Outcast Company

Chapters

%i% - Prologue - Meet the Team
%i% - Travel 1
%i% - Operation Firestarter 1
%i% - Operation Firestarter 2
%i% - Operation Firestarter 3
%i% - Operation Firestarter 4
%i% - Operation Firestarter 5
%i% - Operation Firestarter 6
%i% - Operation Firestarter 7
%i% - Operation Firestarter Debriefing
%i% - Operation Firestarter Briefing

%i% - Prologue - Meet the Team

1 - Prologue - Meet the Team

C1 Prologue – Meet the Team

By N00813

Lightning Dust slammed her tankard of beer onto the surface of the bar table.

She sat in a little niche, off to the side of the main floor of the inn where ponies bustled in and out, bumping into things as they went. A tiny chandelier, some half-hearted attempt at style, tried to illuminate the entire floor. It struggled valiantly against the darkness – alas, it was no use. The shadows of table legs and stools danced as they tried to hide from the weak light.

The alcohol, as dilute as it was, burned as it rolled down her throat. The bitter taste travelled upwards as she burped, indistinguishable from the smell of stomach acid.

She grimaced. It wasn’t fit to be labelled as beer. Hell, it didn’t seem that different from piss. Still, it cost her five whole bits. Five! As if she had money to burn.

Didn’t they know that anyone who ended up here was a loser? Ponies here were all at the end of their respective lines. A couple of builders, old and scarred like their hard-hats, sat around their own table, mumbling in between gulps of hard liquor. One pegasus was slumped against the bar counter, sloshed and incoherent, earning him dirty glances from the bartender. That was what she saw here – that was why she was here.

They said misery loved company.

She’d once thought that only the people without the drive, the ambition, the will to better themselves, were miserable since they were too lazy or stupid to actually go around and do it, instead of moping on what could have been.

The lamp above her, set into a little alcove too small for it and hastily glued into place, flickered as its flame fell from grace, plummeting into the wick, before flaring bright again. Orange light, the same shade as her mane, wavered and danced with the shadows on the table top.

As the light flashed, so did the memories.

How could she have known? It wasn’t her fault, damn it!

She raised the tankard up, pursing her lips and waiting for the liquid to trickle in between her grit teeth.

It wasn’t her fault that five damned national heroes had the insane idea of wandering onto a bloody racetrack during operation!

The beer, like always, was too slow to arrive – almost hesitant in its flow out of the wooden tankard.

She shut her eyes, forcing the cheap liquor down, relishing in the burning against her throat and oesophagus. Anything was better than the memo–

Five fucking years. She slammed the tankard down, the thump reverberating around the little niche she was in, the shock of the impact jarring her foreleg.

So she got a black mark after the Academy incident, a charge for reckless endangerment. She’d learnt. She’d spent five years showing that she’d learnt, always following orders from her weather team supervisor, always doing her job to the letter.

Five years of solid, grade-A work and – her cheeks flushed red and a growl formed in her throat as she reached for the tankard again – ass-kissing had gotten her nowhere. She was still weather-team worker 1032, whilst the cute colt with the dapper grey coat, dark blue mane and a recommendation from his Wonderbolt brother had gone on to be promoted twice.

Twice.

She was sure that she’d worked just as hard as he did, if not more. She had more experience with her work, more experience with her team. She deserved it more than him.

Fucking Wonderbolts.

And with the talks of layoffs coming – ‘saving public money’, they said – she might as well have been a temp worker all along.

Maybe this was how that mailmare, that weird grey pegasus with the blond mane, felt. She’d been working the same position doing the same job in the same place for… shit, how long had she lived in Ponyville? Ten years, they said?

Loser. Maybe if she wasn’t so dumb, she would have seen how fucked up everything was. But no, off she went with a smile on her face, letters in her bag – still kissing ass ten years later.

Or maybe that mailmare was just like her. Messed up one time, once-upon-a-time, and now fucked for eternity.

Lightning Dust lifted the tankard up, draining what remained of the alcohol inside. A little bit of beer dribbled out of the corners of her mouth, tickling her skin. The slight, imperceptible buzzing in her ears was far more deserving of attention, however.

She slammed the tankard back down, and her eyes refocused on the two intruders.

An azure unicorn mare with a pale cornflower blue mane and tail, cut short but not unfashionably so, sat across from her. She was dressed – unusually – with a creased cloak embroidered with stars and spangles that conveniently hid her cutie mark. Underneath, however, Lightning could see the coloured glint of gems and the flash of a piece of steel poking out of pockets on the odd piece of clothing she wore. Her legs were lean and muscled at the top – clearly, she’d done a lot of manual labour.

Huh, manual labour for a unicorn. Just another loser in the long list of patrons that visited at this bar.

She opened her mouth to tell the newcomers to piss off and find their own table as her eyes drifted towards the second intruder.

