—Geyfreyten Knechten Ailil “Soggy” Sluaghadháin. A sliver of her pale wrist stuck out between her sleeve and glove as she reached out to take the double-barreled scattergun from Kvetoslava. He went back to the bush to grab his rifle, and found Ailil pocketing shotshells from the cultist’s pockets.

Illegal under Article IV2, Subsection… fuck it, we’ve got more cultists to deal with. He ignored her and moved on, his boots clicking against the soft duckboard walkway, rifle shouldered. The captain was standing in the middle of the path in front of the church’s main doors, hands on hips, service revolver still in its holster. That idiot. “Ready, sir?”

The captain glanced back at him. His mask hung around his neck, and he had an uncertain expression on his face, features scrunched with internal division. He wasn’t ready for this, Kvetoslava could read it on his face. He hadn’t been ready for the Butte, he wasn’t ready for this, barely a half-measure in comparison. Kvetoslava patted the man’s shoulder. “I can handle the breach, sir. We need the flamers up front so we can torch the village, though.” The captain began to steel his gaze and nod—slow at first, but quickly becoming more eager.

“Aye.” He smacked his lips. Kvetoslava flinched at the deafening noise. “Aye, that’s right, Oberleutnant. You’re very, very right. I will go get them moved up safely and straight-backed. Yes, yes indeed…” He turned on a heel and marched off. Each snapping bootstep made Kvetoslava flinch harder than the last. Why don’t you just fire off that revolver into the air with excitement at witnessing your first kill, while you’re at it? Loud bloody bastard. He shook his head of the thoughts and turned to the door. A rifleman with a scattergun had the ugly teeth at the end of the bore ready under the knob of the door, while the ones behind him had their rifles slung in exchange for compact, folding clockwork machine guns, pistols and clubs. Those submachine guns weren’t standard issue—he beamed at that. A good Omelese friend working as an arsenal dump manager had lost these ten PM9 submachine pistols and two hundred rounds of ammunition.

Some local kids in the town around the arsenal had been known for their hooliganism, and stealing some gunked-up submachine pistol sidearms was well within their modus operandi. Kvetoslava looked down at the rifle in his arms, and took two steps back, face-to-face with the double doors. He calmed his breathing until the wire-reinforced lenses of his mask had stopped fogging, then nodded to the shotgunner.

Yeruti Roman looked back at the blackboard with the map stapled to it, then to the gathered men and women; about sixty in all, crammed tightly like sardines in the tent in their off-duty trousers and sleeveless tops.

“It will be a standard cult cleanse. Oberleutnant Shalev explained to me that you troopers had handled a mission like this before.” He turned to Kvetoslav on the other side of the map board, who nodded.

“It will be standard. The cultists appear to have stolen an automatic transmission valve body3 from a local self-driven carriage manufacturer, they’re likely using it to entrap a poltergeist or demon of some kind. Intelligence suggests they are not likely to be successful. Normally, this would be something for the local police, however the cultists are armed and defending their village against any outsiders. We were close, so the brass decided this would be a good way to keep us off our hands.” He left his commentary unspoken, but his opinion was clear by the discrete scowl on his face. Yeruti’s eyes darted between him and the crowd, and a brief but awkward silence fell over them before he continued.

“Ah, uhm, yes. The cultists are armed with rifled muskets and breach-loading shotguns. We suspect they won’t be a significant threat. It should be a simple affair, in and out before supper!” He emphasized his words with a swing of his fist around till it hung over his chest. The weary-faced soldiers had no reaction. His esprit de corps still needed some work.

The Equestrian skies above Ruby Beacon were dark, and from her place on the cliffside bench she could see the dim lights of fires cast across the land’s silhouette by the major burnpits. Her wings ruffled on her sides, and her hooves itched—something that she did her best to ignore. Not infected, just the Celestial Throne-forsaken dermatitis again. The slight clink of armour behind her snapped her attention and her head turned quickly. Need to stop going out alone at night. Going to get jumped one of these times. The pair of Night Guards wore navy-blue platemail armor; a peytral chestplate, crinet neck guard and chanfron head and muzzle coverage, paired overtop a cloak of chainmail. Their hooves were wrapped in the medical bandages alleged to help prevent contracting or spreading the infection.

“What can I do for you gents?” Ruby asked with a dim smile as she continued flicking her gaze between them and the cliffside. She was expecting a bloomer to come crawling over the side and rip a chunk out of her neck any minute now. The guard on the left gave Ruby a stiff salute and she cringed.

“Ma’am, you’ve been requested at the Guard Headquarters in lower Canterlot.” Ruby scratched at the fur and bushy sideburns on her face. It was an odd sight for a mare—an odd sight period, but on a mare especially, but any questions about it were quickly put off as being a tributary gesture to her father and grandfather, who wore the same bushy sideburns and goatee that she took to.

“Any reason given?” She forced herself off the bench by leaping over its backing. The two guards took steps backward to give her space, and she watched their expressions with hawklike attention. Swear to the Throne if one of their faces even twitch wrong, I’m going to lose it. The guard on the right shook her head.

“No, ma’am.” Okay then. Love this game that we’re playing… Damn it all. Ruby Beacon gave a curt nod, and followed behind the two guards as they about-faced and began trotting down the cobbled path the cliffside relaxation spot was built beside. Her eyes kept darting back to that cliff, expecting there to be a pair of eyes and dried out, black mouth watching. There never was.

The cobblestone roads of Canterlot were empty. It made Ruby’s hackles stand up. Even weeks ago, the city was bustling with activity. Carts would be left in the streets where ponies had stopped to rest at an inn or break fast at a nearby restaurant, gawking at the absurd high-class prices with their fellow carriage-bearers. The young could even be heard in the streets, often the little cheeky shit gangers who thought they were being tough when they bullied tourists.

Now, though? Quarantine had made the streets silent, and a mite more disgusting than usual. Trash was piling up, and the usual dwellers, homeless drunks mostly, who would flourish in the waste of others, were all missing or hiding. That scared Ruby more than the silence. Who is to say they aren’t hiding out in some alley, dying and sick, waiting for some poor sap to come by to bite the hell out of or cough spores onto?

The street turned abruptly, and the silence changed. The eerie quiet of an uneasily sleeping city became the hushed bustle of Cataphracts4 and Night Guards. Frisian horses5 and knife rest barricades choked with barbed wire covered the road, with small sandbag pillboxes behind them, protecting Polybolos6 ballista emplacements and their gunner teams. The buildings were all barricaded, with the alleys boarded up or tarped with a violet glow emitting from the passageway between knocked-out walls. The doors, save for one or two at the end of the rows, had been boarded up with iron and wood, the first and second floors windows too. If memory served—which, Ruby noted, it rarely did—the shops had belonged to out-of-towners. When the quarantine had been declared by the Royal Sisters, they were quickly repurposed for the field research hospital that stood in the place of quaint, hole-in-the-wall businesses on this quiet Canterlot side-street.

The Headquarters building loomed. Corrugated spikes covered the roof and angled outward from the edge of it. No Pegasi would be landing on it. The walls were bland, iron-reinforced martial masonry. Large, darkly colored granite bricks made up the walls, and slightly rusty, spiked reinforcements striped the walls. Few windows, and a few Pegasi perches on the upper floors to allow couriers easy entry and exit. Guards at sandbag-reinforced Frisian horse barricades all along the street. Each was adorned in a messy mishmash of chain, scale and lamellar armor, with cowled leather shawls covering rubber muzzle respirators and sack-hood face coverings of varied designs and model. Not enough to go around. Probably outsourcing to construction companies, Ruby noted.

The meeting room she was shepherded into was bland. A window was open, with a fan gently pulling the stale air and dust out and sending it out. Ruby could see several smoke trails even from her seat across the room from the window. The door opened, and her head flicked on a swivel. Unicorn, the dress uniform was very upper-crust, noble upbringing. His eyes were heavily bagged, and he was disheveled, though. Ruby relaxed a mite. If ever there were a first gesture of trust that got her attention, it was an officer showing they were bloody well a person and not some automaton.

“I’m quite sorry for pulling you at such a late hour, Miss Beacon. As you might imagine, things have been quite busy here and, well—” he paused, catching himself. The stallion cleared his throat before sitting down across from Ruby Beacon. She placed her hooves on the table in a mimicry of a fold.

“So, mister…?” He said his name was Rusty Lance. She flinched at that. He certainly looked like one. “Sir, what is it you need of me?” Ruby allowed herself to fall into the comfort of her military academy training. Her back straightened, wings tightly pressed into her sides, posture as regal as could be managed. With his tired eyes only looking more drained, Rusty explained what it was they needed of her. Her stiff military composure crumbled quickly.

That had been a week ago. The road she walked was heavy with debris from refugees and abandoned carts with no sign of the drivers, the contents intact. She flinched at every movement in the trees on their flanks.

Her column of ponies was forty strong—a platoon of old veterans with graying muzzles and thin bodies, making its way to their first assignment. Six two-mare auto-ballista teams, that’s twelve. Eight cataphracts, that’s twenty. Five marksponies, that’s twenty-five. The rest are magi-lancers and wagon-bearers. The orders rang clear in her head, and added to the building migraine Ruby was experiencing.

Manehattan is not expected to have any survivors. You need to burn it out. We’re relying on you to help prevent the spread of the infection. We’ll give you everypony we can offer, but it’s not many.

When she heard “not many” she wasn’t expecting the young and elderly, too young to enlist and too old to re-enlist, but here she was. Here they were.

Approach Manehattan from the South, the Pegasi teams on standby are trying their damnedest to keep the wind going North toward the ocean, but it’s an uphill battle. The wind moves at its own speed and direction, clouds and weather are getting out of control, too. We’re not happy about it, but it’s the situation. South is the safest way into the city. You’ll have to do a night march to get there so you arrive by sunrise, when the beyond-gone infected, the uh, bloomers, are least active.

The leather shawl she wore around her neck and shoulders chafed with her brass Day Guard junior officer’s peytral. A liberal spattering of black and slate-gray vertical stripes across it helped ward off the shine of the untreated metal. Her platoon of burners were decorated… well, similarly. The protective wraps around the legs had been deemed ineffective at preventing infection but did help with maintaining a grooming standard and preventing trench-hoof, so they were kept. They would be augmented with rubber sleeves on the legs that connected over the back like gartered socks. A chainmail cloak was optional. The leather shawl and cowl were not, however. It was a hooded and designed to help with dust and spore inhalation when paired with respirator masks. Unfortunately, they were underfunded badly enough that the masks were in short supply. They were given face masks made of canvas fasteners and cotton in lieu of the proper respirators. Field Surgeon had quickly disposed of them as soon as they were out of direct line of sight from Canterlot, and explained in no short order that they were just going to die choking wearing those. So, all of them, save for Ruby, tossed them. Ruby Beacon, ever the eager junior officer, kept hers around her neck, not trusting the veterans over the firm words of Knight Captain Rusty Lance of Her Majesty’s Royal Solar Guard.

On the march, the very same Field Surgeon (esquire) made many crass jokes to the fogeys Ruby was meant to be commanding about those damn leg sleeves, ones that got good chuckles out of them. She was appointed second in command in the event Ruby became unable to lead. Couldn’t have worded it more poorly if they were trying, she wagered. Field Surgeon was as her name suggested—a field surgeon. The esquire indicated the rank, the mare insisted. Ruby thought better and assumed the well-worn medical veteran was trying to find some way to make her life more interesting. As if anypony needs that right now…

She shook her head of those thoughts. The city was visible over the crest of the hill. Ruby barked an order to halt formation. Field Surgeon was the first to parrot the order, and from there it was halted. Ruby bit down on the edge of the map case poking out of her peytral and ripped it out, letting it clatter to the ground. She stomped a foreleg down on one end. She snagged a string hanging off the end in her mouth, tugged with her mouth and let the map come flopping out of the case. Field Surgeon took up position opposite of her, sitting down and observing the map. “Looks like we’ll be there in no time,” she proffered with a slightly cheery intone. Ruby flung a glare up at her before tracing the roads on the map till she found the one they were all cramped upon.

“Ye-ee-aaah, looks like it. Ahead of schedule, too.” She checked the sky, narrowed her eyes and made a snap assumption on the time.

“About on schedule, ma’am, but yes. I wager it’ll be good for our ponies to be off their hooves for a short while.” Field Surgeon smiled at Ruby. The junior officer didn’t return the smile. Her eyes were droopy and bloodshot. Field Surgeon gave her a sympathetic look. “Ma’am, it might be a good idea to rest your eyes for a half hour or an hour. You look exhausted. We need you at your best if we’re going to do this.” She reached out to rub her shoulder, but Ruby shot a glare.

“I’ll be fine, Field. Form a perimeter with, ah…” She closed her eyes, tapping her hoof against the dirt. What was her name? “Lily Blossom and Flitter if you don’t mind. I don’t want us to get jumped by a bloomer before the sun rises.” Field snapped off an eager nod and began barking orders. Ruby stowed her map back behind the plate armour on her chest and shook her head. Too much to do in too little time.

Oberleutnant Kvetoslava Shalev readjusted his grip on the rifle in his arms. The dump-feed jammed halfway through the fighting and turned the thing into a single-shot rifle. He got off two shots on the musketeer cultists he saw in the flanking pulpits in the back of the church. One dropped and never got back up, the other staggered. A comrade shot them between the staggerer between the neck and head. The round ricocheted against the metal pulpit and hit the stolen automatic transmission valve body hanging from a chandelier above. It cast baleful light on the corpse on the sigil below it. Once the rifle jammed, Kvetoslava hadn’t wasted the time to try unjamming it. He tossed it to the ground, pulled out his service revolver and got back to shooting.

The screaming would stay with him a while—they took the cultists by surprise. They were in the middle of a sacrificial sermon—some local girl from a few towns over was being disemboweled on the altar between the pulpits at the far side of the open-floor church. The cultists had turned and pulled iron on them as soon as they saw Slava and his soldiers.

It hadn’t saved them much time, but it didn’t save the cultists any time either. The time taken to draw was enough for shotshells to be rapidly placed by slamfiring their scatterguns into the crowd of robed worshippers. It sent them scattering to the wings of the church.

The submachine gunners were ordered forward, and back to back in the centre of the room firing outward, they gunned down the cultists without any real resistance. It was a good plan and a flawless execution. Nobody could’ve accounted for the girl, though.

Once the cultists dropped, the flamer team posted at the door ready to burn out the building once the friendly Sanitarii had cleared out of it. Maybe it was the way they had to pant through their masks to get any good air into their lungs, maybe it was the perpetual ringing that always came after a firefight, but nobody heard the priest whispering to the dead girl while he bled out. Someone saw it—a rifleman. Some fresh-faced brat that Kvetoslava had tried to keep off the action as long as he could. The brat drew his revolver and shot the priest in the back—all six shots. In any other kind of fight, Kvetoslava would’ smashed the side of his helmet with something hard.

He learned the hard way that cultists cheated when Slava watched his last commander get shot in the back by a priest who ignored the fact that the commander had blown his heart to pieces with a scattergun. The sigils painted on the ground—probably with her own blood—began to glow. Kvetoslava barked an order, the brat turned to look at him.

The girl was up and ripping his throat out with her teeth before he could get another word out. Nat shoulder checked Kvetoslava out of the way. Click-click-click. Her donut-packed flamethrower did the rest of the talking for the shellshocked officer.

That was an hour ago. Kvetoslava was chewing on a piece of jerky ration with his mask ‘round his neck, standing outside the marsh with his team as they watched it burn. The veterans in the company cracked wise about grilling meat while they sat around their Boardog7-drawn carriages. A small flock of Belorian Raptors8—beautiful little troodontid birds the size of a small dog—zipped past their halted caravan and a few soldiers looked ready to desert for fresh lunch. Kvetoslava paid them no mind, chewing on his jerky.

Three casualties taken. Two wounded—minor shrapnel from an exploding petrol tank we hadn’t predicted to be in a building, then a third, killed at the end of the breach into the church. Necrophage9 had raised some sacrifice from the dead as a last act of spite, it bit a trooper in the neck. Hauptegefreiter Nat Zahariev acted swiftly, and using her flamethrower torched the trooper and the flesh puppet before it could cause any more harm. We are uncertain at this time as to the actual witchcraft being cast by the Necrophage. Recommend quarantine procedure for the unit until the intelligence gathered from the village can be processed.

Kvetoslava spat the jerky out as a holler began to parrot its way down the column of vehicles. “We’re getting the fuck out of here, boys and girls!” “Load up!” and those sorts of things. He threw another glance at the pillar of smoke billowing into the sky from the marsh and felt a sense of dread. He shook it off and threw himself onto and into the Captain’s motor-carriage.

The road was bumpier heading out than it was going in. Bad enough to wake up Kvetoslava. His heart sank in his gut as he sat up, feeling the goosebumps prickling up his arms and down his back. “Fuck.”

The captain stirred on the bench across from him. “What is it, Oberleutnant?” he mumbled out as he rubbed his face and sat up. They were pouring over the information collected in the village till they passed out, Kvetoslava wagered. His memory felt foggy in that familiar way. Has to be it… Saint above Saints in Heaven, I pray to you that is the problem.

“Not sure, sir. I recommend we halt the column, something’s wrong.” The serious look Kvetoslava levelled at Captain Yeruti Roman silenced any arguing he might have done. An order was barked to the driver, then to the rest of the drivers until all the Boardogs had been halted in place.

Kvetoslava climbed down from the raised steps of the motor-carriage and let out a little grunt of irritation. Damn it all, my rifle’s still being serviced by Soggy. His revolver came out in its stead. A quick sweep in a cone around him and cortisol flooded his body as his revolver’s hammer was drawn back.

“Role call!” He barked through his mask, moving as fast as his legs could carry him without running. The vehicle at the back of the column was a tracked supply vehicle, a Tragenpanzer10, some new fangled model of motor-carriage that sported only caterpillar tracks and a diesel engine in lieu of a Boardog or a standard motor-carriage engine. Kvetoslava trusted them more than he trusted the damn motor carriages, but it was a moot point. They all used manual transmissions, which made them less susceptible to unsolvable reliability issues.