Beside the unicorn, a large griffon – Lightning squinted – female glared at her. The griffon was white-feathered, with a tawny body that looked as worn and abused. The flickering firelight showed off her scars, long deep furrows in the skin that seemed to worm about as the flame danced. Her eyes, amber and unmoving, were the oddest thing – cold, uncaring and yet resigned.

The griffon was wearing what looked like a brown, animal-leather tunic. This, by itself, wasn’t exactly unusual. Unlike ponies, the few griffons she’d seen seemed to like wearing clothing. However, draped on top and across the tunic was a system of sashes, also leather, that held a lot of shiny and very sharp things.

Telling a griffon, especially one as well-armed as this, to piss off was never a good idea. The alcohol was bubbling up inside her, carrying her off to far-away worlds where sleep was easy and joys were to be had. Yet, over the years, she’d learnt to lock those temptations down and focus on the mission.

“Yeah?” Lightning mumbled, weaker than she sounded in her head. Not a good start, she berated herself.

“You Lightning Dust?” the griffon muttered, raising an eyebrow, her amber eyes never straying.

Lightning found it quite difficult to meet the griffon’s intense glare, even with the slightly ridiculous pale-purple colouring around the eyes – her self-preservation instinct told her to bow her head and avert her gaze, whilst the alcohol told her to grin at the griffon. The former was stronger than the latter.

“Yeah,” she mumbled, lifting up the tankard. She didn’t raise it above her head, though. Cutting off her sight to potential thieves and muggers was a bad idea.

“She doesn’t look like much,” the unicorn muttered, throwing a glance to her griffon friend.

Lightning’s stomach clenched. The memory of a group of weather colleagues sitting together, with her at the front as she watched that colt jump from to junior manager in his first six months of work flashed through her mind. She growled. “What do you know, bitch?”

If the unicorn was intimidated, she didn’t show it, but merely shut up and looked at Lightning. For the pegasus, it was a small victory – good enough. She had to take her happiness from somewhere, after all.

“Firey,” the griffon said, cracking a smile. It was the sort of predatory smile that a crocodile would give to the pony in front of it. Lightning paused, glancing off to the side. The tavern’s main floor was still busy, and no one seemed interested enough in her to help her out if that came to that…

“Yeah? What do you want?” She settled for that. Keep them talking, find an escape route and prepare to jet off. A bit of an odd end to her usual drinking session, but hey. Variety was the spice of life. If you could afford it.

The unicorn took up the slack for her griffon friend, pulling out a piece of paper with a big title on top and lots of little words. It fell onto the table top, fold creases bulging out in a cross.

The whole thing looked like a newspaper article… or a job offer.

Slowly, Lightning reached out a hoof towards the paper. A shunt of pink magic slid the sheet to her frozen hoof.

She scanned it, eyes skipping straight down to look at the estimated pay-rate – and widening at the number. “Five thousand bits!?”

“Average rate per op,” the griffon said, leaning back. The firelight caught the blade of her machete – it was a nasty piece, with a curving blade on one edge and serration on the other. Suddenly, the words in the job description started to sound more sinister.

“What kind of ‘problems’ do you ‘solve’?” Lightning raised an eyebrow, layering heavy emphasis on the obvious euphemisms.

“Ones worth our time,” the griffon said, raising an eyebrow to mirror Lightning’s own expression, albeit with a smug grin instead of the hard line on the pegasus’ face.

“Uh huh.” Lightning needed money, but this… this was too far out of her league. The array of sharp crossbow bolts strapped to the griffon’s chest meant that these players were serious business – not the sort of neighbourhood watch that thought they were hot stuff.

“What kind of things do you do?” Lightning examined the two of them over the top of the paper, her eyes shifting from one ‘problem solver’ to another.

“Everything necessary to get the job done,” the unicorn said, failing to keep the boredom out of her voice. “Fuck. The way Rolk had said, I thought she’d jump at the opportunity. You sure she isn’t wired?”

“These eyes have never failed me, dude,” the griffon replied, still looking as relaxed as ever as she pointed to her amber irises with her yellow talons. “Trust me, she isn’t. If she is, I’ll gut her myself.”

That brought a shiver down Lightning’s spine. The way she’d just… so casually talk about murdering somepony…

“We know how ponies don’t like killing,” the unicorn continued, glancing at Lightning before shifting her gaze to the rest of the bar.

Her griffon friend grinned, and opened her mouth to mumble something. Lightning’s sensitive ears perked up, trying to decipher words from noise.

“Shit. You were just like her,” the griffon said, looking at the unicorn.

If she had heard, the unicorn gave no indication. “So we’ll probably ease you in with an easy job. What’s it going to be?”

Lightning blinked, before looking down at the paper. She frowned, kneading her temples with her hooves. This could be it! Her big break, her chance out! Seize the day and never give up. She had a way out, at last!

Lightning’s frown deepened as she continued to scrutinize the wording. All in all, this job didn’t seem particularly… legal. Was it a sting? She looked up, meeting the raised eyebrow of the griffon and the even gaze of the unicorn. Didn’t look like it, but it never hurt to check.