“Unterofficer Quirke! Give me a status report.” Unterofficer Faris Quirke shot up a salute to her superior officer. She told him much of what he already knew—his frustration was growing visible in the way his revolver hand bounced anxiously against his leg.

We’re in the middle of bloody nowhere, sir. We’re missing the radio vehicle, but the company appears to have made it through intact. Oh, and the preacher from third platoon said that he cannot hear Dog11 anymore, so that’s swell.

Kvetoslava was nearing his limit, but he took a deep breath. It tasted stale. “Okay, this is salvageable. Get everyone geared up. This convoy is a sitting duck, we need a perimeter established now.” He felt the dread seeping through the words as they came out his mouth at the first scream near the front of the convoy. He shot a look at Quirke, but she was already barking orders at the heavy machine gun team on loan from 4th Platoon.

Kvetoslava’s jog toward the front of the convoy was interrupted by a whisper that came from the trees. He froze, standing beside two armored Boardogs in full masks. Two beady black pupils on milky white backing stared at him.

His pistol barked twice before it managed to get within six feet, and by the time it was at his feet, all six shots had discharged out the cylinder and it was dead on the ground. He sprinted his way to the front of the convoy without delay, not even bothering to examine the corpse of whatever alien thing he had just shot dead.

Kvetoslava found the bloody stains on the ground. He followed the trail of red that led to the front of the motor-carriage, where an unmasked Captain Roman was clutching his neck while some hunk of shriveled, dead black equine covered in branch-like fungal growths laid on his lap, its head blown to unrecognizable bits by the hand-cannon of a personal sidearm the man kept. Kvetoslava holstered his revolver and offered a hand. Roman’s eyes darted between Kvetoslava’s hand and his masked face, before he took it.

By the time they had a proper perimeter established, and the outer ring of trees around the convoy had been knocked down and a proper defensive position was built, they had only one other casualty. They were an assistant machine gunner—it wasn’t Emil, he checked—who bled out. One of the freakish equines that attacked impaled him through the thigh with some kind of horn protrusion on its forehead, broke it off in his leg and screamed at him in fluent Escalian about missing socks. The soldier was found with his hands around the thing’s neck, dead on the ground. Cheap Company’s chirurgeon12 took a look at the bodies, and with two pokes at the corpses, screamed for a flamer team to get a burn-pit going. She kept one of the corpses, and let the flamers burn the rest in the dead machine gunner’s foxhole.

The chirurgeon stepped out of the medical wagon, tearing off her gloves with several vulgar swears in Omelese. Kvetoslava stood nearby, a shotgun balanced on his hip while two riflemen stood beside him. “What’s the diagnosis?”

The chirurgeon groaned. “I won’t know for a few days, monsieur Oberleutnant. The sickness that these… equines, appear to be infected with seems to have transmitted to the captain.” She tossed the long rubber medical gloves into the nearby burning foxhole and spat on one of the twitching equines as it murmured at her and tried to reach out. One of the riflemen beside Kvetoslava jabbed it with their bayonet then shot it for good measure. The sound made the chirurgeon flinch a little. “I pray that when I die and go to the Otherworld13, that piece of shit Necrophage is waiting, because by Saint Ludovic’s blonde ball-hairs I am going to strangle him to death,” she snarled before shaking her head derisively. Kvetoslava bid her a safe rest of the night, then made his way back to the captain’s motor-carriage.

Those few days passed by without another attack, and after several restless nights of fever, Captain Yeruti Roman died. His body was burned, Kvetoslava was given the honorary title of captain and the fat old bastard’s sidearm. He didn’t leave the motor-carriage for another day yet still.

Author's Note

Alphyrra's Almanac, Issue II

1 Occult ritual activities are a common occurrence on Phyrr, and while most are harmless, many of them may be involved in worship which involves activities such as ritual sacrifice, communion with eldritch entities, etc., and in those cases they are regularly hunted down and exterminated, which has been the "standard" response in almost all locations where these cults tend to be born as of the 3rd era.

2 Article IV, Subsection 2 specifies the legality of looting during warfare. It is referenced erroneously, as Article IV specifies that anti-cultist activity is exempted due to the potential dangers of items tainted by cult influence.

3 It is believed by many cults, and many scholars that the patterns present on certain machinery, specifically automatic transmission valve bodies and some small circuitry, can be used to capture paranatural entities such as various demons. This can be done intentionally by those wishing to perform deals with these entities, but it may also happen by accident, such as in the event of a paranatural entity passing through the automatic transmission valve body's position in Otherworld, causing it to become trapped. Most motor-carriage manufactures offer a clause in their vehicle leases for the removal of these entities, free of charge due to the, quote, "danger they potentially present when left unattended," though many mechanics will challenge this as being less relevant when compared to the formation of paranatural materials on the inside of the transmission causing short and long term reliability problems when not removed or properly consecrated.

4 Cataphract refers to heavily armored mounts. In Equestrian terms, this means heavy infantry equipped with anti-armor weapons, such as cannons, heavy buckling swords, etc.

5 An anti-cavalry barricade comprised of a pattern of logs run through a central beam. Known more commonly as cheval de frise barricades.
(courtesy of Wikipedia)

6 A magazine fed tripod-mounted ballista developed by the Equestrians for protection of outnumbered frontier settlements against hostile forces, such as Changelings and/or Diamond Dog gangs. Crewed by a gunner and loader.

7 A mount native to Escal and introduced globally following the end of the 3rd era. It has its genetic roots in the Terran dairy cattle, extensively mutated and altered at some point in Phyrr history, likely 0th or 1st Era. Preferred for their hardiness in rough conditions to equine horses (whom were reintroduced to human cultures in the 3rd era by an unknown party)
(Placeholder courtesy of All Yesterdays, fantastic book)

8 Belorian Raptors are a native bird to the continent of Ukrea and Paigobrath, which came to Wraihohen by the exotic pet trade and ended up becoming an invasive species by enough breeding in the wild. Craviisto-Gradd and their northern neighbor, Yascaida, allow open season on the birds during most seasons. Their meat is said to taste like chicken with the consistency of beef.
(Placeholder courtesy of nature.com, recreation of Jianianhualong tengi by Julius T. Csotonyi).

9 Necrophage (alt. form Necrophagus, noun, plural Necrophagi, Necrophages, interchangeable,). A Necrophage is classified as a type of occult worshipper with an unnatural connection to the Otherworld, specifically one who dabbles in life and death witchcraft, such as the raising of the dead, "miraculous" healing (often coming at the cost of others) and similar acts. In humans, they are easily identified by unnaturally pale "ghost-like" skin, unnatural physical strength despite physical gauntness and pronounced, miscolored veins, though these symptoms are considered to be largely based on historical myths about the Necrophagi built during the 3rd era, when they were a common sight before they were largely all killed off during the early years of the 4th era.

10 A Tragenpanzer is a type of militarised motor-carriage utilising caterpillar tracks. While this is considered odd for military vehicles, this is considered a common trait in civilian motor-carriages. It is a semi-armored caterpillar-tracked vehicle, with a distinctive bug-like appearance, earning them the moniker of "beetle-car" by infantry. They serve the dual purpose of either munition transport, artillery carriages, or on occasion ambulance lorries.

11 Dog is a commonly used term by members of the Baphelogan Church for their deity, who worship the goat-headed aspect of free choice and liberty by the name of Baphelogast, a deity with roots in pre-Phyrr monotheist religion. Being a demon in that religion, overtime it became a cultural habit to refer to Baphelogast (then Baphomet) as "Dog" instead of "God" as an act of religious expression in a time where they were persecuted. The habit stuck, and became a mainstay of the church and easy shorthand.

12 Chirurgeon is a rank of field surgeon held outside the traditional military rank structure, allowing for greater autonomy, though commissioned officers withhold the right to give orders to a Chirurgeon. Sometimes called "chop docs" by Craviist infantrymen due to a penchant for amputation during the Wasting Plague crisis of the '30s, they are highly trained for the time period and are well-respected, often coming from Omelone or countries like it.

13 Otherworld is the mirrored dimension by which many Phyrr's religions and occult researchers believe is the final resting place for "souls", human or otherwise. It is also believed to be the source of various paranatural phenomena, creatures and most notoriously "demons." It is considered to be a phantom dimension, which exists "on top" of reality, or at minimum this is the most popular theory, as it explains the common phenomenon of "demons" and similar entities becoming trapped within circuitry boards and automatic valve transmissions, like flies caught on a windshield.

III

The air around the camp was tense the days following Captain Yeruti Roman’s death. Unterofficer Faris Quirke pondered why as she sat in a rapidly assembled trench alongside Gefreite Urbain Marie, Hauptegefreite Nat Zahariev, her assistant flamer Kalin Rylee and several other grunts with whom she was not acquainted.

“The way I see it,” she began, her hands clutching a short-pattern utility bayonet and a block of emulsified raptor jerky, “we’re better off by a wide margin now.” She whittled a strip of jerky off and passed it to Nat. The flame trooper woman had her chemsuit let down with the sleeves tied around her waist. Her well-toned arms worked at her flamethrower with a cleaning kit that she’d been fielding out of a rectangular ration tin. Faris noted her hair cropped into a short rat tail at the back of her head. I’ve seen pictos of my grandfather wearing his hair like that. The flametrooper snorted.

“You don’t think Oberleutnant Shalev killed him?” Faris balked at the idea, visibly. It brought a deep-voiced laugh from Nat and a few of the other grunts. The flametrooper whistled for her assistant to pay attention as she began servicing a specific valve or tube of some kind on the flamethrower. Faris took the time to rub her scruffy chin. Need to shave again. Last thing I need is to get dressed down by a bloody feldwebel over grooming standards. She whittled off another piece of jerky from the block and popped it into her mouth.

“So, is this a thing we’re all collectively deciding to think is true? That Oberleutnant Kvetoslava Shalev, the least incompetent son of a pig in this company murdered the captain? For what, exactly?” Faris frowned as the words came out of her mouth. Urbain snickered at her as he worked a cleaning rod down the bore of his rifle.

“The least incompetent son of a pig, whom is the executive officer for the whole company, which, I shall remind you,” he enunciated carefully as he all but tossed the rod down the bore and ripped it back out in quick, fluid motions. “Is currently trapped either in a foreign country or something far more insidious. He kills the commanding officer after he is laid low with fever, this officer whom has nearly gotten us killed three times since being instated and has never showed his damn face in a single combat engagement? Fuck me, I’d believe it. I do, in fact.” Faris shot Urbain a dark look. She whittled off another piece of jerky which he happily took out of her offered hand. “Bribing me to shut my mouth, are we? How very scandalous, Unterofficer.”

Faris couldn’t help but smile a little, fight it as she might have. “Piss off, you brat. I’m trying to make conversation.” The smile was wiped off as Urbain sat a little more straight-backed. Nat, of course, was indifferent. She threw a glance up, nodded, said hello, herr captain de facto, then went back to showing her apprentice the ways of the flamethrower. She’d have better luck if Kalin weren’t distracted staring at her biceps, but Faris didn’t have the heart to grill the trooper.

Faris looked up at Oberleutnant Kvetoslava Shalev, in his disheveled chemsuit and bascinet helmet with its visor turned up, mask around his neck. “How’re you doing, sir?” His face was serious. He hadn’t shaved in a while, either it seemed.

“We have a mission. You need to lead it.” Her heart dropped, and the trench went silent.

Each of the four platoon officers sat with Kvetoslava in the former captain’s hybrid motor-carriage, the map table blank before them save for rough charcoal etchings made by 1st platoon’s best forager riflemen. They were all of the Subaltern rank. 1st platoon’s Piritta Winter had white hair from a genetic defect that didn’t prevent her from joining the Sanitarii. 2nd platoon’s commander was Léandre “Jacket” Jacquet. He was distinctive for a great coat he wore off duty. There were dozens of stories as to how he got it, Kvetoslava didn’t have the time to remember any of them. Fırat Pawlak led 3rd platoon, he had an average face and his men respected him, but bullied him relentless for how average he looked. Fjolla Winogrodzka was a pale junior officer—she ran their heavy weapons & cavalry support platoon, 4th. She was a replacement for a man who had died on the Butte. She was an impressively brusque woman with a perchance for swearing that endeared her to her men quickly. Kvetoslava recalled Emil giving her the moniker “Snow Smoothie” which never caught on, because of an offhanded comment the woman had made about how the women in the army were ugly. Of course she thinks we’re all ugly, he had told Emil, she’s from Tinggård. All the women there are smooth-faced and look like children. That had gotten a good laugh out of them. Sitting beside her now, he felt a little embarrassed for having laughed at her all those months ago.

Kvetoslava cleared his throat. No time for that now. “What is it you need, Herr Oberleutnant?” Fırat piped up. He cringed at the usage of Herr but did his best to hide it. Kvetoslava gestured to the map.

“I’ve been pouring over the maps we had on hand, even some that we managed to rough out using some of the foreigners in the company to supplement our continental maps. To be blunt,” he cleared his throat. “We’re not going to survive without more intelligence or supplies. The scouts managed to find what they believed to be a city,” he pointed to a spot on the map where several dozen squares had been situated behind a moat-like half-moon of water with a bridge drawn across it, and across that bridge several loud X’s. “We also think this might be the source of the strange equines, judging by the branch-like growths the scouts reported on the buildings.” He produced a rough sketch from a folder he had on his lap, a charcoal rub of a brick building whose silhouette would’ve been perfectly square if not for the tree-like growths sprouting out from its top and upper floors.

“So, what, you want us to voluntell some riflemen for it?” Jacket’s arms were crossed, and his face was scrunched. Kvetoslava shook his head and ran a hand down his face. Jacket’s face loosened with a sympathetic look. The captain de facto had a look of exhaustion on his face that few in the company could say they truly felt before.

“No. It’s…” He paused. Scratched his stubbly chin. “I’ve sent good soldiers to their deaths before. I don’t want to have to send them to one here. We’re in a lot of shit, let’s get all of them back alive if we can.” Piritta rolled her jaw and retrieved a cigarette from a pouch on her uniform’s webbing. A dark murmur passed through the four of them. Volunteering soldiers for a job like this was always bad for the heart.

“Faris can lead. She has the qualifications and experience for it.” A glance around the room. Kvetoslava saw no dissent and nodded. So be it, she’ll lead. Fjolla spat the chewing tobacco she’d been packing in her lip into a tin at her boots.

“Well, if Faris is leading, then I’m going to send my gunners. Assuming these… equines are the shit we think they are, better to just treat them like savages. They’ll run right into the machine guns. Colum Ivers, my junior gun commander, he needs the experience and it’ll be a simple enough job for him.” Jacket leaned forward and rubbed his greasy face in a quick gesture, almost anxious.

“Isn’t inexperience the last thing we want to be basing the team on?” He proffered. Kvetoslava fought the urge to step up for the short, rowdy heavy weapons commander, who adjusted her field cap and shook her head.

“No. We’re basing it on who would be best for the mission. Rébecca and Achille make a good team, they’ll keep each others’ backs covered and follow orders. Muirgheal has been in the Sanitarii longer than any of those shitheels. Kristel’s gun will shoot straight like always and old Murmurs will keep Colum in line.” She smirked. “I think the little shit’s scared of her. I don’t blame him, to be fair. She scares me, sometimes.” She thumbed her chin and leaned back. Kvetoslava looked to Jacket. He shrugged. I’m assuaged.

“Okay, that makes two machine gun crews. If I may?” Kvetoslava looked up at Piritta. She gestured for him to go ahead. “Nat and Rylee.” Piritta frowned.

“That really a good idea, Oberleutnant? That puts us down one of our only two flamethrowers if they get killed, and our most veteran flamer, too.” Kvetoslava nodded solemnly. He scratched his face.

“I know. It’s risky, but I don’t think it’s wise to not send them in with a flamer. Nat can take care of herself.” He paused, then smirked. “She still keep that pocket scattergun in her uniform?” Piritta snorted derisively, though the ghost of a smile haunted her face.

“Of course. No matter how many times I confiscate the damn thing, she always gets her hands back on it. She’s taken to the lashing scars like they’re bloody tattoos, so I stopped bothering with the disciplinary action.” Kvetoslava gave a few self-affirming nods. She can take care of herself plenty fine.

“Then I have faith in her to be safe… Now, let’s get over the rest, why don’t we? I think 3rd platoon can give some riflemen, then…”

0600 hours.

Unterofficer Faris Quirke stood at the edge of the river beside the city that was dubbed Tartarus by the former residents. It was surrounded on all sides by water, an island city with villages along the bridges leading in. Walking through the ashy streets, Faris corrected herself. It used to have villages along the bridges heading in. Kicking over a burnt stuffed toy left half-burnt in the street, Faris noted the former inhabitants did a fine job of scorched earth on their way out. Nothing left but ash this side of the bridge. Unfortunately… they missed a spot. The city over the destroyed bridge looked like a hive of black trees in the early morning light, growing out of windows, through roofs, across the streets she could make out. It set her stomach uneasy, but she powered through it.

Faris whistled her troops forward. Two machine guns, Nat’s psychotic ass and her assistant flame trooper, four riflemen, my 2IC and the combat engineer. Makes twelve. Would’ve just sicced 1st on the problem, but I guess Slava’s got other plans. Her gloves creaked as she tightly gripped the handguard of her rifle. She’d oiled the dump feed heavily to save time on jams, made sure the damn thing would be in pristine shape for fighting. Her long-pattern bayonet and short utility-pattern were strapped to her ankle, and enough ammo to fight a battalion hanging off her body in belts and in charger clips. Her revolver was fully loaded and she had a fistful of stolen moon clips in her pockets. Her troopers were similarly burdened with gear, save for the abundance of pump-action scatterguns.