“This doesn’t seem like a legal job,” she said, simply.

“Yeah, it isn’t. So?” The griffon’s expression didn’t change at all.

Lightning sighed, feeling her wings flutter. Such a decision was better made when she was sober, not light-headed from the drink and put under pressure. She could handle the spotlight, but she suspected that the griffon’s array of impressively sharp things was designed to break her down.

“Can I think about this?” she asked, a lot meeker than she sounded in her head.

“Weren’t you doing that just now?” The griffon grinned, pre-empting Lightning’s huff, before popping up from the table, her chair scraping against the floor harshly. “Chill, dude. Yeah, go and think. But… erm, Tricks?”

Tricks, the unicorn, rolled her eyes. “You have until tomorrow morning, when we hand in our room key. Room 201. Ask for Gilda” – she pointed at the griffon, who was at the bar – “or Tricks.”

Tricks looked up for a brief moment, before her gaze fell back down to look Lightning in the eye. “But if you tell anyone about this, Lightning… there isn’t any place you can run.”

Lightning shivered. The warmth in her gut was forgotten as her spine was replaced by ice.

Tricks flashed an oddly pleasant smile. If she wasn’t wearing her little knife, the unicorn might have looked friendly, even.

Lightning Dust merely nodded as Tricks left to join her friend.

-&-

There it was. Room 201 was one of the larger rental rooms, an ensuite that stretched out to occupy the space behind that entire wall. Lightning raised a hoof, intent on bringing it down on the solid wooden door.

The moment of truth hung before her. It was like the moment before a complex stunt – time hung still as all possible things that could go wrong slammed through her head, before she locked down her focus and became the wind. The leaf floating on the wind, with nothing but the strain of her muscle and the natural gyroscope in her inner ear to listen to…

To hell with it, she thought.

She looked outside. The sun was rising, a semi-circle on the horizon, spraying pink and orange light into the sky. Celestia’s sun. Apparently, one of the heroes she’d almost killed was a student of the Princess, and her brother was somewhere really high up in the Guards, with a noble wife or something.

She spat, gagging. No wonder her life was so shitty right now. A Princess’ word against her five years of work. She should have known which would win out. Hell, she never even had a chance.

Lightning brought her hoof down on the door, twice.

The thump of steps increased in volume. Lightning sucked in a breath, even as her heart thudded inside her ribcage.

“Hello? Ah, Miss Dust!” a relatively small black griffon said, his eyes shining as the corners of his beak lifted up into a little smile. From what Lightning could see from the little gap in the door, he was black from crown feathers to the tuft of his tail. Only his clear, brilliant blue eyes were any shade of not-black.

“Uh…” Lightning silently berated herself. “I’m looking for Tricks?”

The griffon nodded, before turning his head. Oddly, he never kept an eye off her, even as he shouted Tricks’ name.

“She’ll be with you in a moment,” he said, never moving from his place. Perhaps that was intentional. He was doing a very good job of blocking out what was going on inside.

Mumbles and grumbles grew louder as the blue unicorn stumbled into what sounded like a wall. The griffon withdrew, letting Tricks take his place – and in the tiniest moment Lightning spotted the brown of brass –

“Yes?” Tricks’ question shook her out of her little self-induced stupor, and Lightning blinked twice at the unicorn. Tricks was obviously hung over. Her mane was dishevelled and her eyes were creased, with bags beneath them even after the night of sleep. For a moment, Lightning wondered how the griffon Gilda was getting on.

“Uh,” Lightning muttered, before shaking her head, closing her eyes and staring straight ahead at the door. Like a well-trained Wonderbolt, she thought. “I’d like to accept your offer.”

Tricks merely nodded, her horn glowing.

Lightning’s eyes widened. She took an involuntary step back as a tingle spread from her hooves upwards. “What are you doing to me?”

“Making sure,” Tricks mumbled, before nodding. “You’re clean and clear. Smart girl.”

Lightning merely raised an eyebrow as Tricks lifted a little brace up with her magic. It was an odd thing: a curl of black material that bulged out at one end, with an inset crystal, tapering off into a long stick of plastic.

Tricks sighed. “Come here. I haven’t got all day.”

It’s the crack of dawn, Lightning thought, but said nothing as she stepped forwards, a bit slower than she would have liked.

“Hold still.”

Lightning waited as Tricks floated the thing up to her face, and then past it. Her eyes tracked the bulb as it stopped next to her left ear.

Tricks frowned, and Lightning narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth, before a cold coil made contact with the back of her ear.

Lightning yelped, her ears flicking back and forth like leaves in a hurricane. Tricks groaned.

“There! I’ll get back to it when I’m better.” She stumbled away from the door and into the room, revealing her cutie mark of a wand over a field of stars, before glancing over her shoulder as if she had just realised that Lightning was there. “Come in!”