The night before the op, they were all sleeping in their wagons, foxholes and trenches when one of the night watches had called out for a fast flyer overhead. He was wasting ammo trying to shoot it down from the sky—and ended up drawing its attention. Faris spoke to him when all was said and done, he was more than a little unnerved. The thing had glassy eyes, black branches sprouting all over its spine and wings, black ooze sloughing out its mouth. It came dive-bombing at him, speaking in Escalian. He thought he was dead, standing there with only a repeating rifle in his arms, but he dove, grabbed a scattergun from the end of a trench and popped the thing with buckshot when it floundered against the ground in a heap, then slam-fired the scattergun until the tube ran empty.

Everyone was awake by then, including the woman the night watchman stole the shotgun from. Aside from a kick in the groin, the chirurgeon said he got away from the endeavor without any serious wounds.

Faris was quick to requisition whatever spare shotguns they had in storage for the operation after that kerfuffle. From there, it was a simple matter of gathering troops, stealing or requisitioning as much ammo they could carry and get moving.

They had a single boardog-driven carriage and its driver at their center, the machine gunners hitching a ride in the back while the riflemen, Nat and her shadow were on foot. The machine guns swiveling on their tripods in an open-topped carriage seemed like a good idea, though Faris noted the convenience that it meant none of the gunners would be walking. Gefreyten Knechten Muirgheal “Old Murmurs” Cnáimhín had a cheeky grin on her creased face, but Faris let it slide. It was a waste of words and too noisy to get into an argument with Cheap Company’s oldest grunt.

Faris rubbed her jaw, behind the tight rubber seal of her bird-like gas mask. “We’re going to have to use the dinghy, figured as much.” She whistled forward her second in command, Obergefreite Thibaut Eulalie. When Faris turned, the woman was kneeling beside her, carbine-length rifle leaned on her forward knee. What is it, boss? “We need to get over the river. Find a good location where we can push off with the dinghy, we’ll do two shifts of six. Make sure Soggy is on board with ‘em, right?” A nod. On it, Unterofficer. Thibaut stood and disappeared back toward the column. A whisper of orders went up, and the silence was replaced with the plodding of kirza1 boots through ash and drying mud, the sound of rifles clicking against webbing and the hiss and swears of disgruntled troopers. Faris kept her eyes on the city as they worked.

Two hours later, and a spot to disembark was chosen. The waters were an ugly colour at that early hour, but Faris paid it no heed. Once the boat was unloaded from the carriage, the driver made his way back to the fortified convoy in the forest, up the hill and down a winding road.

0800 hours.

They were over the river with both teams within an hour’s time. The city had been built on sturdy stone foundations, raising it easily two heads over any of Faris’ troopers. Soggy, their jack-of-all-trades combat engineer, was quick to point this out once the dinghy carrying Faris and the second half of the team had made it to the other side of the river. “Whatever junk we scrounge from the city is going to have to be let down from the top to the bottom.” Faris nodded along, and eventually Soggy snapped her fingers. “On our way in, there was a fire burning somewhere on the west side of the city, I could’ve sworn I made out rigging and such. We can leave a team to watch the dinghy, lower it down and transport it over the river in the boat.” Faris grinned under her mask.

“Once we’re all done, we can mark the location and camp out between the stash and the road. Good plan, Soggy.” She could feel the smoldering look being sent her way from the Gefreyten Knechten.

“Don’t call me that, Unterofficer.” Faris offered no reply as she scanned the concrete foundations that loomed over the beach. She snapped and pointed to a door. “Looks like a service tunnel,” Soggy noted.

“Exactly. Alright! Thibaut, Soggy, Nat, Rylee, Marie! You’re with me,” Faris yelled in a low, harsh whisper. The two flame troopers, the looming Nat Zahariev, her diminutive assistant flamer wearing a dozen small canisters over their body joining her. Kalin Rylee. Can’t believe they saddled us with a recruit. Fucking apprenticeship programme, that brat is barely old enough to drink. Faris snorted quietly to herself. Thibaut and her carbine were beside her before she could even notice the movement. Soggy stood forward with her own carbine. Gefreiter Urbain Marie poked his head up and shuffled over, shotgun clasped in his rubber and leather gloves. Faris flicked her head toward the stairwell and turned to move. “The rest of you, stay here and guard the dinghy. Use a red flare with the flare gun if you run into trouble.” The machine gun commander, a scrawny junior officer, Colum Iver, nodded sharply. He went to salute—then stopped himself. Fuckin’ idiot. Faris gave him a thumbs up before turning back on her heel, rifle hung under her arm on its sling.

1500 hours.

Ruby Beacon and the burner team arrived at the southern edge of Manehattan later in the morning than they’d meant to, around 0800 hours, five ’o’ clock in the morning. The river was calm, and their initial plan to use a boat seemed sound until it was realized quickly they would have to transport a supply cart over the water. A pontoon bridge was the next choice, and seven hours later, it was built and crossed. Ruby Beacon and Field Surgeon (esq) were the first across the bridge, watching their old soldiers make their way across the narrow, bobbing bridge. A whisper from the quayside above set Field on edge, and had Ruby cautiously turning. A shadow moving away from the railing was the last thing she wanted to see. Bloomers? Refugees? Damn it all, I hope it was just a cat. Ruby’s wings stirred anxiously as she watched the rest of her soldiers make their way across the bridge. The supply cart was trundling along quite precariously.

“Something isn’t right.” Ruby muttered aloud. A quick smack at the back of her head had her snapping around to look at Field Surgeon, who was glaring at her.

“Don’t ever say those things. Please.” She gave a slightly patronizing smile. Ruby glared. She asked why. Field Surgeon explained it to her—Ruby needed it explained a second time. She stopped listening halfway through as a pair of glassy eyes began staring at her from atop the quayside.

Thirsty. So thirsty, it whispered. It began mantling the railing. Ruby made a little terrified noise. Field Surgeon spun. The thing lunged—it was a pegasus, with its entire body shriveled into a black husk of a silhouette, trailing glittering spores in the air behind it. Field Surgeon’s horn charged with a muddy-golden glow. Ruby barked an order to the ballista team, though it seemed unnecessary. They were already planting their tripod in the muddy beachside and jamming the automatic ballista on its mount.

The bloomer soared over and past them toward the bridge. Several bolts from the ballistas snapped past it with a distinct whistling. Ruby Beacon continued to shout orders, keeping her sight bounced forward and backwards, making sure any ambush would be caught before she could lose someone to a bite to the neck.

The bloomer hit the bridge right in front of the carriage-driver. They were unarmed save for a lance mounted to the side of their body. They swung, the bloomer was caught in the neck. It tore its own throat open like a sieve to bite down on the driver’s face. The driver screamed as the bloomer fell backwards, taking a large chunk of their face with them as bolts slammed into its back. It left a greasy black smear on the bridge before collapsing into the water. One of a thousand bodies in the water, Ruby. You can’t help that.

The driver began to spasm and scream. One of the wagon wheels screamed as it edged off the pontoon bridge. Ruby threw herself forward. If not for the chainmail on her body, she’d have her wings out. Another veteran had the same idea and they were soon across the bridge, grabbing the wagon before it could join the bloomer in the water. They pulled in the opposite direction as the flailing driver. Ruby didn’t catch it, but the veteran must have unlatched the screaming, bleeding pony’s attachment to the cart, because they flew off the wagon. There was a snap of chainmail shattering and the shlk of a blade gliding into solid meat. Then, the driver was pushed back and sailing into the water. Ruby stopped to stare only for a moment. “Don’t stop pulling, it’s going to fall!” Her attention was back in an instant.

Two hours later, the supply cart was pushed back over to shore. It hadn’t even made it halfway across the bridge, it was safer, quicker and easier to just push it back. Ruby gave the order to burn the bridge after one of her veterans called out a bloomer watching them from a building overlooking the quayside. Field Surgeon gave her a look of uncertainty. Is this a good idea? Ruby could hear the words in her head, even if Field’s face was pursed and scrunched. She steeled her gaze and nodded to Field. “Do it.”

Once all of her platoon was over the pontoon bridge, they flung one of their canisters of pitch across it, then lit it on fire. From there, there was a tired, quiet march along the beach, looking for some way into the city, the soldiers laden in what little of their supplies from the carriage they could stow on their persons.

She wasn’t happy when the only way in they could find without wasting the rest of their daylight circumnavigating the city’s border was a drainage pipe with spores glittering in the beams of light piercing the darkness inside it. “Out of the frying pan, eh, Ruby?” Field gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder in tandem with her little joke before looking over the drainage grate with a scowl. “Give me an hour and I can get this open.” Her horn took up that muddy-gold glow in tandem with the padlock on the grate.

Author's Note

Alphyrra's Almanac

1 Kirza is a waterproof textile used by many Phyrr nations in the manufacture of boots, as a protective outer layer to chemical suits and many other things. It has an appearance like pig leather, and has its historical roots in the 1st era post-apocalyptic cultures which rediscovered the means of creating the material from museum documentation on old European cultures.

Fun fact/behind the scene thing! The main weapons of Cheap Company are based on the Krag-Jorgensen (no individual model) bolt action rifle, Winchester 1897 shotgun, and the Gasser revolvers, the 1870 and 1898 Rast & Gasser respectively. Their uniforms are based on the Red Army Scout uniforms with American webgear from the interwar/WW2 years, combined with either an French "Adrian" helmet for the infantry or a cut-off pig-faced bascinet helmet for non-coms and officers, combined with a mask designed after the generic plague doctors' crow mask with gas mask filters on a 135 and 45 degree angle to the beak.

IV

Ruby Beacon breathed in slow, cautious breaths. The drainage tunnel was a looming thing, designed to allow minotaurs to walk through for work. Inside, it was quiet, save for a distant whispering in the background. Too familiar sounds of anguish being whispered out. I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty. She couldn’t make out faces in the dark, but that uneasy feeling that passed through one’s bones when a bloomer was near was coursing through her like adrenaline.

Field Surgeon tailed behind her, alongside their platoon of ponies. Marsh light spells were flung forward in hundred-yard intervals. At first entry, Field suggested letting the heavy ballista team forward alongside three cataphracts. Ruby agreed, so the ballista team headed their quiet sidling through the drainage, a unicorn named Butter Hooves and an earth pony named Bolt Thrower making up the loader and gunner respectively. The cataphracts, in heavy plate armor mixed with chainmail shawls, sidled forward at an angle in front of the ballista team, throwing up their heads in a deer-like halting gesture every few hundred yards. The ballista would click onto its heavy wooden tripod, the cataphracts’ barrel-mounted spears would angle forward like pikes. Then silence.

The occasional bouts of fighting never came without casualties, especially in the insidious darkness of the winding drainage tunnels, with frequent splits. Every so often, Field Surgeon would hear a crunch, turn her head and there was one less pony in their unit, always the unarmored magi. They aren’t this smart. We’re just this stupid, she mused, then kept moving, flicking marsh lights forward to light the tunnel a hundred yards ahead.

Ruby Beacon felt cagey. Without the ability to use magic due to her lack of a unicorn horn to channel, she had no offensive capabilities aside from her spear. Without the ability to use her wings, she was grounded, both due to them being pinned under her armor and due to that armor’s weight in equal parts. She listened for the back of the platoon, took comfort in the steady burbling sound of pitch letting out of wooden barrels like the junior officer had ordered. If we get overwhelmed, we’ll take the whole tunnel with us. It’ll collapse, and that much of the city will be destroyed. I’ll take partial completion to failure.

Unterofficer Faris Quirke looked over the streets of ‘Tartarus’ and found that familiar anxious feeling in her chest she’d felt so many times before on the precipice of a bad firefight. Her eyes wandered down to her rifle. She ran the bolt back partially, letting the brass glint in the scant illumination of the foggy streets. The branching fungal trees sprouting out of high-rise buildings let a constant rain of fungal spores like ashen fog down from on high. Faris checked her watch again. Need to do a filter swap in about 40 minutes.

“You seen this yet, Faris?” Quirke turned back to see Nat. She was squat, poking at an unidentifiable pile of dead meat with patches of fur. More of those black branches stuck out of it at odd angles. Some of the branches ended in white bulbs, the air thick with spores. Nat had her chemsuit down to her waist despite Faris’ orders to the otherwise, but she had the good decency to wear the long asbestos gloves her flamethrower required to be worn. Faris loomed behind her and the scrawny rifleman beside her.

“Don’t touch that. It might be infectious.” Faris muttered, checking her watch again. Nat glanced back at her, ridged helmet and bird-faced gas mask with its twin filters blankly staring up at Faris. Her mask’s lenses had been penned over with dark ink to tint them like a motor carriage’s windows. With a quick look thrown back at the pile of furry meat, Nat muttered something in her native tongue—a language Faris couldn’t recognize of course—grabbed her flamethrower and barked for the assistant to back up and top her off after “she grills this old burger.” Then, with a click-click-click, she gave a short, single spurt of flaming jellied fuel onto the pile of meat. They both leapt out of their skin at the way it immediately jolted. Faris’ rifle levelled and were it not for Nat putting a glove on the barrel, she’d have fired.

“Don’t waste the ammo, Unterofficer. We’ve still got plenty of opportunities where we might need it. Whole city out there, and all that,” Nat steadily enunciated. Faris furrowed her brow and scowled behind her mask. Babying me like this is my first work detail in combat. The balls on you, Nat Zahariev, are immense. Wish you weren’t right about my nerves, though. Faris nodded, then hung her rifle in its sling, hand moving to rest on her holster—it was a comfort thing, feeling the wooden grip of the revolver over the coarse hand-fitted rubber-leather gloves. The cobblestones glowed under the pile of ash that was jittering seconds before. Nat beckoned her assistant trooper along, and Faris led the way back toward the wharf. It was a beautiful thing made of large stone blocks cemented together at the bottom, with smaller stone bricks lining the walkways and making a short railing along the edge overlooking the short beaches. Low tide, I guess. The smell of salty ocean air managed to penetrate Nat’s mask in spite of everything. So did the smell of burnt meat and rot, though.

There were abandoned fruit and vegetable stalls along the wharf against the backs of several low-rise brick and wood offices. Harbor authority, I wager, Faris noted.Soggy, their combat engineer, was eagerly fixing up a pulley-winch system that looked older than her. The sort of thing you think of in the same vein as line fighting with muskets and wood-hulled ships. Faris also noted the actual wrecks of wood-hulled ships that were half-burned out or crashed into the wharf, several rows down from where they were. She shuffled over to where the combat engineer was tweaking at a nut and bolt assembly at the base of a tall wooden structure, a big leather bag of tools at her boots. “Any sign of the dinghy team?” Faris proffered to the mousy egghead, kneeling beside her. Soggy flicked her head slightly upward.

“Yeah, actually. I sent them across the river to start marking out the drop-off point, they’ll be back soon.” She jabbed a thumb to her right toward the end of the wharf. Faris stood up and leaned left and right, trying to get a good look—till, there. The wooden dinghy was being watched by the machine gunner and their riflemen on the other side of the moat-like river. “Wonder where all the people are?”

Faris flicked her gaze down at the engineer again, then round the wharf. Wooden carts left abandoned on the streets, some with their goods spilled across the street haphazardly. “Nowhere to be seen. Same with the wee tree-horses. Doc said they were infected with some kinda mushroom, like the cork flu1 back home.” Soggy snorted.

“Maybe they’re all underground like the corkers, too.”

Another pony down. Ruby Beacon stared at the twitching, glass-eyed body of the unicorn with a deeply unnerved frown. Their seventh casualty since getting here. Old mares and foals is all they give me, and I have to watch them all die like this because they’re too slow. She shook her head and took a shaky breath. Field Surgeon’s sympathetic brush against the morale-broken junior officer helped her focus. She gulped down her nerves and checked her local map again.

“Should be a waystation up ahead, in that alcove.” She pointed with a foreleg, and the under-strength platoon continued forward. There were abandoned barricades made of trash, mud and rubbish splayed across the cut in the wall, and at the end, up a slight incline—bingo. Ruby rushed forward and jolted up. She bit her lip to prevent herself from screaming at the sight of the pony behind the locked grate. The pony jumped too—aqua green fur and a yellow mess of hair atop her head, wings at her sides. A Pegasus. No obvious signs of infection, though without the marsh lights it was hard for Ruby to tell.

“Who are you?!” the guard whispered in a hushed scream. Ruby’s team filed in behind the barricades behind her, quickly lying flat against them, or against the curved walls for cover. There was a distant scream down the tunnel. Ruby’s heart rate spiked.

“We’re the cavalry—you gonna let us in, or what?!” Ruby harshly retorted. The guard looked over the uniform—caught the glint of the solar sun on her peytral, then nodded eagerly.

“Yeah, but I need to go get the key.” Damn it all. Ruby nodded and gestured for the guard to hurry—go, go, we don’t have time for arguing. The screaming and manic mumbling grew louder. Field Surgeon threw a look at Ruby, and whispered orders to take cover and hide. The bloomers won’t poke into the alcove if they don’t see any of us. They were probably attracted by the smell of the burning pontoon bridge, or the blood, or… hell, I don’t know. Ruby ducked behind a shattered wooden barrel lying splayed across the ground.

“What’re we going to do, Field?” Ruby looked to the self-titled mare herself, who shot her a look. If I start picking that lock, the noise and magical presence will alert any bloomers. We wait until we can’t wait anymore, then we fight. Ruby had problems with the plan, but she couldn’t think of anything better to suggest, so she hunkered down behind her barrel and waited. If this gets us killed or worse, I am going to haunt her ass.

The bloomers came shuffling, running and staggering past them. The ones in the throes of infection moved like they were being puppeteered by a drunk, the ones long past in their final stages of bloom moved with disconcerting accuracy. The fungal infection that had eaten its way into their brains had taken over the meat suit with fine motor accuracy. It mimicked the few words it could remember. So thirsty. Have you seen my socks? Bandages will fix it, bandages fix it, bandage, bandage, bandage, bandage. Thirsty, thirsty, thirsty. They were manic, slurring each word and twitching audibly with almost wooden cracks as the dried out joints tore and snapped into place by the chemical commands of the fungal brain. Her troops were antsy, unnerved and uneasy like her. Field Surgeon too. She wore a veneer of calm, but Ruby could read the sudden bouts of anxiety in her eyes every few words. All too familiar with the sounds. Bringing back bad memories. Ruby wasn’t a virgin to the horrid sounds either.

She made the mistake of assuming they were through the worst of it—that salvation was around the corner. Then that stupid blue Pegasus came jingling along with the keys. A neck snapped to turn toward the sound. Thirsty. Please. Joints cracked as the thing limped forward with all the grace of a corpse. Her ponies went silent as the thing tunnel-visioned toward the grate. Field Surgeon turned blue through her fur as she held her breath. It was a unicorn at some point, with its horn having shattered early on in its infection like so many others. Its eyes were beyond being glassy, just small, focused pupils without any life or color left in them. Just dryness. Its jaw was broken, and it slurred out its words, mouth dry and without any spittle to come flying out with each desperate parroting of those two words. Thirsty. Please. Please. Please. Thirsty. Thirsty. Quiet, louder than a murmur, quieter than an indoor voice. It began to mantle the wooden barrel Ruby was behind. She all but pissed herself as the thing loomed over her. Its eyes scanned the tunnel ahead behind the grate. Its neck was narrow and thin. Its shoulders were gaunt, ribs visible against blacked furless skin, like a sphinx cat covered in soot. Its tail was devoid of all but the rattiest hairs at the end, flicking with idle movements. Another parroting movement to draw in prey. Look at me, I’m normal. My tail and my ears flick. I speak the same language as you, I am alive. Come close and breathe in my spores, become distracted by my horrific form long enough so I might sink my rotten teeth into your supple flesh. Ruby tried to cleanse her mind of the thoughts, but couldn’t in the face of the utter horror of the thing. The guard wasn’t visible in the tunnel yet, just the echo of the keyring in her mouth. Go away, turn back where you came from and get distracted.

Then its eyes turned down at her. “So thirsty. Please. Thirsty please.” It’s jaw flapped, and it lunged forward. Ruby screamed—she flailed, she raged against the dark silhouette in a desperate act of something between courage and a fight response.

A magical aura encompassed the thing’s head as it fell upon Ruby. Field Surgeon cast Break Leg. The thing’s head crunched inwardly like a melon being popped with rubber bands in those precious seconds before it exploded. Ruby’s flailing limbs sent it careening past her into a heap.

“There goes the element of surprise,” Field muttered. She swore under her breath at the sound of the twisted voices getting louder again. “Alrighty, then. Let’s get ready to die fighting, hm?” While Ruby laid there, panting and coming down from the panic, Field Surgeon barked orders. Barricades were pushed forward and piled up. Spells were cast, fires began to glow. Field Surgeon grabbed the broken corpse of the bloomer and flung it over the barricades with her muddy-gold magic aura, then lifted Ruby’s head off the ground. Their eyes met. “Unless you want to start drinking bloomer brain juices, get up.” Ruby got up. Why am I alive? Field Surgeon flinched visibly at the answer—just barely perceptible, but enough to snap Ruby out of it. “You need to lead these ponies to relative safety, out of this fight. Get to it.” Ruby nodded with numb, coarse bobs of her head. She began whimpering orders. Field Surgeon translated them and barked them out. They were followed, and when the first beady, glassy eyes were visible over the barricades, a flaming ballista bolt was planted tween them. Their head popped. Another pair of eyes, then another and another. More ballista bolts, more corpses falling. Shots missed and embedded into the stone wall behind the heads, or past barred windows into the snapping jaws of frantic faces trying to claw their way through solid stone.

1900 hours.

Unterofficer Faris Quirke watched the perimeter on their little section of wharf with that queasy feeling rising in her gut. They filled sandbags, stacked them against the streets turning into the Wharf, combined with the discarded wooden carts and other various bits of dock trash to make proper barricades. Riflemen manned the bags and watched the barricades, sitting on trash, sandbag stools or lobster traps.

Gefreiter Armand Malvina stood beside Faris, Nat and Nat’s assistant flamer, Kalin Rylee. Armand was a rifleman, carrying a shotgun and bandoliers packed tightly with wax shells. Kalin was arguing with him about the soundness of his logic to use rock-salt shells in the shotgun as a paranatural deterrent. The sun cast an orange glow through the fog that cloaked the city, thin beams trailing between the buildings and dimly illuminating the wharf.

“’And misery did follow her, wherever she went.’” Faris turned to Nat, who was sitting with her right side to the city, her left to the wharf, using one of the dirt sandbags as a stool.

“What the hell are you saying now?” Faris cocked an eyebrow behind her mask at the flametrooper, who was looking her flamethrowing wand over with a suck of her teeth. I’m quoting poetry, Nat said. Faris asked what poem. Nat told her—some Omelese poet from the ‘teens. Faris told her to stop being a sap and stay focused.

Then Faris saw something moving in the dim orange-pale blue light of the waning afternoon. She narrowed her eyes. Black silhouette. Quadruped. Coughing and wheezing out choked words in Escalian—why always that rat tongue? Faris drew her pistol, turned to the subordinate on her left, Nat. The muscly flame trooper cocked her head. “Going in for the kill, boss?” Faris proffered a reply by drawing her revolver from its holster and thumbing the hammer back to full cock. Nat readied her flamethrower and followed behind Faris.

The thing was sickly. Not as far gone as she had thought—not as bad, but still bad. She could make out an ugly aqua-green-blue faded to a darker baby blue by disease or nature. It had glassy eyes, twitching limbs and a cracked horn at the base of its head. The ratty hair on its head was thin. It kept murmuring in that “rat tongue.” Nat translated.

“Help me, I’m so thirsty, so thirsty. Flitter, is that you?” Nat repeated. The thing seemed to stop as it was nearer to them. Its glassy eyes shakily rose to greet them. The thing twitched. Faris raised her revolver. The thing stared at it, lips trembling as it murmured more indecipherable speech. “Flitter, please. I’m still your sister, Flitter. Please.” Faris shot a glare at Nat. She felt a little thump in her hand. The horse had gently headbutted its forehead against the bore of her pistol. “It’s suffering, boss.” Her words lacked that bordering monotonous and mocking quality that Nat’s voice naturally took on. Faris met eyes with the horse again. The black branches growing out of its back looked agonizing. Seated in the spine, I’d guess. She pulled the trigger.

CRACK.

The horse dropped. There was a scream and a flutter from the rafters of a building to the left, on the corner. Faris shot her eyes up, pistol tracking in turn. The thing that flung itself off the roof looked better off than its now dead compatriot by a margin but starved in the same way. Faris crossed the fingers on her offhand, then with her body aimed perpendicular to the horse, pistol drawn and raised in one hand, she pulled the trigger. The trigger depressed the first three quarters and the hammer pulled back. It fell off the cliff-like hook mechanism inside the grip, and flew forward under spring tension. The cartridge pistol barked, and the winged horse cried out. Got you. The thing was bleeding like a stuck cow. Faris turned to Nat. There was disapproval in her eyes, past the tinted lenses of her gas mask. Heat wafted off the back of Faris’ neck. “Burn that body,” she kicked her head toward the dead one she shot square in the forehead, “then get Urbain and Malvina. We’re going to track that thing back to whatever nest it came from.” Faris added “Like killing a bunch of irradiated dogs,” right at the end, fervently. As if to convince herself. Nat gave her a concerned look, then nodded, turning her flamer on the body as several troopers came rushing over. Faris was already on the move when she heard the distinct click-click-click of the thing’s pilot light.

Author's Note

Alphyrra's Almanac, Issue 4

1 The Cork Flu is an ill-understood disease with its origins in the Wraihohen Deserts. It gets its name for the porous holes that begin forming on the victim after a period of time. The Cork Flu causes severe heliophobia and manic mood swings, and is fatal after three weeks.

If ever there is a term you read in here that does not make sense, leave a comment and I'll add an addendum to the chapter with my almanac of terminology. ^^

06/13/2024: Rewrote the last section of the chapter. Wasn't happy with it, is all.

V

The bloomers kept coming. They mounted a valiant defense, but the ballista ran out of bolts, so they moved onto pikes and stabbed their way through until the heads snapped off. They used the broken wooden staffs to beat back the bloomers, whacking away until they were left with the unicorns putting up a wall of electrified mana trellis as a last-ditch resort.

Ruby Beacon was grateful when she heard the key rattling through the tumblers on the grate behind them. She filed the twenty-five or thirty ponies left through the portal of the tunnel, and then pulled the thing shut herself, snatching the lock from the guard to ratchet over the clasps. Ruby stepped back and watched the trellis collapse, and the mass of bloomers rush forward in a small tide of two dozen or so.

They snapped their jaws, flung their hooves and screamed in terror, anguish and rage, all pale imitations of real emotion. Not people anymore. Puppets. The scream of pain behind them was very real, though. She tilted her head and paled. One of theirs—she saw them go down during the fight, thought they died. Evidently not. They couldn’t move—covered in bites and bruises, with broken bones jutting out. The bloomers ignored the poor sod. Why? Just kill him, please, you animals. Please, for the love of Celestia, he doesn’t deserve to be left to bleed out like that.

Field Surgeon’s horn glowed its muddy-gold colour, and with a quick snap, the broken-bodied stallion’s head twisted, and he went silent. Ruby flinched and turned to look at the dirty unicorn beside her. She sported a tired look and gave a little dismissive shake of her head. “Nothing we could’ve done,”Field Surgeon proffered, as if trying to comfort her. Ruby felt numb.

Field tugged on Ruby’s ear and pulled her along. The junior officer staggered alongside her while the guard led the way at the fore, often pausing to itch at her leg and neck, sitting to scratch with her back leg behind an ear like a dog. Field Surgeon paid it no mind after a quick look of disappointment that she washed away in the instant she remembered Ruby was still watching her. “They did that, the grifs. I watched them do it during a war with… the minotaurs or the yaks, I think. I was an observer.” She stroked the back of Ruby’s head with a foreleg and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Point being…” Field trailed off. She paused in tandem with the column as their guide went to sit and scratch again, watching her with hawkish eyes. “Never mind.”

Don’t have much to say, do you? Ruby let out a little huff, forcing the exhaustion out her throat with pursed lips. “So, where exactly does this lead, miss…?” Ruby piqued up, finally feeling the need to gather intel. The guard flicked her eyes back at Ruby, and she swore for a moment the mare looked so indignantly mad she might fly into a rage. She didn’t, though, and instead paused, tilted her head, then let out a long ‘uhm’ before explaining herself. It’s a causeway, leads up to a surface access somewhere on the north-ish side of Manehattan. We send ponies up for supplies sometimes, it’s the only way we can really eat.

Calling it a refugee camp seemed an understatement. The rear entry they trotted up to was guarded with a decently built fortification of two wooden barricades by spear-wielders—not ponies, diamond dogs. They had iron helmets and cloth sack masks on. On closer inspection once they were nary a few yards from them, Ruby noted a flintlock pistol in the waistband of one of the guards. Wonder how he got that. Those things aren’t exactly common.

“New ponies?” One of the dogs rasped to the aqua-green mare. She nodded. Yeah. Royal guards, here to help apparently! The dogs didn’t share her excitement, or at the very least didn’t emote it. Ruby couldn’t make out their facial expressions behind the sack masks. She cleared her throat.

“We’re here to assist any refugees as best we can.” The dogs didn’t reply. Ruby felt sweaty under her leather shawl and brass peytral. The dog with the pistol in his belt shrugged.

“Soldier ponies go help, then. We dogs stay guard, make sure no stupids try leaving through back door.” Can’t exactly blame you, there. The guide, whose name was still lost to Ruby, led past the tunnel. The room opened into something between an atrium and a quarry pit. The Manehattan drainage system was a mess—the city elevated steeply to the center of the island. Ruby wagered they were somewhere around there, at the bottom of the extensive network of drainage pipes that were built under the streets. Looking up into the causeway, Ruby noted it was less of a causeway, more of a central chamber. It was what she imagined the central spire of a changeling hive might look like; careening upwards with tunnels dotting the walls leading down toward the ground where the entry tunnels were. Here, it wasn’t much different.

The refugees had built little one-shack ‘streets’ into the tunnels, with massive blockages placed at the far ends to prevent any bloomers from sneaking their way in. Water still seemed to flow through from cracks, but they had built around that, too. Everything was on walkways, like a city built on stilts. The thing was about three “storeys” high, with a tunnel or two in every direction on each, though she did note walkways at the very top that led off to doorways. They had string lights hanging from walkways to light the whole affair as best they could. At the bottom where they were, a deep trench down the center of the room had originally split the floor into quadrants, but two had been dammed off and boarded over to make walkways, leaving a sort of river down the middle where gaunt refugees bucketed up water to shuffle up toward their camps with. She knew ponies from Manehattan—that sense of community resonated here. Even in dire circumstances, urbanite city dwellers will stick together. It was something she never really saw in Canterlot. Ruby blamed money and moved on. Their guide was rambling along about the place.

“… and at the top tunnel that used to lead into 4th and 36th where the bank used to be, we have an extensive kitchen set up, although recently it’s been hard to find food. We can’t enter a lot of the tall buildings because the bloomers like to be in the dark, and while by now a lot of them have started to, uh, get all wilty and stationary, like proper dead, uh, well, uhm, they still leave spores and, like, all that stuff. Oh!” She bounced on a metal sheet that had been placed over the “river” at the bottom, hearing it warble with some amusement. “We get all our water from the runoff from the river, like the settlers first did. Isn’t that neat?”

Ruby frowned at the river and the cagey refugees that scattered like bugs once they entered, watching them from behind corners, stalking almost. It set her hackles arisen. She was thirsty, though. She went to dip her head toward the river but Field pulled her mane back. Ruby let out an abrupt curse as the senior vet pulled roots. “Gh-! Field, what the hell are you doing?” Ruby snapped, harshly whispering with a scowl. Field Surgeon had a grim look on her face that wiped the anger off the junior officer’s face. She pointed to the end of the “river,” the source of the flow. It was a grated pipe like the one they had just walked through—but more cramped. Her blood went cold when she saw an eyeball and a patch of bloated meat glinting in the dim light. “… Thank you,” Ruby begrudgingly whispered. Field Surgeon didn’t reply. She turned to the ponies and passed the order down not to drink the water.

The guide got them set up with some grimy tents, which Field Surgeon and the rest of their unicorns thoroughly disinfected with a bit of magical trickery before setting up and settling in for a rest against better judgement. Off to the side, in a red tent, the under-strength platoon’s two commanders laid on sleeping mats across from one another, faces mired in physical and mental exhaustion. They didn’t have a plan for this. They expected a refugee outpost or two in the drainage tunnels—sure, they anticipated it. The abandoned supply cart on the other side of the river was packed with informational pamphlets—which, of course, Field Surgeon was quick to remind Ruby were propaganda—notes on how to recognize infection, how to disinfect and cleanse one’s living space, quarantine procedures, and what to do if one was infected. Ruby felt an ugly pit in her stomach when she read the grim instructions.

If you suspect yourself or a loved one have contracted the Everfree Infection, it is crucial that you instate proper quarantine measures. Ruby remembered passing the houses on the southern side of town, boarded up at every exit and entry with the uncomfortable white and red X’s painted onto every side of the building. If the bored spores have not been removed within an hour’s time of infection, the chances of recovery are slim, but present. A lie, according to Field Surgeon. “There’s no chance of recovery,” she began with a mirthless laugh, “once you’ve started coming down with the first stage symptoms, your best bet is to drink a tincture of rat poison and sleeping medication. You’ll die painlessly in your sleep, long as you don’t wake up.” Ruby’s face twisted with indignation at the notion but found only an exhausted sigh escaping her muzzle.

“They’ve been drinking tainted water. There’s bound to be spores in the air—how long have they been breathing it in, do you wager?” Field Surgeon gave a weary shrug of her shoulders as she sprawled out on her sleeping mat, inspecting herself with a fine-combed gaze, plucking small bits of debris out and cauterizing the areas with liberal dosages. She barely had any fur left on the areas below her knees, on any four legs.

“Not certain. We supposed, or rather my and my fellows supposed there would be colonies like these.” Colonies. Dehumanizing them, I see, Ruby pondered inwardly. “Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot we can do for them aside from… well.” She gestured with a hoof, slicing it across her neck and making a “Khk” noise with her mouth. Ruby frowned at that. There has to be something we can do, Field. These people are sick, we can’t just—A hoof held up. “Ruby Beacon, you’re a junior lieutenant in the Solar Guard, you can’t be this naïve.” That patronizing tone. Ruby’s ears folded back with anger. Field Surgeon gave her a sympathetic look. She averted her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I know we haven’t been on good terms throughout this… thing, they’ve told us to do. Salute the rank, not the mare and all that.” She ran a hoof through her mane. Field Surgeon bit down on her lower lip and shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak, but Ruby cut her off.

“I get it. It’s clear to me they’re your ponies and they don’t have much respect for a junior lieutenant whose only qualification was passable marks in cadet school. I get it. I like to think that’s why I haven’t been fighting it. I’d rather keep the illusion of power.” Ruby sucked her teeth. She swallowed the mass of anxiety in her throat. “I think we’re better off this way, in any case. You’ve got the experience to keep our ponies alive, and I don’t.” Field Surgeon looked like she wanted to argue but stopped herself. She nodded a few times in a pacifying fashion.

“Okay.” That’s it? Just okay? Ruby frowned. Field continued. “We’re both adults. We’ve both seen bloomers at various stages, they aren’t… people, anymore.” Field shook her head softly and rubbed her face with a hoof. Ruby nodded along.

“I know,” she mumbled. “I know, Field Surgeon. Just wish they didn’t have to be…” she gesticulated with a hoof. Field nodded along. Ruby sighed. “Let’s just get a few minutes rest before we have to act on our mission parameters. Delay the nightmares and whatnot…” She put her head down. Field Surgeon kept her head on a swivel as the junior officer rested.

2000 hours.