Lightning hesitated, just a tad, before the first rays of sunlight from the rising sun fell across her face. She hissed, before striding into the room, and then hesitated again.

It wasn’t the room that gave her pause. The place was a utilitarian affair, with nothing but the barest of furnishings. It was the people inside that froze her blood.

Tricks stumbled away to the bathroom, where the sound of running water suddenly started.

Gilda was sitting, leaning back against a wall with her machete in her fingers. She didn’t look too badly hungover. The griffon turned to the groaning inside the bathroom, smirking. “Lightweight.”

A massive earth pony mare, of light khaki skin and rust-red hair, sat in the centre of the room with her legs folded under her. Lightning could see scarring dotted around her side, little rings with tendrils of tissue that crept outwards like stars.

The mare turned her head around. Upon spotting Lightning, she flashed the sweetest, most innocent grin Lightning had ever seen.

That was supposed to placate her fear, Lightning supposed. The effect was ruined by the black griffon leaning against the earth mare’s side, whose claws were working on the long rifle in front of him.

The weapon was a mean piece of jet-black steel, with a scuffed wooden stock attached to one end that tapered to nothing as it travelled further up the barrel. The griffon was snapping something back together before he looked up at her.

“Ah!” He stood up, sliding the rifle over to the side as he walked over to her. Lightning’s eyes tracked the weapon as it came to a stop against the wall.

The griffon gestured to the thing hanging from her ear. “May I?”

Lightning simply nodded, too dumb to do anything else.

The griffon squinted, his blue eyes glinting, and Lightning suddenly felt intensely weak. There was a mercenary with his claws around her head and she had just let him get this far without protest –

Instead of the pain she expected, though, she felt the cold fibre of that thing wrap around her ear – both the front and back of it – and a second later, the griffon stepped back.

“Done!” he said, smiling. “That earpiece will keep you safe. I’m Rolk”– he gestured to himself, before pointing to the earth mare behind him –“and this is Spring.”

He went back to his rifle and scooped it up before chambering a cartridge. “Welcome to our merry band of killers!”

What have I gotten myself into? Lightning wondered, her eyes wide.

%i% - Travel 1

2 - Travel 1

C2 Travel 1

By N00813

“Pack up!”

Rolk’s voice pushed the team into action. The black griffon’s own things were already in place, hanging from the chest area of the large harness that criss-crossed Spring’s body. Gilda attached her satchel, a relatively small bag to the steel hoops on one side, whilst Tricks’ bag was hung on the other side.

To her credit, the earth mare stood strong. Her legs never shook from the strain of carrying so much.

“Miss Dust?” Rolk asked, drawing Lightning out of her mindless gaping.

She whirled her head around, eyes focusing on the black shape in front of her. His rifle slung his back, inside an unassuming black box.

Lightning blinked twice, then muttered, “Uh huh?”

Rolk sighed. “Take what you need from your house – and I mean only what you need. Armour, weapons, money, sleeping bag if you need it. We travel light, and we travel a lot.”

Lightning was not averse to an adventure, but this seemed ridiculously risky, even to her. “What if I need something, but forget to bring it?”

“I pay you well enough for you to go out and buy them yourself.”

Lightning nodded. Fair enough, she supposed. “So… where are we going.”

“Your house, of course!” Rolk smiled, drawing a flush and an awkward chuckle from the pegasus. “But after that, Haysead.”

He swept a hand, claws flashing, towards the doorway.

They walked out of the inn in silence. Gilda took up the front, with Tricks, whilst Lightning and Rolk walked alongside each of Spring’s hind legs. In the daytime, the tavern was barely alive – everyone had gone home to vomit up their alcohol – so only the barkeep remained to glare at the lot of them. Even in the daytime, though, the shadows ruled the inn. Daylight couldn’t penetrate the dirty glass windows.

“Rest of the payment, and key,” Rolk said, slapping down a pile of bits. The bronze key rested at the top.

The bartender simply nodded, grunted, and waved them out of the door.

Rolk’s face flashed with a frown, before he took in a breath, and flapped his wings. A dust cloud formed around him, eliciting groans from everyone else.

They were in the outskirts of Dodge City. In the distance, Lightning could see the shining speck that was Canterlot hovering on the side of a mountain. To the east, she could pick up the first hints of green – the borders of the Haysead Forests.

A caravan stood, wheels locked by glowing magical restraints, by the side of the entrance. It was a tiny thing – one time, the side of it might have folded out onto a platform. For what purpose, Lightning couldn’t tell. But that didn’t matter. The walls had been roughly sealed with excess amounts of epoxy.

Rolk and Spring headed straight for the caravan. The earth mare crept down, before popping back up with the yoke across her shoulders. Rolk, meanwhile, helped clasp the yoke securely around Spring’s neck.