Windy Slope clutched her leg as she perched on a fire escape in an alley, panting heavily. What the hell are those things? Minotaurs? Diamond Dogs?! Celestia above… She was still bleeding heavily from the wound on her leg; it wasn’t too bad, but the blood coming out didn’t look right. She just needed a moment to rest, to—

Tap. Tap. Tap. She turned. A pair of eyes, a mangled face, a cracked hoof tapping on a window. “Water?” Windy Slope stared at the thing, listened to its rasping, muffled voice. The milky white eyes stared. The hoof tapped harder on the glass. Then the eyes looked down at the latch. Windy Slope followed its eyes. Its hoof moved to the latch. Windy Slope threw herself off the fire escape. Her wings beat quickly, and she heard the foreign tongue of the barking bipeds below. So much for a moment of rest.

Unterofficer Faris Quirke led the front, in a light jog. Riflemen Gefreiter Urbain Marie and Gefreiter Armand Malvina were behind her, Urbain with his carbine and Malvina with his shotgun. Hauptegefreiter Nat Zahariev taking up the rear with her flamethrower, the demure form of Kalin Rylee and their revolver existing in her shadow, reserve fuel tanks sloshing on their webbing.

Humans are persistence hunters, Urbain, Faris said to the rifleman when he complained that they would never catch up. The thing is bleeding like a stuck pig, leaving a trail for us, ever so kindly. It’s tiring out, too. When she said it, she was expecting to find the thing stopping, giving her a dim look with the same animal eyes like so many prey had before.

But it didn’t. It looked at her with terror, its face emoted that terror and it cried out in all too human a voice as it fled. A sinking feeling was beginning to fill her gut. Faris kept her unease to herself.

They followed the winged horse for hours. It wove through narrow alleys, wide open streets and past several abandoned and toppled tram carriages. The twitching silhouettes covered in dark slick and with beady eyes prompted them to pause and torch the thing before continuing their hunt. Darkness was overhead by the time they made it to the end of the blood trail.

The winged horse ran into a building that loomed above them. It had big, blown-out glass windows and a burnt-out interior. There were the charred remains of corpses scattering the floors, save for a single clean spot in the center of the room. Suicide bomber? Faris shook her head. No time to worry about that. The sick colony would have to burn first. The only door left had a bloody print on its handle, and indicated a maintenance access leading underground. With only furtive glances over their shoulders and the anticipatory anxiety of being alone in a place full of flesh-eaters, Faris barked a whispered order, and they filed in. She was at the front of the column. Nat behind her, then Kalin, Urbain and Malvina at the back with his shotgun. Nat shared words with Faris, begged her to tread lightly. Faris ordered her to train her flamer on the first thing they saw and get it ready for a burst.

The hallway careened and zig-zagged, with side passageways blocked off by debris or entirely walled off with cement and clay. The sound of voices eventually met their ears. Faris steeled her resolve and hung her carbine in its sling in exchange for her service revolver.

The blood trails they followed led to a door, whose handle dripped with black-tinted viscera. Found the den of wild pigs… Faris thumbed the hammer on her revolver back. Her left hand went for the handle, pushed it down as she shouldered her way through. Nat came up behind her, and as ordered, the flamethrower’s pilot light went click-click-click.

VI

Ruby Beacon awoke to a feeling of dread in her chest. A glance around her tent saw Field Beacon absent. With a little sigh, she took off her armor. Each piece was inspected for damage after it was laid out on her sleeping mat. Then, she checked herself, felt for bites, growths, anything. She was grateful when nothing bristled against her hoof other than fur and skin. She redonned her armor.

Field Surgeon stepped in as she tightened her peytral around her chest. Hello, they both said. Field Surgeon sat beside her as Ruby finished going over herself, taking a sharp edge to a block of chocolate. “You know,” she said, whittling a strip off the edge which she popped into her mouth. She let it dissolve before speaking. “If they made this stuff taste worse, it would last longer.” Ruby glanced back at her.

“Probably right,” she muttered. Field Surgeon’s features softened at the exhaustion in her face. She asked if Ruby slept well. Ruby said she hadn’t. Field Surgeon asked why, Ruby explained it was nightmares. The conversation went on with slow, off-kilter beats. Then Field Surgeon put the block of chocolate back into the satchel on her barrel.

“Looks like we’ll be settled in for the night. Too dark to be out and about on the surface,” Field said without meeting Ruby’s eyes, poking at her hooves. “We can get an idea of what this refugee camp is like, see if they know about any others.” So we can burn them out, Ruby finished. The hair on her back stood on end at the idea. She told Field she was going to go find out what food the refugees were eating. Field decided to follow. Ruby appreciated the confidence her presence provided.

The soup kitchen was up several flights’ worth of rope bridges near the top of the causeway, where the surface entrance sat. The big, circular brick tunnel had duckboard floors laid out and salvaged furniture being used for a rough kitchen setup. Ruby would go so far to call it homey if the grander context of the situation wasn’t crushing her spirit.

The bleeding Pegasus staring down the bore of a long tube held by a biped wasn’t solving her poor mood either. There was tension in the air as she trotted up to the frozen kitchen. The tube’s end began to click, when a second biped put a glove on the tube and pushed it down—a placating gesture? Something. The sick ponies at the kitchen, wrapped in cloaks and bandaging to conceal themselves from sight and easy identification, were huddled against the counters, bowls spilled and dripping on the floor as the two bipeds in the door stared down the newcomers. What in the name of Cerberus’ prick have I stepped in the middle of?

When one of the tubes turned to her, she found diplomacy the first thing that came to mind; there was an uneasy foreboding in her chest that warned her against hostility. The way it held the strange contraption in its… hand, carried a force with it, an air of violence. She called out to the biped with the handheld contraption that held a cylinder behind a long tube. A weapon. Why else would it brandish the thing like that. It turned to her, and lowered the thing, and began barking at its companion. The beak on its face was a mask, that was clear. It muffled their speech—what language is that? Ruby furrowed her brow and scrunched her muzzle. The one holding the long tube with the pilot light at its tip lowered its device and made some kind of awestruck sound, tapping their companion’s shoulder to point at Ruby. The two bipeds stared at one another—their body language betrayed annoyance on one end. Military?

Then Field Surgeon began cycling through greetings—Equish was a no-go, she skipped ‘hello.’ Next was the Diamond Dogs’ dialect. Ruby knew the word for hello, which Field then cheerfully barked at the bipeds. No response. She tried Yak. Nothing. Then Griffonian—bingo. That got a tilted head. The shorter one with the one-handed contraption began returning the speech at Field. Ruby tried to follow, but she knew only a few words and the conversation felt lightning-paced to the junior officer. The short biped ran a glove down their mask and shook their head with recognizable disdain. They turned, barked an order. Another one came up behind them. The bleeding Pegasus was flinching at the sight of the lot of them. Ruby looked to the handheld contraption, then to the pony. Her muscles tensed.

“Field, I don’t think these are… friendly creatures,” she carefully whispered to the surgeon as she trotted over to the wounded Pegasus. The aging veteran flashed a smile at her.

“I noticed. Be calm, let’s not rouse them to violence. They have muskets and pistols.” Ruby shot her a glare, questioning. Field caught the look. “The diamond dogs guarding the ground level had pistols, they put holes in ponies. I’ve seen it before. This,” she gestured subtly to the bleeding Pegasus as she sat beside her and fished through her saddlebags, “is a hole from one of their pistol balls.” Ruby hoped the tension would bleed away from there.

She was not relieved to find it only grew with time, as two more of the bipeds filtered in before shutting the door behind them. They sat on the lip of the wall across. The one with the handheld cylinder-actuating weapon was the one who spoke to Field, the rest stayed quiet. Leader, Ruby noted. Every few sentences, Field graced Ruby with a translation, though kept her eyes on disinfecting the Pegasus’ bleeding shot wound.

Why are they here? Came to steal from the ruins. Correctly judged there was a pandemic killing everypony, decided to take advantage and get bearings.

Why did they shoot the Pegasus? Wanted to follow the trail. They surmised she was sick, wanted to see if she led them to a leper colony when she ran. They weren’t wrong.

Why are we not gathering the mares and running these bastards through? They shot a pony. Because if they hadn’t, we would have done worse to them.

The last answer made Ruby shudder. By then, most of the ponies had cleared out by request of Field and by barked order from Ruby. Only the Pegasus, Windy Slope, remained, and she was out of it from blood loss. The question of ‘what now?’ brought no reply from Field as she continued to idly chatter with the leader of the bipeds. It made Ruby antsy, but Field seemed to ignore it.

When Field Surgeon left the Pegasus on the ground with an unbandaged leg, Ruby gave her a confused look. Field Surgeon gave her a renounced smile. “She was dead when she got here, infected and all that. I only made her comfortable. Why don’t we take advantage of our new friends and their,” she paused to turn back to the leader, asking a question in the Griffonian tongue before repeating the answer to Ruby, “flamethrower?” Ruby felt a pit growing in her stomach.

Unterofficer Faris Quirke had a similar pit in her stomach as she followed the pastel pony down a series of rope bridges toward the bottom of the drainage funnel. There were a pair of bipedal dogs at a far tunnel eyeing her and her weapons with something akin to lust and a dozen or so more of the armored ponies with her. Nat, ever the talker, was quick to pipe up. “They’re so cute, unt’! Can we keep them?!” The woman was all but whisper-yelling in her ear, and was only deterred with a swiped jab at her stomach.

“Quiet, Nat. And get your shit together, things might get ugly.” Nat snorted. For them, maybe. The arrogance on the flametrooper astonished her superior. She was a regiment veteran—she was no Old Murmurs, mind, but she was certainly less green than most of the infantrymen she was with. She expected the woman to more serious, but Faris supposed that was foolish in hindsight. She was a big, muscular teddy bear with a heart of gold… and a flamethrower, of course. For better and for worse, I suppose. She turned to the pale doctor pony who had identified herself by the rank of field surgeon. “Burners, I take it?” The pony bobbed her head, spongy hair bouncing a little with the motion.

“Yes sir, that’s us. Her Majesty, Princess Celestia’s best and hardest veteran royal guardsponies… or, that’s the line, anyway. Truth is most of the young bucks who they’d toss the job to normally are sick themselves or busy with patrolling the capital.” Faris sucked her teeth. Right, I see. “And, uh, I suppose by the masks and the PPE, you must be some manner of burners yourselves?”

They reached ground level, and Faris noted with disdain the body-catchers at one end of the small canal in the center of the open-top ground level, and the myriad corpses caught within. “Yeah.” Faris shook her head and followed along behind the field surgeon. “We are Sanitarii. We have, uh, periodic outbreaks like this, though never this bad before—at least, not since I’ve been in the service.” The field surgeon nodded along as she trotted over to a small village of tents. More armored ponies, maybe two or three dozen. They began popping their heads out, gathering in a rough formation. The field surgeon turned back to smile at Faris in a way that made her uneasy. That’s a full house if ever I’ve seen one. She shared an uneasy glance at Nat, whose body language shared her disdain.

There’s thirty of them and five of us. The field surgeon trotted on up to Faris again, looking up from the waist-ish height she stood on all fours at. The second pony—an officer of some kind judging by the regality on their armor, kept eyeing the five sanitars uneasily. “What’ll it be, doc?” Faris dropped her sidearm into its holster and hung a hand on her sling. The field surgeon smiled and pointed toward the tunnel with the two dogs guarding it. Her smile faltered at the sound of a lock snapping, and the alerted stances the dogs took up before drawing their rudimentary flintlock pistols. Faris’ mouth moved in tandem with her hands as she drew up her carbine. Nat took up position with her assistant flamer between the dogs and braced against the flimsy piece of plywood they called a guard post.

The glow of the bloomers eyes backdropped against the filtered light from the tunnel around Faris and Nat was the signal to go. Faris barked an order. Nat stanced up while Kalin Rylee held the flamer’s tubing against his body with one arm to prevent bunching in the tube, the other raising up an automatic pistol. Nat’s flamer went click-click-click.

Author's Note

Shooting to upload chapters every other week; we'll see how that goes.

VII

The flamethrower’s gout of jellied fuel came out like the belch of a pissed off young drake. The bark of gunfire was foreign to the ponies at first, but they became accustomed to it at first sight of what it did to the bloomers. Their rifles, based on the contemporary rotary “dump feeding” magazine, feeding a powerful compressed black powder charged, walloped harder than any Diamond Dog firepowder musket could even approach. The carbines, loaded with hollow pointed rifle bullets, kicked into shoulders. The copper-jacketed bullets snapped through the air at supersonic speeds, bit into woody, dried out flesh and expanded, rending holes into the bloomers’ bodies. They dropped like sacks, and the noise alone seemed to repel them at first. Smoke began to belch out of the tunnel as her five-man squad began to backpedal, Nat’s flamer belching out continuous gouts as they led a collapsing retreat. Ponies above screamed as the onyx-black bloomers began pouring through the tunnel, cast alight and screaming as they burned.

“Driftwood horses, fuck off and die!” Nat roared. Kalin Rylee’s automatic pistol snapped off repetitive shots, the toggle lock snapping up with each recoiling of the action, causing the hit bloomers to stagger or drop dead as the rounds impacted. The refugees scattered once the armored ponies made it up to the upper floors and their unicorns flung firebolts into their flammable homes. A few more bloomers came bursting out of a few. They were peppered liberally with buckshot before the group moved on, up the next bridge and burning the ones behind them. The smoke became choking as it rose to the ceiling and clouded the solid roof.

Faris was unharmed, but still all too eager to get the hell out. Her gas mask was rated for this sort of work but it ran hell on the filters. If they ran dry, she was cooked, figuratively and literally. Her troopers had the same problem, and were all too eager to push forward and keep any wayward attacking bloomers or refugees on the ground and full of holes.

Faris’ revolver barked repeatedly, four times in quick succession. A wrapped pony dropped as she trundled past its body and pushed toward the soup kitchen. It was abandoned, save for the bled corpse of ‘Windy Slope.’ Faris kicked the basement door in. A bloomer fell back. It had been fiddling with the knob using talons. It had some bird-like features in addition to its pony ones.

No longer. Her revolver barked and its brains splattered across the concrete. The twenty or so armored ponies still following darted past her, with the field surgeon at their front and the junior officer at their rear. Faris’ team trailed in behind, Nat holding up the rear with the frequent clicking of her flamer as it coated the soup kitchen in burning fuel. She shoulder-checked the door shut once Faris called out that everyone was present.

The door was slammed against repeatedly, but an extra gout of flame would mean it would open into yet another inferno. Fucking woody bastards, Faris inwardly swore. She began kicking empty shells from her revolver into a palm. She was closing the gate on her revolver when they pushed out into the first floor of the bank. The field surgeon looked to Faris uncertainly. “They’re more active at night, you know. They’ll be drawn by all the noise. Creepy damn things will be stalking us as we move on the open streets. Our numbers should help keep them away, they tend to go for lone targets, pick them off and get them infected or dead.”

Faris found truer words never spoken. The open city was hell to traverse at night, even with their Sanitar-issue handcrank torches and rudimentary chemlights. They managed, but not without a few more of the armored ponies getting lost in the dark. Faris wagered a fifty percent casualty rate at minimum for them, including just trying to get their way up the damn causeway and out into the burnt-out building above it. All the same, she was in some ways grateful for it; less of the pastel freaks meant less leverage the field surgeon had over them in bodies. She crunched the numbers as they walked. They could manage this. Prisoners meant intel and intel earned good marks. And without casualties? Kvetoslava would be bloody relieved.

They found more corpses across the street where Faris ordered the machine gun to emplace. She threw out a chemlight, called out the code-phrase. A positive response came, and Faris rounded the corner. “Guests!” she said to the gunner and his loader. Certainly, there were fewer fitting words in the dictionary to describe the pastel ponies than guests. Prisoner will be a good fit for ‘em, Faris wagered.

“You’re coming back with us,” Faris said to the field surgeon. They made no argument against it. The junior officer did, of course, but there was a quick argument between them ending in a strike to the junior’s jaw and a snapped order which had the rest of the ponies filing past the machine gun toward the wharf where the pulley lift was working its magic, and a team was running supplies across the river.

Field Surgeon knew she misstepped somewhere between the refugee camp and the wharf. They were running on little sleep and too many lost faces burned into the mind. She rubbed her face as she sat beside the rest of her comrades. They weren’t stripped of weapons, but she didn’t wager it would matter much either way. Their muskets fired quickly, quicker than any Diamond Dog firepower. Her head rang from the noise. So much volume packed into a nine by fifty or so millimeter brass tube, so much hate packed into the thirtyish millimeter projectile.

“Guess we have something to talk about,” Ruby’s voice called out as she slumped onto her haunches across from Field. The veteran’s face melded into guilt. The slug across the mare’s jaw was unnecessary, and her hoof throbbed from it. Not deserved. Should apologise.

“I suppose we do.” Field Surgeon failed to meet her eyes at first but steeled her heart. You’re a big filly. You’ve seen far worse than this without flinching. “I’m sorry for hitting you. You didn’t really deserve that; it was out of line and uncalled for.” Ruby seemed unmoved.

“That’s hardly what I meant, but it’s a good start as any.” She rubbed her swollen jaw and glared at the older mare. “I haven’t given an order these past few nights without you having to parrot it before it’s listened to. It doesn’t much seem like I’m the officer of this platoon, it feels like I’m the observer.” Field Surgeon examined her features. She read frustration easily, but struggled to make out what was buried underneath. Guilt? Some sense of disappointment? Her eyes throbbed. She blinked and shook her head.

“Yeah. I suppose it’s been like that. I served with a lot of these mares and stallions, they respect me and my orders… clearly aren’t used to being back in the service, either.” She gave a half-hearted smirk that wasn’t reciprocated. It was dropped. “More than anything, I don’t think any of us are at our best. I know—it’s an excuse, but it’s the best answer I have for you right now. If it’s any consolation, I’ve not done anything to go against you intentionally—” Ruby scoffed.