Gilda and Tricks merely stood off to the side, waiting until Rolk hopped off Spring’s back, before unclipping their bags and tossing them into the door at the back of the caravan.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Rolk stared at Lightning. “Lightning, go and get your stuff.”

“Please, just call me Dust,” Lightning said, shaking her head. She would never get used to a merc talking to her by her first name. This was just a business thing – remain on professional relationships, Lightning!

“Alright, Dust!”

Even as she rocketed away, her wings ripping through the air and the wind roaring in her ears, she could still hear her employer’s call taper off.

Meanwhile, at the caravan, Rolk tapped the side of his head. The earpiece hidden in his thick, interlocking head-feathers began to glow a faint blue.

“Dust, this is Rolk. We’re moving the caravan, up… up Forest track. Meet us there.”

Lightning nodded silently, before remembering that he couldn’t exactly see her. “Yeah, I got that. I’ll, er, just a moment.”

“Right.” The voice in her ear came back, clear as if he was talking next to her. “Don’t take too long.”

She ignored the implied threat in that. Despite what she had signed up to do, they did all seem like reasonable people.

Lightning’s house was a short, stout, one-storey affair that was built on a frame of wood and walled with pieces of corrugated iron, magically welded together by the local unicorn. He’d charged a ridiculous amount for what seemed to her like an easy job.

There weren’t any clouds around here to build a cloud home with, and the ones that passed were created from the Haysead of its own accord. That meant they’d fall apart under the baking Dodge City sun, and she didn’t look forwards to having to spend an hour every day simply to patch up holes.

Hell, maybe that was why she was assigned here. Slacker City, the pegasi running the show in Cloudsdale called it.

Inside, she didn’t bother with lighting the lamp hanging from a hook in the ceiling. The harsh sunlight pouring through the open window would do nicely. No one stole from her, here. There was nothing of worth to steal. She carried all her money – all the pitiful thousand bits she’d saved up over her five years – on her, in her saddlebags. Letters from her family, sat piled up in a corner, ignored. The last one was dated to about two months ago. In the corner, she could see the dusty Wonderbolt uniform she’d bought from the Academy gift store…

Dust looked at her namesake piling up onto the clothing. Here, in Dodge, sand mixed with wind to become flaying storms at the worst of times, or inconveniences at the best.

It was old history, Dust decided. It was a part of her old life, before she gave into killing for a living.

Dust didn’t even bother locking the door as she flew out, carrying a leather jacket and a small, blunt knife in her forelegs.

She only had to fly for about ten minutes, barely breaking into a sweat, before she spotted the trundling caravan in front of a cloud of dust. Four quadrupeds walked with it. Yep, that was the one.

She skidded to a stop in front of them, before assuming the trotting speed Spring was taking as she lugged the caravan. Rolk glanced at her as she made a little cough.

“I’ve got a knife, and some leather – fake substitute,” she said, the goods balanced on her back.

Rolk nodded. “You’re going to be an interceptor…”

He hummed a bit, before smiling. “Go to Gilda. She can help you.”

Dust shot a glance at the bigger, white-tawny griffon striding alongside Tricks. The machete and crossbow bolts on Gilda’s chest glinted as they caught the sunlight, whilst the end of a stock – of a short, stubby crossbow, most likely – stuck out of a bag slung over her back.

Dust made a whimper, and Rolk chuckled. “Don’t worry – she won’t kill you just for asking.”

Dust merely glared at him for that comment.

He shrugged. “I’m a sniper. I attack from range, I scout. She does most of her work up close – like you will soon. The better you two work together, the more likely both of you will come out alive.”

“And Tricks?”

“Tricks does decoys. Magic. Illusions. She’s a unicorn, and you’re not.”

“Thanks, I suppose,” Dust muttered, slinking off.

Rolk merely rolled his eyes at that.

Gilda had just finished a short chuckle with Tricks, before noticing a turquoise pegasus slow down to trot nearer to her. For the shortest of moments, the image of a rainbow-maned, light blue pegasus layered itself over Dust’s body – but Gilda shook her head, and the image was gone.

Gilda kept silent, looking out of the corners of her eyes as she strode on. Tricks had also noticed, and fell silent, peering at Dust.

So much for subtlety, Dust thought. “Gilda? Er, Rolk told me to go talk to you about”–

“Weapons and armour. Yeah, I thought he would,” Gilda sighed, a twitch forming in her eye. This was taking her down memory lane a lot further than she’d have liked. She reached into her clothing, and took a small grindstone out of her pocket.

“Rub this against the blade of your knife. Understand?”

Dust bristled a bit, but she lowered her head, nodding. Gilda tossed the little stone to her, and she caught it in her teeth. Her eyes watered from the impact, but she shook them away.

“Good.” Gilda smiled. “For armour, you wear your clothing. It’ll be torn up in about a day and it won’t do much, but it’s better than nothing.”

“So I might as well not wear anything for all the good it does me,” Dust growled, twisting around to put the stone on her back. “Some help.”

Gilda shrugged. “Whatever, dude. It’s your life.”

“Fine.” Dust looked around.

The ground was now green and grassy, with little tufts of vegetation sprouting up from all around. Directly ahead, the overgrown path stopped just before the treeline. Deeper in, Dust could see nothing but darkness.

Rolk held up a claw as they were taken into the embrace of the forest, and the team – with the exception of Lightning – sprang into action.

Spring tugged the caravan to the side of the path. The wheels sunk into the mud, but the mare just kept pulling nonetheless. Squelches of displaced mud sounded out as the wheels tore up the wet earth.

As soon as she stopped, Tricks and Gilda bundled into the caravan, before dragging their gear out in bags of touch-looking fabric. Tricks turned, relocking the door and wheels with a series of spells from her horn, before turning to Rolk with a nod.

Gilda sprung the crossbow from her bag. The weapon’s arms sprang out, four wicked spokes that were crossed at the tip and at the ends with two taut steel strings. She slotted a bolt into the holder, before nodding.

Spring simply pawed at the clasp. The mechanism fell apart, and she slipped out of the yoke with surprising agility for someone her size.

Rolk took the rifle out from its box, before pulling back the bolt. Grunting in satisfaction, he pushed the bolt back into place, before slinging the firearm over his shoulder and back.

Lightning collected her equipment, fear creeping into her muscles. These guys weren’t playing around, for sure.

“All good? Great!” And with a jaunty nod and a faint smile, he leapt into the forest.

Dust paused, but a shove from Gilda made her turn her head to glare at the griffon whilst her hooves plodded forwards. Her wings flared out automatically for balance.

Gilda’s head jinked back, and she shrugged. “Fine. Get lost in the jungle, it’s your own damn fault.”

Dust continued to burn a hole in the back of Gilda’s head as she walked forwards, following her colleagues into the underbrush.

The forest seemed to eat away at light. Under the canopies of the ancient trees, shafts of sunlight were as rare as gold. The smell of rotting vegetation, humus and what she suspected was animal faeces wormed their way through her nostrils, leaving her gagging slightly and scrunching her nose. Animal hissing, howling and chittering replaced the whisper of the wind.

Two sky-blue eyes blinked into existence to her right. She gasped, leaping backwards, and twisting her head. The handle of her knife seemed to slip as her teeth brushed by it. She swore, forelegs lashing out–

Rolk’s light, breathy chuckle found its way into her ears. She stopped, wings spread wide as she balanced on her hind legs.

The black griffon seemed to coalesce from the shadows of the forest. Behind him, Spring’s massive bulk was hidden by the forest undergrowth, with only her eyes peeking out like glimmering white crystals.

Lightning continued to gasp, adrenaline coursing around her body.

“Spring will stay behind, keeping tabs on the caravan,” Rolk muttered, turning to Gilda and Tricks. In the dense darkness, a pair of amber eyes and a pair of violet eyes, each surrounded by shadowy shapes, stared back. “Standard stuff.”

“Right, Dust,” he continued, “I’ll fill you in on our current job.”

%i% - Operation Firestarter 1

4 - Operation Firestarter 1

C4 Operation Firestarter 1

By N00813

Gilda slunk into the bushes, watching the bits of the camp that she could see in between tree trunks. Around her ear, the Ariesian-made earpiece was silent. She could see Dust and Tricks follow behind her, hidden in the deeper, denser tangle of forest. That was where they belonged, she thought.

The dog leant back against the tree-trunk, his face hanging in boredom. Gilda could see his eyes blink slowly, vacantly. Good. She hefted the crossbow up, before glancing around. There were no other sentries on the ridge.

Experience had taught her several very important things: the chief amongst which was that what the eye saw was not always what was there, or vice-versa.

She shifted the crossbow until the dog’s eye was in her sights. At this range, she wouldn’t have to factor wind or gravity into the equation. Rolk’s shots would, but then he’d done that for years and years. To him, it was second-nature.

She turned her head slowly, towards the west. There was a range of hills there; rolling bumps that turned the forest’s canopy into waves of green. Gilda’s eagle-sharp eyes could just make out Rolk’s small frame sitting amongst the branches, his black feathers and shawl lathering him in darkness. The foliage also helped cover him up.

She checked one last time. No one was going to check on this dweeb. She pulled the trigger.

The bolt hissed as it sprang along the guide, bowstrings singing quietly behind. For the shortest moment, the thin rod of steel seemed to hang in the air, even as Gilda’s adrenaline-addled brain scolded her to get going –

The shot was perfect.

The dog didn’t so much as jerk – there was just a short gasp of surprise accompanying the spurt of dark liquid from his eye, before he slumped. But he didn’t fall to the ground – Gilda noted with grim satisfaction that the bolt had punched through the back of his head and into the tree, keeping his frame upright.

She looked to both sides, before giving the all-clear gesture.