“I don’t care if you haven’t done anything to go against my orders. You’ve barely even acknowledged my authority, but that’s only small change in the grand scheme of my worries, here.” Field’s face scrunched up with bemusement. She looked up and met Ruby’s stern look. They were the eyes of a naïve filly as much as Field’s were. She flinched a little under the ocular assault. “We left those ponies to die. We let these… creatures kill them, we let them shoot one and get away with it. What in the name of Tartarus were you thinking, Field?!” She was standing, pointed at Field like a ready pike. Field’s ears flattened against her head, and she soon met the stance, standing straight-backed on all fours.

“What were you thinking, Junior Lieutenant Ruby Beacon?” Her snarl made Ruby flinch in return. A trade of verbal blows. Field pushed the assault, stepping closer. Ruby stepped back. “We are here to burn out colonies of lepers. We are not here to administer hospice to the homeless. They died when the local garrison blew the bridges, ma’am. Our job was to destroy, and we became so caught up in this mess that we’re already down most of our ponies and in the hands of a group of apes as fucking PRISONERS. Do you really think that now is the time to keep balking at my moral compass, Ruby Beacon? Hm?” The junior officer’s bite was a limp gumming in comparison. She had no bite-back, only allowing herself to slump on her haunches. Field Surgeon took a few deep breaths, then huffed them out angrily. She stepped back and slumped down herself. There wasn’t enough energy to stay angry. “I don’t know what you think you signed up for, Ruby, but I did. This was a suicide mission that was expected to succeed at our expense to save the lives of Celestia knows anymore. Ten ponies? A hundred? A few thousand? I don’t know what in the name of Tartarus they were thinking that we could stop this by burning a city that’s already been lost.” She laid forward on her stomach, head lying on folded hooves. The exhaustion on her features made her look a decade older. Emotions swirled in her head as their bipedal pseudo-captors shuffled about, chit-chatting and doing maintenance on their weapons. Tomorrow’s a new day, Field told herself. Tomorrow’s a new day. Chance to start again and have a better day than today. Then she closed her eyes for a nap.

VIII

Faris Quirke’s team made it back from the city with two casualties; one death and one wounding, due to a failure of the pulley-crane that their engineer had built. Obergefreite Thibaut Eulalie’s leg was crushed under a piece of heavy metal, and Gefreiter Armand Malvina had his neck crushed. He died instantly. Thibaut was quick to blame herself for it when she and Faris delivered the mission after-action report to Kvetoslava once they arrived back at the caravan with two carts full of materiel and twenty-five prisoners.

Kvetoslava was not expecting the prisoners. Grateful, of course, but not expecting it. The Oberleutnant’s executive stood beside him; Harshal Ajam, Fähnriche 1st Class, was a man that stood with Kvetoslava for the whole stint of his service. Narrow-faced, scrawny but with steel cables for muscles. Slava could think of few others he trusted as much as Harshal. The men stood beside one another on a small berm overlooking the dug-in convoy, a few infantrymen sitting behind them and sharing some smokes. Kvetoslava cleared his throat. “Any word from the prisoners?” Harshal sucked his teeth and jammed his hands into the pockets of his chemsuit.

“They’ve had little to say. Good old chirurgeon Gwendoline Mireille had some words about their biology, though. Says they’re all uninfected. Oh, and they’re old fogeys.” Slava scoffed. I could’ve told her that, with the way they’re all gray around the faces like that hound we kept at base. He gestured for Harshal to continue. “Right. The uh, one in charge, Ruby, I think its name was; it wanted to speak with you, sir. Face to face.” Slava nodded. Doable, he replied. They stepped away from the berm.

The ponies were all huddled together in a tent that was put up and had its walls rebuffed by using corrugated iron plates scrounged from Manehattan, burrowed into the dirt so they wouldn’t have any night-time visitors without ample response time. With two riflemen at the doors, Kvetoslava felt comfortable stepping in with only Harshal at his side and the former captain’s hand-cannon on his hip with a hand rested comfortably upon the ruby grip plates. There was enough room for them to comfortably sit about with personal space, something they seemed to take advantage of. The one that identified itself as a field surgeon, its ears perked up as soon as they stepped in. The junior officer, too. Kvetoslava had a prayer mat tucked under an arm; in a quick motion he laid it out and knelt upon it. Then, after getting a thumbs up from Harshal regarding the air quality, he popped his garish helmet and mask off. The ponies gawked at his stubbly face and long, gaunt features for reasons he suspected were separate from the looks he’d get from his fellows who reacted similarly on occasion. Never seen a person like us before, I wager, Slava deduced. The boys just think I’m ugly. These? They think we are ugly. Or at the very least, they’re unaccustomed to us.

The officer spoke, the field surgeon translated. “I am Junior Lieutenant Ruby Beacon, this is my second in command, Field Surgeon. We represent Her Majesty, Princess Celestia of the celestial throne and the Equestrian nation.”

“I am Kvetoslava Shalev, Oberleutnant of the 107th Khantaran Demons sanitar regiment of Craviisto Gradd. We represent the authority of the Office of the Premier of War of the Conciliary Republic and the General Secretary of the Craviist Altruist Party and the General Conciliary Committee.” It gets longer every fucking year… Slava fought the urge to vomit. The ponies seemed unhappy with the mouthful of titles too. Glad we agree on that, at least. He gave them a sympathetic smile. “Yeah. Mouthful.”

The conversation went casually from there. He produced a map they had acquired from the city, asked them to identify where they were. They did.

Northeastern Equestria. We should be going south, not north. The only thing north of here is the wastes and the crystal empire.

That begged the question. “What is the crystal empire?” The answer was drawn out and left Slava with more questions. Hours of more questions, more answers then even more questions would drag on until the sun fell from the sky and a moonless night spattered by dim stars dominated the horizon.

Slava gave Junior Lieutenant Ruby Beacon and Field Surgeon, esq. An assurance of safety and retreated to the tracked command vehicle in the center of their convoy, still laid out where it landed those few days ago.

Kvetoslava ran his finger along the rim of the artisanal whiskey glass. The bottle sat under the seat his ass was firmly planted on, in a compartment the late Hauptmann Yeruti Roman likely commissioned after he was promoted to captain of Cheap Company. Slava took the time to inventory its contents after the man’s death. A Craviist flag, two boxes of ammunition for the handcannon, four bottles of ten-year aged whiskey from the lost continent2 and a trapper keeper packed with illegal Ukrean cigars. His first act as de facto Hauptmann was to give the cigars away to his subalterns, to be distributed to squad leaders as rewards. The whiskey was the same, all for one bottle which was kept alongside two cigars for his own indulgence.

A knock at the door. Slava hollered a quick it’s unlocked before continuing his admiration of the artisanal glass. So much money wasted on such a frivolous thing. Wonder how much ammunition we could’ve bought with just one of these, or spare parts, or…

His attention was taken by Piritta Winter as she slumped onto the green leather-topped bench across from him, map table between them. “Got a final count for the resupply operation. With what we… repurposed from the, er, ponies’ city, we’ll be able to keep ourselves fortified wherever we put down roots.” Slava gave a bob of his head.

“Roots,” he parroted. “If we’re putting down roots, it needs to be in a defensible position and we need to figure out what the hell our plan is, first and foremost.” His eyes raised to look at Piritta, who matched the look with some concern and bemusement.

“Seems like something the other platoon leaders should be present for, sir. Planning, that is.” Slava’s lips pursed and he shook his head. He produced the bottle of whiskey from beneath his seat. He pinched a pair of glasses between his fingers and placed them on the table. He gestured to the bottle. Piritta gave a haphazard shrug and took it in hand. She popped the cork, gave the swill a good smell, dipped a pinkie into the bottle and licked it as it came out3. Glasses were poured, then the bottle recorked. Slava sucked his teeth before giving the whiskey a taste.

“Maybe it should be something all the other platoon leaders should be present for. All the same, it’s just us.” Slava’s facial features twisted at the bitter alcoholic taste in his mouth. You get used to it, his father told him. Lying bastard. Slava cursed the man as he rubbed his stubbly face. “Based on what the ponies’ maps suggested, I think it’ll be best for us to follow the coastal roads. Avoid any patrols and—” Piritta held up two fingers. Slava paused and pointed his chin at her. Go. She questioned the wisdom of keeping prisoners with their supply situation being what it was. Kvetoslava snorted derisively. “Hardly wise to do from a logistical standpoint, no. From a strategic one? The ponies are a wild card. It’s their world we’ve stepped into, and the first thing we’ve done was take prisoners. I think it’ll be a smart bet to keep them close until we’ve set up some kind of defensible position, then figure out what to do with them.” Piritta was frozen in thought, eyes darting across the map as her head meat sparked with activity.

“Okay. They’ll have better knowledge of the land, too. We can pressgang them to assist as long as we need, then release them after we’ve got a few more cards in our hand.” She looked up from the map and gave Kvetoslava a smirk. “Or any cards at all, for that matter.” His shoulders bounced with the amused snort as Slava nodded his agreement.

“We’ll get the vehicles moving at first daylight. Bring up the field surgeon pony, we’ll use her as a navigator. We’ll discuss specifics on the road with the rest of the officers in the morning.” Slava threw back the rest of his whiskey in tandem with Piritta, then wished her a good night. He removed the hand cannon from its holster on his side in tandem with a great coat Slava had inherited from Roman. He placed the pistol under the bunched up coat, laid across the bench and set his wristwatch’s alarm for the morning.

Author's Note

Here's to trying for weekly uploads. Going to try uploading every Monday, at 14:30 EST. We'll see how long that works out for!

IX

Ruby Beacon was awoken roughly by her superior as the tent around them was being dismantled. Eyes bleary and ears still ringing from her first experience with gunfire, she barely could make out the words ‘moving out’ from Field Surgeon’s mouth.

They were rounded up by troopers wearing those full body camouflage suits and bird masks she almost envied. Spore-proof, I’m sure. She didn’t linger long. Her ponies were herded into a self-pulling carriage made of metal. It smelled like rubber and chemicals inside, but the wooden benches lining the walls were comfortable enough. Field Surgeon yelled at one of the soldiers with feather plumes in that Griffon tongue they shared, then sat beside Ruby, relief and dejection in equal measures across her face. “What’s the story?” Field didn’t turn her head at the question, just flicked an eye at her.

“They’re taking us south, that’s the good news.” Ruby nodded and gestured for Field to continue with her chin. “The bad news is they’re taking us. It’ll be a while before we get released, it sounds like.” She rubbed a hoof against her nose, sitting on her haunches like a cat. “They only know what we told them. They’re scared, you can hear it in how they talk. They’ve seen the bloomers, no context, who knows what they must be thinking? I can hardly blame them but damn it all.” Ruby gave her a somewhat assuring pat on the side with the flat end of her foreleg and listened to the steady rumbling sound of the carriage’s engines pistoning to life with burbling purrs.

Feldwebel Romy Quirin ran his hand across the dashboard of his truck, air chuffing out of a bull-snout as he let a grin cross his face behind the upsized and suction sealed gas mask making him sweat like a whore in church.

Romy’s compatriot in the passenger seat gave him a sideways look. Gefreyten Knechten Bitrus Sonja mirrored Romy’s features; cloven hooves for perambulation, brawny features, a seven-foot build and a bull’s head for a face. Unlike Romy, his horns were shaved down, the goat-like protrusions just stump flat under his helmet. Romy, on the other hand, had a curly pair which poked out of the bottom of his helmet and concealed his hair-tufted ears under their swirling horizontal growth. “Bapheloghast, Saint Ludovic1 and the rest of those false shepherds be damned. My god will always be the purr of my flatplane V8,” Romy all but purred as his free hand gripped the acceleration lever and cranked it as the convoy began to move. His fellow filataur2let out an aggrieved snort.

“You survived all these years in this fucking men’shiy’s army, earned yourself the respect to grow your honors again and you waste it by being a truck driver lusting over his vehicle. I’ll never understand you, bratan.” Romy turned to his brother soldier and clapped him on the shoulder.

“When have you ever given a damn about understanding me and my motives?” Romy’s eyes snapped forward as he asked his question, tunnel vision taking hold as he focused on the poorly paved dirt road and the drawn carriage ahead. Baseline human infantrymen filled the back of the wooden cart. The mixed squad was behind them; mostly filitaura like him, but a few others, too. A svelyc from Moltestry, a few pistrimen from the Tyrannic and an aljabur3 from… somewhere. He wasn’t quite sure where she was from. He didn’t bother to deduce it; the road was his mistress, and she would punish him harshly for deferring his attention away from her. Bitrus took the opportunity to keep up the conversation—Romy threw him a passing grateful look.

“I started giving a damn when you started outranking me. It’s humiliating,” he snarled into a canteen before drinking greedily from its contents. Any human soldier would’ve said the thing was closer to a fuel container than a canteen in heritage. Romy snorted at that. Funny, that. “I find it humiliating that you have your honors intact. It is miserable.” Bitrus smacked his lips and adjusted the mask hanging on his neck. Romy grinned at his companion and ran his tongue over his blocky teeth.

“You’ll get there one day, bratan. Might take a while, but that’s part of living.” Bitrus chuffed again. nose twitched and he looked out the window at a corpse on side of the road. It was infected with the same virus as the equines what had attacked them those few nights ago. Infantrymen were throwing trash at the body as they passed, he could see it in the mirror and from the bits of debris flying out the vehicles ahead of them.

“One thing I’m grateful for,” Bitrus began as he reaffixed the rubber mask to his face, “an enemy we can hate without invoking Gaia’s1 misery.” Romy hollered with joy at that, clapped his bratan on the shoulder and sped up to meet the mileage of the convoy ahead.

The convoy came to a halt with salty air wafting through their air filters. Thin strips of wood held together by wire—sand fencing, one of the Subalterns identified them as—followed the length of the dirt road on their left, with debris-rampant coastline stretching out for almost a mile past them. As he stood with a pair of binoculars, head poking out the top hatch of his command vehicle, Kvetoslava Shalev only made passing note of the little bits of trash, the fencing, the makeshift rafts. His eyes were on the horizon and the wooden whale cutting across the drink with billowing sails. She was a barque—three masted sails were aloft and catching tailwind while spurts of water shot off from cannons on her middle decks.

“Emergency ship. Can’t translate the text, isn’t Escalian or any other written language I’ve seen,” Slava hollered to the subaltern hanging off the starboard ladder of the command vehicle. Emergency? She asked. He turned a passing glance at her, nodding in the process. “Firefighting ship. Three masts. She’s a big girl for her class, too, probably a crew of forty at most.” He stowed the binoculars in a satchel on his waist and threw a passing salute at the ship before slamming the hatch down.

Once outside beside the subaltern—Piritta, once more—Kvetoslava pulled out the ponies’ hand drafted map. He traced the distance, matched the burning silhouette of Manehattan with a finger with the one on the map, then the markedly bubble-surrounded silhouette of Fillydelphia to their south. Sucking teeth, he rolled up the map. “What’s the word, cap?” He flinched a little.

“Filly is to the south. There’s,” he turned east, “forests to scrounge for supplies for a bunch of klom that way,” he turned back to the coast, “and an ocean to fish. Not certain we’ll find anything worthy of eating given the state of things so far, but I don’t think we’ll find a better spot anywhere else without tempting fate and wandering into a fight with a bunch of equine psycasters. Bad plan.” Slava shook his head. He pointed at the woods to their right, stretching eastward across the horizon, surpassed by city skylines on their flanks and the mountain at the forest’s back. Piritta sucked her teeth, arms folded under the gas mask carrier bag on her chest.

“We’re going to have to clear the forest for that.” Slava nodded. Piritta adjusted her mask. “I’ll pass the order down.” Kvetoslava watched the treeline with hawkish eyes as the convoy’s engines began to quiet and infantrymen filed out of the vehicles. A pit was growing in his stomach, but he ignored it. Slava collected his weapons from the receptacle on the inside of the door and walked with an itchy trigger finger to a nauseating briefing.

The sun hung hot overhead as the soldiers of the 107th felled the first trees and shrank back the treeline, inch by inch. Machine gun nests were eagerly set up by rolling up the canvas covers on wire-frame infantry vehicles. The guns were planted facing the forest with boxes of ammo tilting the trucks to one side by the weight of it all.

Feldwebel Romy Quirin had his frame-fitting chemsuit tied by the sleeves round his waist, the wooly undercoat of hair spilling out of his striped tanktop as he worked at the trunk of an oak. Gefreyten Knechten Bitrus Sonja stood watch beside him, chemsuit adorned plainly and with many satchels of ammunition strewn over his shoulders. Romy’s face was sweltering from behind his mask, but he found himself unable to complain when the first tree to land horizontally scattered a flock of blackened, wood-like birds and rodents that nearly compromised them. Bitrus and the other infantry acted quickly. Bitrus, with a 25mm flat-topped revolver, fired a shot into the crowd of matted fur and rotting teeth. Filitauri, with biceps bigger round on average than the smallest soldier’s waist, could handle the recoil of cannons. So they did. Bitrus’ revolver barked like localized thunder, and a cloud of birdshot painted the air with lead gnats.

There was a greasy stain and a hive of holes where there had once been an intimidating swarm of infected critters. Someone laughed. Bitrus calmly flicked the cylinder out. Someone else began to cry. He ripped a branch off the tree to use as a ramrod, ejected the spent shell and slipped a fresh one in from his belt. Orders were given again, and progress continued.The trees were pulled aside by the other company filitauri and Romy, alongside the other hatchet carrying soldiers, hacked at the wood.

The fighting was sparse for those first few hours. Romy was grateful for it because it meant his 20mm rifle could remain on his back and the rubber-handled woodcutting axe could stay in his hands. Then it wasn’t. The moment when the mood shifted was imperceptible. At one blink of his eyes, his axe was rearing back to split a trunk. At the next blink, the axe head was splitting the neck of a shriveled equine with matted green fur and wild eyes. All the energy from the swing transferred and the thing was bisected on the diagonal. In that moment, with adrenaline flooding into his system and hands shaking with cortisol, Romy felt in touch with his ancestry.

The air was out of his lungs and Bitrus was in front of him by the next blink. Bitrus’ sidearm belched smoke and birdshot. Romy slammed the axe into the ground and swung his rifle into his arms. It had a trigger like a grenade loop pin, a simple forward-backward thing that was sized adequately for clawed filitaur hands. It bucked in his arms and spat fire out the front. A winged equine exploded as it was hit. He took two steps backward and ran the bolt back on his rifle. The extractor snapped the shell out, and the 200-odd gram casing smacked into the ground with a tinny thud. Bitrus matched his backpedaling in lockstep until their backs were to the vehicles. They stepped aside and the machine guns opened fire.

The machine guns tore up the bloomers well enough, though they were limited to short bursts. For all his lack of experience, the junior officer under command did well to direct their fire, and but for a few seconds, the air was silent. Then, a chorus of reports of status. The disconcerting quiet was replaced by the din of troopers moving about their business.

In the back of their transport, Ruby Beacon stared out the plastic window stationed amidst the fabric cover at the carnage. At her side, Field Surgeon too watched, her brow furrowed. “Minotaurs,” she muttered. Ruby threw a cursory glance in her companion’s direction. Field matched it. “They have minotaurs in their ranks.” Ruby furrowed her brow at the observation, preparing a quip. Field beat her to it when she loudly whistled, drawing the eye of one such minotaur. It tromped over. Field Surgeon asked it a question. It answered. Ruby tuned them out as her eyes and mind wandered to the bloody carnage lying in mulched chunks outside.

She hadn’t seen anything like it before. Even with their abrupt departure from Manehattan—it was different. There was urgency to their evacuation which prevented her from focusing on more than just the deafening noise and the escape, lackluster as an escape it proved to be.

Here, she saw it with her full attention. Fire clapping forth from long steel tubes and spitting lead rain at its targets. It was power—the kind not even the griffons at the prime of their industrial revolution were able to craft. A small part of her hoped, while the rest screamed at her to tread cautiously. The minotaur seemed to chuff at something Field said before giving a curt nod and stomping off in its usual fashion, weapons clinking on the interlocking clasps, belts and pouches lining its wide silhouette. Ruby found the medic with a proud look on her face as she sat back beside the junior Pegasus commander. “So?” asked Ruby.

“There may be hope for us yet.” Field had a mirth in her voice Ruby found lacking, even when she laughed alongside their comrades in hooves. The small part that hoped grew a bit bigger.

Princess Celestia, solar diarch of the sister throne of the Equestrian Monarchy, sank into her throne, a tense sigh blowing through her and making her feel like a deflating balloon. The throne room of the Celestial Castle was converted to a war room in the wake of the Everfree infection, and at present, was empty save for herself and the quiet, aged silhouette of Raven Inkwell, her faithful assistant. The earth pony with salt and pepper mane and white coat was hunched over a permanent desk fixture added in wake of the past month of outbreaks. A cot was arranged behind it, right up against the Solar throne in the centre of the room.

She chided the mare for her unwillingness to return home. The tired look in Raven’s eyes as she pointed out her place was beside her monarch ended the argument tersely. Celestia felt uneasy about it all the same, but reminder of how the mare’s family had died abroad several years prior and how she would be safer in the castle calmed her nerves enough to drop the matter. Her eyes fell on the empty throne paced equally beside her own ran a pang of sorrow through her heart like a spearpony. Her sister’s room seemed more like a mausoleum than a sleeping chamber the longer the days went by.

“Raven?” Celestia’s voice sounded hoarse. So much yelling today. Nobles trying to break the quarantine for their selfish aims, generals I need remind that the lives of our subjects can nary be thrown away, even in the face of this monumental tragedy…

“Yes, ma’am?” Celestia’s eyes fell on the pony. She held the weight of a dying nation’s paperwork on her shoulders. Celestia’s quietest recesses cried for the little earth pony.

“Has Commander Lance delivered any updates on Operation Beanstalk?” Had she the energy, she might’ve smiled at the silly name. An old habit of the Interior Ministry from the terse war years during the reign of Sombra over the Frozen North.

“Yes, ma’am.” Raven sifted amidst the papers on her desk, snapping out a thick sheaf of paper bound in twine. Using her teeth, she removed the wax seal and removed the first page. Celestia’s eyesight, not enhanced by necessity of circumstance, couldn’t make out the header. Raven cleared her throat. “Targets Victory, Tango-Tango and Mare have been confirmed as successful. Two of the three teams have reported back. Team Victor reports a 35% casualty rate and Team Tango-Trotter reports a casualty rate of 65%.” Celestia deflated a little further. Victory is victory, one could suppose. Her heart ached for the guardsponies lost in the engagements. She asked the status of the third team. “They never reported in at their scheduled time. Commander Lance has yet to declare them as missing, though. He did not say why.” Celestia frowned at that.

Rusty Lance was a veteran guardspony. He was given medals of valorous service for actions during the Changeling invasion and several skirmishes with the wilder fauna that could not be handled by the Elements safely. As part of his promotion, Celestia had played a long game of chess with the stallion. His greatest trait, and what proved to earn him that promotion, was his willingness to sacrifice his pieces. Never needlessly, but never with reservation. Service is sacrifice, your majesty, he had said to her. Dying in the line of duty is part of that sacrifice, should it be necessary. To see him hesitant to report this team as missing in turn made her hesitant. Had he finally lost it in the face of the crisis? Or was it something else entirely? “Would you have a courier sent to bring the stallion in for inquiry? This is odd behavior for him.” At her nod and preparation for departure, Celestia gave a quiet ‘thank you’ and looked out the nearest bay window to the night sky above. May Harmony find you well, Commander Lance, and your answer satisfying to my worries.

Author's Note

Considering moving the upload date up to Sunday or Saturday. Haven't decided yet! In any case, we journey on. Genuine feedback is impossible to find in the world but I like to think my introspection on the narrative of this story (or lackthereof) is helping me mold it into something more interesting. I dunno, though!

The thematic and tonal mix of Band of Brothers with the Walking Dead will probably become more apparent as soon as our characters are beyond the point where surviving to the next morning is their only concern. I also intend to touch on those themes at some point. This story hasn't been well received so far but I hope that whomever reads these words, you, I hope you, unknowable stranger, are enjoying my queer milslop.

Till next time.

X

Hauptegefreiter Nat Zahariev sat with her legs crossed and flamer wand pointed up at the sky, propped on a leg. The burbling engines of the military caravan gently rolled across the air like the distant thunder of an approaching storm. She bit down on the piece of jerky ration in her hand. Cloud-choked dreary sunlight bled in thin beams down on her squad as they sat on the forest’s edge, eating rations out of tins and looking out at the caravan as soldiers milled around the motor-carriages. The flamer trooper threw a glance at her nominal superior, who was perched on a tree with her rifle, eyes scanning the horizon. The cliff road they took pause on overlooked a city amidst rolling hills, currently with a shimmering bubble around it. Smoke rose in thin streams across the fields and beyond. It reminded Nat of a burning oil field. “Why do you wager we’ve stopped?”

Unterofficer Faris Quirke narrowed her non-dominant eye by maybe a few millimeters. Her dominant eye took focus on the peep sight of her rifle. The front post narrowly zoned in on the twitching rabbit watching them from inside the forest. “Hold the thought, Nat,” she mumbled. A finger slipped from the trigger guard and onto the trigger. She whistled. The rabbit’s glassy eyes failed to focus on her. It’s head lolled to the side in a disconcerting fashion. She grimaced. “The animals get sick too.”

Kalin Rylee, ever the pest, poked up. “You going to answer the question, Unt?” Almost out of spite, Faris pulled the trigger. The gun bucked into her shoulder—her firm grip forced the recoil backward instead of upward. The round sailed true—the soft, hollow-pointed lead caught the rabbit in the torso. Faris watched the thing pop like an overfilled water balloon and chuffed. She dragged her rifle cautiously from the tee branch that served valiantly as a rest. A quick once-over of the wood revealed she made no damage, and so she let it hang off its sling on her shoulder. When she looked back, Kalin Rylee was muttering to himself and pawing at a spillage of oatmeal across his crotch while Nat cackled with a sort of goblin-esque childishness. Faris snorted. Kalin shot a look up at her, bubbling anger mixing with bemusement. “What in Ludovic’s name was that bloody well for?!”

Faris pushed off her perch in the tree and onto the stepping rock she’d used to climb up into it. “For not paying any attention, trooper,” she hissed in that voice reserved for non-commissioned officers. Kalin’s back straightened a bit out of impulse and he began to mumble an apology before she grabbed the back of his head and pointed him toward the splash of dehydrated blood and woody flesh where the rabbit had been nary a moment before. “What’s the first bloody thing they teach you about minding infected fauna in basic, Rylee?” With an albeit rusty, but all the same otherwise practiced stumbling cadence, Kalin Rylee spouted off a list of half-remembered regulations, all the while fumbling for the respirator bag on his chest. With his on, Faris turned to Nat. She hadn’t needed to even bother throwing the veteran flame trooper as much as a cold look—her mask was on, and her eyes were focused firmly on the treeline. Bloody morons, Faris inwardly spat with the same affectionate venom as one spits at a beloved dog eating something unsafe, or a sibling doing something foolish.

Watching out his commander’s car, de facto Hauptemann Kvetoslava Shalev flinched at the sound of the gunshot. A hand impulsively went down to a gun not in his holster and he grunted to himself. At his behest, they had come to a stop in preparation for the potential storm that was brewing overhead. He was less concerned about rain than he was about ash, or worse, spores. Their beloved Omelese chirurgeon had given the verdict on the samples she was studying nary an hour ago. The infection was fungal—less transmissible to human beings than the others, but not by a large margin. The report’s words roiled around in his mind.

... Our inoculation procedures are sturdily designed for moments like these. Perhaps not exactly, but it means it is not a sure thing that we will turn, should this infection take one of us…

Words like should and probably were not ones common in the proud woman’s vocabulary. It only made his uneasiness worse. Worse were the frequent non-violent sightings of infected stalking them from the bushes and trees along the road. The rattling of a fist on his door made the man jump for his non-existent gun again. “Enter,” he called with an unexpected rasp in his throat. A fist went to his mouth, and he cleared the rasp. He was surprised when the pink-furred unicorn pony stepped in alongside one of his subalterns. “Frau Winters,” he greeted cautiously, sitting on the bench behind himself.

Subaltern Piritta Winters had seen better days. Her snow white hair was messy on the best of days—the woman’s defining feature was work ethic. She was Kvetoslava’s aide during his time in her position for that very reason. She was not, however, defined by a rigid adherence to the regimental grooming standard. Gun oil and blackpowder fouling covered the woman’s hands and uniform sleeves up to the elbows, and she had a distinct smell about her that suggested she had fallen into a slit trench. The pony beside her seemed, save for that stench, almost like an older-faced clone of the woman.

Mane unkempt but tidied enough so it wouldn’t get in the way of work, a familiar week-without-sleep baggage under the eyes and a scuffed dirtiness that came from laboring, though the gun oil, somewhat concerningly, was replaced with dried blood. She looked Kvetoslava over with a mix of curiosity and that suppressed look drilled into a soldier to take when in the face of the enemy. Piritta cleared her throat to break the queasy silence. “Herr Hauptemann. This pony wished to speak to you.” Kvetoslava turned to her. The mare looked to the seat opposite of Kvetoslava. He gave her an agreeing nod, and she climbed onto it, then plopped her rear onto the hard cushion.

“Field Surgeon, was it?” The pony nodded. Piritta leaned against the door. Kvetoslava reached into one of the deep pockets on his uniform and offered a cigarette and a matchbook. He gave a half-cocked smirk as he drew another to sit in the corner of his mouth. “You smoke?” To his surprise, she nodded. Slava allowed the amusement sit on his face for only a moment before offering over the cigarette into her waiting mouth. He lit both. “What is it I can help you with, Field Surgeon?”

She took a long drag on the cigarette, mulling the cinnamon tones amidst the tobacco—good tobacco, too, before blowing the smoke out her nostrils. Her horn lit and held the cigarette near to her mouth. “Well, Herr Hauptemann, we have mutual needs. I surmise you didn’t take us prisoner in such a fashion out of any sense of malice. I’m willing to overlook the imprisonment as an act of aggression, and I’m willing to help you.” A bemused look from the man. Field Surgeon gave him a gentle smile. Kvetoslava noted the crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes and her creased face. He took a drag.

“What sort of help do you think you can give me? Aside from telling me more about where we are, I cannot see many ways in which you can help. We have a place to lay down our roots, all the same.” Field Surgeon glanced outside. She weighed her options, mulling over the cinnamon-tinged tobacco smell lingering in the air in the same breath.

“Where you are now, I see as a good temporary encampment, but we both know you need somewhere secure, more than just a checkpoint off the side of the road. I can give you a place to rest. Isolated, in a hilly region. Safe for you and your people.” She took a drag. Quite a flavor, this… out through the nose it went. “It’s not without benefits to mine, either. They have a magitech radio tower there. It means we could contact our superiors, perhaps tell them we have some new allies… should you drop the armed guards and the pretenses.” The man’s beady eyes seemed to bore into her soul. There was a tired look in his face. The way lines and creases drew across it reminded her of her own advancing age.

“I’m considering it, Field Surgeon. Really, I am.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “I’m worried what’s waiting for us at this town. I don’t trust you. How can I? I don’t know this country, let alone the bloody world it’s in.” There was desperation in his voice then. Field Surgeon’s aged smile returned in full.

“I know things must be scary for you. I cannot imagine what you’ve been through, if what you say about not being from this world is true, then you must be terrified.” She paused. Field Surgeon thought about what Celestia might say, and with all the courage she could muster, with that soft smile and non-threatening demeanor, she pulled the words from within. “All great friendships start with a leap of faith, Herr commandant. My people know plenty about friendship. Perhaps we could teach it to you, if only you trust us.”

Kvetoslava Shalev leaned back in his seat. He stared down at the quadrupedal, mute-pastel colored horse. He sighed. They finished their cigarettes, and Kvetoslava told the pastel pony that he would get back to her on that plan after some sleep. Once she was out the door, the not wholly willing commanding officer found his vision filled by the disappointing gaze of Piritta Winter. “Trusting the enemy is not something I would expect from you, herr—” Slava snapped up a held trio of fingers, tightly pressed together.

“One,” he furled his index, “we are not in the presence of others. Drop the Herr commandant,” he furled his ring finger. Piritta gave a cheeky smirk. “Two, they are not the enemy. They’re victims of circumstances, same as we are.” He lowered his hand. “And finally, I don’t think there’s many options. They know the lay of the land and are seemingly eager for some kind of—” he purposefully kept the word friendship out of his rotten mouth, “—alliance with us. Given the spears and arrows, I can only fathom why.” His other hand raised to run down his stubbly—no, bearded at this point—face. Piritta huffed out her nose.

“All the same, Slava, I don’t know if trusting them on this is the right play. We’re on foreign soil. For all we know, they’re leading us into a trap.” Kvetoslava glowered at the notion.

“I doubt it,” he snorted. “They’re scared shitless. Given what we’ve seen, and given how Cork Flu was handled back home, they cannot be blamed.” He ran a hand through his hair. I’m getting old, he mused. He knew there were grays coming in even before getting dumped into this runny pastel world. He looked down at his hands. Cracked knuckles and nicotine stained fingers looked back at him. He noted the places where his fingers oddly gnarled from poorly healed breaks. He noted the scar running from the top of his wrist, snaking off under his sleeve. Bloody thing… Kvetoslava looked back up at Piritta.

“Get everyone packed up. I want to be on the road in an hour. Put Miss Field Surgeon in the front carriage with… bloody hell, she’s going to be in there with Romy and Bitrus. Maybe we’ll make enemies out of them yet.” Piritta snorted, snapped off a salute and exited the command car. Kvetoslava looked down at the rough map on the table in the middle of the cramped carriage.

In spite of the little comments made by the grunts around her as she was escorted to the front motor carriage, Field Surgeon did not mind the presence of the two filitauri flanking her sides. She wished that she wasn’t squeezed between them, mind, but she didn’t mind them. The smell wasn’t nearly as bad as the brusque woman with the flame wand and her NCO suggested. It wasn’t pleasant, mind, but she couldn’t blame them!

“… and after that, bloody hell, who knows? I hope to go home, I think we all do,” Gefreyten Knechten—what strange rank structure they had—Bitrus Sonja said with an affirming tap on one of his curly goat horns, chuffing out his bullish nose. Keeping with the flow of conversation out of a mix of politeness and genuine interest, Field responded with a short pause to process the story about the son of Minos’ service in what he called ‘a pissing match’ with the ‘smelly animals of the north.’ When asked what kind of animals they were, he described the Yascaids in as many pejorative as could be impractically crammed into a sentence, with all the awkward stilting that entailed. Romy whiffed him up the back of the head for that, and it sparked a goad of laughter out of Field Surgeon. They reminded her of her days in the Guard, helping to train Equus minotaurs on pony military tactics in preparation for a migration of bugbears passing through their country. A sad smile sat on her snout. She missed those days.

“What is it you hope to do when you get home, ser Bitrus?” The ser threw the filitaur for a loop, and he snorted with amusement.

“Ain’t ever been called a ser before! Appreciate the kindness, Surge’, but I ain’t a ser. Never even stepped foot near an Immortal before.” That posited a frown, but her mouth opened about the same time as Bitrus snapped his fingers. “Right, home! Sorry, my head wanders at times. Well, I used to take daguerreotypes—” he paused, thinking of how to describe the concept of a daguerreotype to a creature whose technological level he could only parse as primitive in his mind, “basically, we have this machine. You take a silver plate with a mirror finish, er, bit more than that, but—yes, a silver plate—no, not like a dinner plate, more like a steel plate. Like a sheet! Thank you, yes, a silver sheet, you take this sheet, and from there you position the machine so the lighting is as good as you can manage and—wait, what do you mean like a camera? Oh. No, thank you, I don’t need to keep going!” Bitrus snorted with laughter. “Odd that you ponies don’t have anything as powerful as a firearm, but you have cameras, though one might suppose it’s possible that technology evolves at different rates…” He shook his head. Field Surgeon snickered and he joined her in the laughter. Romy smirked at the two of them, eyes darting to glance at them for nary a moment. He was a lorry driver by trade—not that he would ever let it on to that artsy twat, Bitrus, bless his heart. He knew better than to lose focus in moments like these where the roads were narrow and winding.