The shuffle and scraping of leaves being brushed aside haphazardly brought a twitch to the griffon hen’s eye. It had to be the new one, Dust. Tricks’ cloak let her move through the terrain almost as well as Gilda could.

Dust’s forelegs were shaking like leaves. It was a wonder how the pegasus managed to continue standing upright.

Tricks seemed to rematerialize next to Gilda, the unicorn’s cloak humming just the quietest note as it powered down. She nodded to Gilda as she lowered herself to the ground on the edge of the cliff-face, pointedly ignoring the dog’s body. “I’ll be fine.”

Gilda looked back to Dust, whose aquamarine form still hadn’t moved. The griffon hen shook her head.

“I’ll talk to her, just get into position,” Tricks mumbled, her violet eyes still gazing over the campsite. Gilda looked at the camp one last time before nodding. The rough positions of the guards were still in her head as she crept once more back into the jungle.

For a moment, nothing but the sounds of life and nature surrounded her. Then –

The growling of a rock-hound sounded out from just ahead. She pressed herself to the ground, her crossbow pointing in front. It sounded like the dog was angry, almost, or confused, judging by the whines intermixed with his rumbling growls. No matter. She’d put him out of his misery.

She picked up a rock, before tossing it in an arc over a bush in front of her.

The rock hit a tree with a solid thud. It wasn’t too loud as to sound suspicious or dangerous, nor too quiet to be missed – just that beautiful medium where she knew the dog’s brain wouldn’t let it go unless he checked it out. By himself.

She grinned as the sucker’s heavy footfalls sounded out, accompanied by the chorus of broken twigs and shuffling undergrowth. A great form appeared in front of her, about a head taller than she was. He was on two legs, and using a large but roughly finished metal spear as a walking stick.

Best of all, he was facing away from her. She could see the edge of an eye wrapping around his face, but his neck and back was totally exposed. She could almost smell the jugular blood that was pumping through his neck –

Focus, Gilda, her mind said. The griffon hen raised her crossbow, and then pulled the trigger–

The weapon almost flew out of her grip, such was the recoil. She’d fired from a bad position – lying down, aiming upwards – but the results had been worth it. With the blood spraying out of his neck and into his windpipe, there wouldn’t be much chance for him to call out for help. Already, she could see his movements slow down.

A slit throat wasn’t an instant kill, as the stories said – usually, it took about 40 seconds for blood loss to kill the victim. Gilda’s shot had punched through the neck and into the fleshy part of the lower jaw, almost tearing out half his throat. Even then, it took about 10 seconds of agonising waiting before she was certain her target was dead.

She glanced to the side. Hidden at the top of the cliff, Tricks’ frame was composed of shadow, reaching out from the underside of the nearby tree to embrace a sister. Beside her, still hanging from the tree, was the dog’s body.

She had to go back and retrieve the crossbow bolt sometime after the mission. No point wasting money.

Gilda cast a quick glance out. Her white feathers, even when covered in muck, acted as beacons that pointed to where her head was. The less time she spent exposed, the safer she was.

She tugged the rock hound’s body towards her. Some collapsing artery splattered blood all over her chest and claws. She ignored it.

Rifling through his pockets, she liberated his money, her crossbow bolt and a few other things that looked like good sells –

“Goldie, get a fucking move on,” Tricks’ voice hissed into her ear from her earpiece.

The griffon herself sighed, her claws gripping her weapon once more. She didn’t deign to whisper a reply – Tricks’ cloak had a couple of magical enchantments that made it difficult to spot her sight-wise or sound-wise, but Gilda’s own metal armour was a lot more standard. She was never the sneaky type, though.

With a nod, she simply vanished into the foliage once more.

%i% - Operation Firestarter 2

5 - Operation Firestarter 2

C5 Operation Firestarter 2

By N00813

Tricks’ cloak hung like a satin sheet from her back and neck. From the outside, the garment looked like a piece of rough, machined fabric decorated with childish patterns of stars. From the inside, it would still have looked the same.

The unicorn who owned the cloak shifted slightly, her forelegs spreading out until she deemed herself comfortable again. She smiled, the tinges of a memory spreading across her mind, before she blinked and the images were gone.

The pegasus next to her – the rookie, Dust – couldn’t stop staring at the dog’s dead body. It hadn’t moved in the thirty minutes after the dog had died. With a glance, Tricks confirmed that the body was still nailed by the crossbow bolt in his head to the tree behind him.

Her breaths, short, shallow and rapid, scraped Tricks’ concentration until it was razor-thin. The little gasp the pegasus made, like she was choking down a sob, was the last straw.

“Shut up, Dust,” Tricks muttered, half-growling. Opposite them, in the forest at the southern end of the camp, she could see a dog start and walk deeper into the forest. Probably his last move in the world, she thought as she turned around to face her partner.

Dust gaped at her like she’d been struck. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and her breathing sounded like she’d run a marathon and then some more.

Tricks merely shook her head. Images flashed through her mind, once again, but she shooed them away. “Dust is… in the middle of a crisis.”