“Should be arriving outside the town in a little under ten minutes,” Romy growled, coughing to clear his throat after. Field Surgeon’s ears twirled to face him a second before her head did, brows raised until she saw the speed they were traveling.

“By the Sisters, we’re moving fast. I’ve seen Pegasi go faster, but this is a different kind of impressive!” Bitrus shot a look at her, made a comment along the lines of ‘Oh, you have those too?’ but before the conversation could come to another roundabout turn and subsequent babble, the radio on the vehicle’s dash crackled.

Ouroboros, pull off to the side of the road, please acknowledge. Romy grabbed the handset, a thing that looked more like a candlestick than a telephone—bloody old instruments, he spat inwardly—and stuck it to his face. “This is Ouroboros, wilco.” He clacked the receiver back to the dash and began running the steering levers, the vehicle beginning to slow in tandem as his foot eased off the acceleration pedal.

“Why’re we stopping?” Field asked, a tone of concern filling her voice. Romy gave a non-committal shrug as he threw a look at Bitrus, hands moving autonomously as he put the vehicle into idle. “Go make our check. Bring a gun.” Bitrus rolled his eyes. Romy could almost hear him say as if you needed to remind me in the back of his mind as Bitrus kicked open the shuttered compartment in front of his seat. He removed the snubby big-bore Filitaur-pattern revolver, fingering a lever to break open the cylinder an inch. The ejector pushed the rims of the 25mm slugs out by an equal amount, and he gave a curt nod to himself. “Taking my piece, I see,” Romy said. Bitrus chuffed.

“Mine doesn’t have a fancy ejector. Besides, yours doesn’t have those shallow bloody gutter sights designed by some worm of a man with a head small as my hand.” Romy belted out a mirthless cackle. Bitrus looked to Field Surgeon, made a placating gesture to stay with his hand and kicked open his door, slamming it with a clunk behind him. Romy hollered something at him about not forgetting about the lack of a double-action trigger pull, but Bitrus chuffed and ignored it.

De facto Hauptemann Kvetoslava Shalev stood with Subaltern Léandre Jacquet, 2nd platoon’s officer. Bitrus tromped over and stood at attention at a respectful distance, half turned toward the intimidating tree-line to his left, finger itching at the back of the decocked hammer on the revolver in his hand. “Herr Shalev, I assure you, whatever this forest must have to throw at us won’t be as bad as the nightmare of this village. We can come at this from multiple angles. It’ll be just like the cult siege.” That prompted a grimace from Shalev. “All of 2nd platoon is itching for a fight, sir. We can make it happen.” That only made the senior commander twitch, but he gave a relenting sigh and a self-assuring set of head bobs.

“Okay. Okay, fine. Mobilize 2nd platoon to foot.” He looked to Bitrus. “Do you need something, Gefreiter?” Bitrus snapped to attention and threw up a hasty nod.

“Yes, Herr commandant. I want to deploy with 2nd platoon.” Herr Shalev looked to Jacquet, who shrugged. He turned back to Bitrus. “Go on, Gefreiter. Go get kitted up and meet back here with Subaltern Jacquet.” They traded discrete nods before Shalev mantled his way back into the command motor carriage.

A short argument with Romy later, and Bitrus had the full weight of his combat webgear heaving across his broad shoulders, his single shot 25mm rifle slung in hand and full chemsuit over his body, including the damn beaked respirator by which most of his ire oft was directed. To form a proper seal on his face, it required him to shave down to the skin in several places—a bad look on a creature mostly covered in fur along his head. The convoy began to roll down the road as he stood amidst the thirty or so soldiers of 2nd platoon.

Jacket threw a look over his shoulder at the departing convoy before checking his weapon. A stubby pistol carbine with a selector switch sat in his arms, about as heavy as most of their rifles. For good reason—the subgun nicknamed “Millsaw” by its users had a rate of fire between 1300 and 1500 rounds per minute and would burn through its 60 round magazines in nary 3 short bursts.

They had about two miles of dense forest to cross until they were on the town of Hollow Shades. He wasn’t anticipating the presence of “bloomers” in the forest, but anything was possible. He whistled an order to his NCOs—Unterofficers Faris Quirke, Ronan Hadžić and Feldwebels Judicaël Kovač and Murat Gujić. Competent leaders—Faris in particular had his eye, her performance during their supply raid into the city of ‘Tartarus’ was above expectations. As the four NCOs gathered, he looked to the sky, judged it to be a little past mid-morning, and gave himself a nod. “We’re going to move. I want you formed into loose columns—we need to do this quick and clear the initial entry for the convoy if it has been overgrown. We have about,” he checked his watch. “Three hours.” The NCOs began clicking buttons on their own clockwork timepieces. “Sync your times. Let’s go.” Jacket took the lead as his NCOs barked their troops into line. Jacket whistled to the filitaur among them and waved him over. “You’re with me, big man. C’mon!”

XI

The city of Canterlot loomed through the Northmost window of Commander Rusty Lance’s office, painting its silhouette across his floor in the moonlight. His faded gray features were made blued by the light of the moon overhead and emphasized in an orange-gold glow by the flaring cherry of the cigar hanging off his muzzle. His eyes lazily drifted over a letter on his desk as he chewed on his cigar, making little noises of annoyance—a grunt or chuff out his nostrils—or occasionally amusement—a grunt or chuff out his nostrils—or every so often, he would grin a little and make an amused sound, usually a grunt or chuff out his nostrils. He glanced at the framed photograph on his desk and frowned. It was the last he’d taken with his wife, nearly two years ago. He looked young for his age in it. Now, though? Now? He groaned and sagged a bit. Barely pushing fifty and my mane’s turned almost all gray. Bloody fur used to be blue, now it looks almost white. A hoof came up and ran across his face, deftly avoiding the burning cigar.

He glared hatefully at the massive inbox of paperwork on his desk. It was the kind of affair that normally required him to hoof-sign, but as the crisis bore on and ink became scarce to get abroad, he moved to a more impersonal method, stamping with red, green or blue. A knock at his door distracted Rusty from the musings at hoof, and he turned his head up to acknowledge it. “Enter.”

The guard who stepped in wasn’t unfamiliar to him. Flash Sentry was a good officer for the army, if inexperienced. “Sir,” the lieutenant began. “A letter has arrived from the Throne.” Rusty’s brow furrowed and he gestured with a hoof for Flash to come closer, prompting the guard to remove a wax tube from within the folds of his chainmail and present it.

The wax tube made a hissing pop sound as the seal broke and its scroll was removed. “It’s from Princess Celestia herself,” Rusty murmured as he unrolled the letter from bottom to top. His eyes scanned across the fine quill hoofsign as his eyes widened noticeably. Flash Sentry shuffled in place anxiously. “It’s a summons to the castle.” Flash gawked.

“Permission to, um, speak freely, sir?” Rusty gave a nod and a ‘get on with it’ waving gesture with his hoof. “Why would you need to be summoned to the castle, sir? Especially when you’re needed here for inspections?” Rusty only gave a grunt as he pushed out of his chair. Flash Sentry had an image of the snobby, aristocratic Royal Guard officer—a fat old bastard with a barrel full of ribbons on an immaculate uniform. Rusty Lance’s uniform was frayed at the edges and crumpled from lack of care, and his chest was barren, save for his badge of rank and nobility. Rusty ran hooves down his uniform to straight out the creases.

“Operation Prescribed Burn. We dipped a lot into junior officers and our retired veterans to see it to completion.” Flash Sentry seemed to frown at this, so Rusty cleared his throat. “The Guard is tied up with Projects Slingshot and the Redheifer Plan. Taking away from those was deemed—“ Rusty coughed, and his face turned sour. “—costly. Too costly for the councils of nobility.” Flash Sentry’s ears drooped and his own expression began to taint at the knowledge. Rusty trotted over with a slow, long-legged gait and planted a hoof on the colt’s shoulder. A sympathetic pat was all he could muster. Flash didn’t much notice. His eyes flicked from Rusty to the desk, then to the dimming silhouette of the moon against the floor. Smoke clouds were rolling through. Another burn team, or something else? Flash couldn’t wager. Felt no need to, anyway.

“We don’t have anypony with your eye for inspection that can be trusted to handle the overhead like you, sir. They’ll make mistakes, they’ll—” Rusty held up a hoof.

“I know.”

“Well, damn it, sir you can’t leave—”

“I know.”

Flash Sentry swallowed the lump forming in his throat. “Well then sir, what are you going to do?” Base Commander Rusty Lance looked at the young officer with the age of a stallion who lived a thousand years before trotting over to his desk. He ran a cracked hoof along the wispy chin hairs that hung, well-trimmed and short from his muzzle. His eyes looked glassy in the dim light of the moonlight. The old stallion scooped up his forgotten stogey and took a pull on it, enveloping himself in the flavors of the tobacco.

“I’m going to do what I have to do, son.”

Subaltern Léandre Jacquet felt uneasy.

Uneasiness was a familiar emotion, once that comforted him like a sucking chest wound in times of great anxiety and stress. In spite of those situations, the adrenaline, the violence, the volume—Jacquet was calm. Combat was easy—you kill the enemy and you obey orders. Natural calm under stress in the trenches of foreign wars at home proved the deciding factor in his rise in position, nary some time ago. When he was promoted to Subaltern to fill the gaps left by the rung climbing in the wake of former captain, Hauptemann Yeruti Roman’s death, uneasiness rushed in to fill the gap where calmness once held like a dam. He was a squad leader by trade before this wretched place, and now, by his own arrogant hand and the hand of fate, Jacquet was leading a platoon of soldiers to their own deaths.

The thought weighed in his gut like a stone. He suppressed it by scanning the horizon. More trees, though beginning to thin. They were ahead of schedule by at least five minutes. Not good. Not bad either, but it meant there would be five minutes they would be stuck sitting with their asses hanging out in the open. Jacquet looked to his executive officer—she was a Fraint, skinned somewhere in the spectrum of roses and wine, and bearing turned-down goat horns alike to a demon’s own. Fähnriche 1st Class Tamanna Andrei was a good soldier. They shared a look behind their beaked gas masks. Hand gestures began to fly.

Where go next?

Hold. Off schedule. Five mikes.

Understood.

The wave of small metallic clinks and rubber creaking signaled the platoon had the order heard just fine. Good. Jacquet looked over his submachine pistol. The Millsaw, in his opinion, was as flagged onto its’ receiver with the words, a piece of shit. The Omelese PM9 was the better weapon, and he was all too disappointed the ‘Saws had to be broken out of storage once the ammo ran dry. He recalled the conversation with Harshal Ajam, Hauptegefreiter and company blacksmith with a frown. Till we’ve gotten settled in, I can’t reload the brass. Didn’t even recover most of it, anyway. 90 rounds to split between a company and ten guns. Jacquet ran the bolt on his Millsaw back until it clicked into the fire-ready open position.

… In order to accommodate for the design features such as the fire rate of the weapon, its crisp trigger and compact design, some decisions had to be made, starting with the usage of the notorious ‘open to go, closed to stop’ safety, wherein the bolt shall be locked shut in order to prevent it from firing. Given its’ open bolt design and standard chamberless carry practice…

A rustle in the bushes. Jacquet raised his bulky machine pistol.The mumbling came back to him first and set the hairs on the back of his neck to stand. It was the voice of a child—the equines spoke the language of a Craviist ally. It was a miracle that saved them from cleansing at the hand of 2nd Platoon’s favorite cook and flamethrower.

The word Mutter was whimpered raggedly by whatever was crawling around in the brush. Jacquet took a step back and tensed. The color began to drain from his face as the equine child crawled from out of the bush, dragging a red stain behind it. No need for the poor thing to suffer. He stepped back again to keep space from the infectious child and went to draw his knife. The animalistic snarl and the whites of eyes that met him when his eyes flicked up past the bloody drag marks on the ground. His submachine pistol was snapped up, and it earned its name with the first and only burst of fire.

Unterofficer Faris Quirke’s head snapped up at the buzzsaw’s brief screech and bright flash of muzzle flare. Her rifle came to bear. The safety went off and she turned to Nat, gesturing with a snappy pair of tightly married fingers to move. The distinctive clicking of the woman’s flamer trailed behind as Faris ran forward toward the flash. Léandre Jacquet came running toward her. His bellowed orders to fire fell on deaf ears as the disconcertingly jarred animal roar echoed across the forest. They proved unnecessary as the Manticore burst through the underbrush, looking feral and manic. Black nettles sprouted from gashes along its sides and its glassy eyes dribbled fluid down furrowed channels along its face. Faris’ rifle bucked in her arms as she squeezed on the trigger. Fire and smoke boomed out of her rifle and filled the air with plumes of smoke. The shot was followed quickly by the cacophony of twenty other rifles opening up.

Faris backpedaled until the glow of Nat’s flamethrower was visible on her right. She was planted like a statue in the ground, legs spread and wand brandished as its pilot light flashed bright and napalm drizzled from the bore. Her assistant flamer stood behind her, brandishing a revolver in one hand while the other fumbled to connect the reserve tanks along his body to Nat’s donut-like backpack.

The Manticore was like a bullet as it leapt through the smoke cloud without so much as a whimper of pain at the dozens of shot-wounds now covering its matted hide. Nat’s bearded face twisted to a wicked grin as the flamethrower bucked slightly in her fingers. Blue and orange flames like a pressurized stream of water came splashing across the manticore as Nat took three steps backward in tandem with the Manticore’s landing near directly in front of her. The beast’s glassy eyes seemed to come into brief focus as it lashed about and screeched as the wet fire licked across its body and clung like glue. Nat kept up the hate in long bursts as she continued to back up. The Manticore set its sights on her with a howl. One of its eyes detonated as it lunged, and threw it off as it sailed like a fireball through the air toward Nat. She dove to the right. It went left. Faris was sent flying back as the fireball made of muscle, melting fur and chitin smacked into her at vehicular speed. Her chemsuit was all that saved her from fiery death as the jellied flamer fuel failed to stick to the rubbery composite.

She hit the ground with a crunch as her ankle twisted unnaturally. Faris screamed as her world turned to pain. The light of the Manticore grew closer and the squad leader snatched her rifle from its sling. It looked intact, and with shaky arms she turned it on the burning tower of blooming fire and pulled the trigger.

Click. “Fuck!” Faris ran the bolt back. The Manticore reeled and swept its paw. She threw her gun up. It went flying alongside a long rake of her suit and skin. Faris screamed as she was tossed awkwardly by the momentum onto her side. Her sidearm was pinned under her. She twisted. The Manticore’s jaws were rapidly approaching by the time her fingers wrapped around the wooden grip of the Empire revolver.

The swarm of angry buckshot made first contact. The Manticore’s momentum was redirected and its flaming bulk slammed into the ground beside Faris instead of into her. She snapped her gaze to the source and found the towering bulk of a filitaur soldier rapidly sliding up next to her. He shoulder-checked right into the manticore and sent it skidding back several paces before turning on her and lunging. Faris yelped as his bear paw of a gloved fist snapped around the back of her webbing and ripped her up and over his shoulder. She wrenched her revolver free as the filitaur turned heel and ran. “I’m getting you out of here, boss!” he barked through his own rubber face mask. Faris’ revolver barked at the recovering minotaur in reply, but it proved fruitless as one of her soldiers ran up and slid a stick grenade down its open throat before leaping prone.

The Manticore’s head went one way, and its body flipped the other way, landing on the ground with a crackling thump. The jellied fuel was smothered under the weight of the corpse, and soon enough, the body was a smoldering heap. The filitaur put Faris down at the base of a nearby tree as her squad filtered in from the surrounding forest. She hissed at the pain in her leg. “That’s gonna be a week of light duty at best, shit…” Faris shook her head, looking with squeezing eyes up at the filitaur. “Thanks for the save.” The big man grunted and gave a curt nod. She offered her free hand. “Faris Quirke.” He shook it.

“Bitrus Sonja.” Faris gave him a grin behind her mask, realized it was all but entirely hidden, and snorted.

“Glad to have you on my side, Bitrus.” Nat came up to Faris, wand held over one shoulder. Concern etched itself across her eyes, but a dismissive wave from Faris saw the concern melt into the background. “What’s the situation, Nat?”

“Well, it looks like you’re our only casualty. Thank Ludovic for that, because I don’t know damn well what we’d do without you, Unt.” Nat offered the woman a hand. She took it, flinching as she was pulled up and onto her good leg. Nat looked at the chicken winged leg and smirked. “Doc Gwen’s gonna give you no end of shit for that one. Hey, at least you can say you got tossed by a…” she looked back at the burnt corpse barely two hundred feet away. “… Lion… Scorpion… bat? What started fucking in the forest to make that ugly bastard?”

“Manticore,” came the reply from an accented voice. Nat’s head snapped on a swivel to Subaltern Jacquet as he limped over. She stiffened at the sight of him, straightening her posture, but he quickly waved her off. “At ease—Merde, my back.” He turned to Faris. “Can you walk, Unterofficer?”

“Not unassisted, sir.” He bobbed his head in thought and acknowledgement in a few successive beats.

“Okay. Get your squad in order. We’re about on schedule now, so we’ll be moving into position on Hollow Shades.” Faris swore under her breath as the subaltern walked away. Bitrus cracked his knuckles.

“Fuck me running, this is going to be living Hell.”

Author's Note

Sorry for the day-late posting. My backlog is empty so this may become more common with time.

Yeah, so we're almost at Hollow Shades and I'm setting up some of the details regarding Canterlot.

Next chapter will be the finale for Act One! I'm excited. We'll be moving into territory where the characters can actually show their colors and we can have more meaningful interactions now that they'll have a proper place to lay down roots and relax. My biggest struggle writing these first twelve chapters has been mostly that--I'm inexperienced with character writing and I'm pretty rusty because I haven't been as inspired recently, but I intend to finish Cheap Company before 2026. We shall see what I manage. Hope you enjoy. Ciao Ciao.