“No shit,” Gilda’s voice muttered. “I can see her shivering from down here. Hey, you know what? Tell her to pull the bolt out of the dog’s head. I need it, and she’s closer.”

Tricks’ mind flashed with sadistic glee for a moment, before she nodded. Dust would need to go through her own trial-by-fire, and this was a good warm-up to get her used to spilling blood.

She turned her head to the pegasus, whose eyes locked onto her own, wide and pleading. Tricks kept her gaze firmly neutral. A life as a former showmare had done wonders for her poker face.

“Dust, pull the bolt out of the diamond dog’s head,” Tricks said.

Tormenting Dust felt almost as good as when she had the amulet –

Tricks cut off that memory with a blink of her eyes, and focused her eyes once more on the camp below her position on the cliff-top. The guards around were clearly unnerved, now – more than once, she spotted a dog’s stubby tail waving jerkily, and some of the guards were beginning to glance behind themselves from time to time.

“Well? Scared of getting your hooves dirty?”

Dust rounded on her with a glare. “Fuck you. Do it yourself.”

Tricks shrugged. “You’ll get a lot bloodier after all this is over. Might as well practice now.”

Out of the corner of her eye, the unicorn could see Dust’s face crease with anger, before her whole face seemed to fall. Dust then looked down to her hooves, and then at the dog’s body. She cringed, switching her gaze back to Tricks.

The unicorn ignored her companion’s stare.

“How?” Dust said. Her voice was barely a whisper of wind.

Tricks raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean ‘how’? Wrap your hoof around the bolt, and rip it out!”

Dust’s face twitched all-too-quickly with a snarl, but Tricks raised a hoof as the pegasus opened her mouth. “The first time you cut someone’s throat, you’re going to fumble and make a mess of it. That slows us down and causes more pain in the process. If you freeze up in sight of blood down there, I can guarantee your enemies won’t.”

“I’m done,” Gilda’s voice piped up, and Tricks’ ears flicked in surprise. These new earpieces had saved her life many times before, but she could never really get used to how weird they made things…

“Well, Dust isn’t,” Tricks replied, hissing. The cloak would help muffle her voice, but nonetheless she didn’t dare raise her voice. “She’s panicking over the blood!”

“We can wait four hours until nightfall before I start shooting,” Rolk said, his voice crackling a little with the distance. “But I don’t want to wait that long, and I’m sure none of us do.”

“Damn right.” Gilda’s voice sighed.

“We’re all counting on you, Dust,” Tricks muttered, turning once more to the pegasus.

Dust’s aquamarine hooves shook as she raised herself slowly off the ground. Her hooves planted themselves on the bark of the tree, and she let out a little gasp as she felt slick liquid beneath the appendages.

Tricks rolled her eyes. “Come on! You can do it!”

Beneath her cloak, Tricks could see Dust squint as the pegasus’ hooves reached the neck area of the dog, planting themselves on either side as she took a breath.

Dust coughed, her eyes widening. Tricks swore. Her horn lit up. Ambient ley wound around it as she flicked through her mind for the combination of the twelve forms – there! She held her breath, before releasing the spell into the ground. A faint ring of light grew in size until it encompassed the two of them – oh, shit.

A little string of light hung over the edge of the cliff. As Tricks stared at it, a twisting coil of curling magicka just hanging in mid-air like ghostly rope, Dust coughed.

This… It was all Dust’s fault. Get a grip, damn pegasus! Before the dogs picked up that something was wrong!

“Shit, Tricks,” Gilda muttered. “What the fuck’s going on up there?”

“Dust was about to cough and give our position away,” Tricks mumbled, her own face beginning to redden even as she told herself not to dare to whimper or cry. Anger, hot and boiling, wrapped up around in her gut and stomach.

“Dust,” she growled, voice dripping with menace. “I don’t care if you have to lick his blood off, but get that bolt or someone so help you –”

Dust’s own whimper, suppressed and choked, cut her off. Images began to flash in her head: a caravan, lying broken. A long empty path of dust in front of her hooves. A pony, gasping out his last breaths as the image blurred – but she could still feel his windpipe in the crook of her right hoof, even now. She glanced down at the appendage.

“Dust,” Tricks began, before softening her voice. It was much more difficult than she’d thought. The pegasus turned around as well, and in that moment the two of them looked at one another.

Dust’s colours seemed to darken into azure, and her wings seemed to have been replaced by a horn for just a nanosecond.

Tricks blinked twice. “Close your mouth. You don’t want blood getting in there. You’ll also want to do this quickly – so you can dodge any spurts.”

Dust nodded jerkily, before refocusing her attention to the body. With eyes squinted so much they resembled slits, and the barest hint of white teeth at the corners of her mouth, she wrapped her hoof around the crossbow bolt.

Dust ignored the squelching as her other fore-hoof pressed down on the dog’s chest, where the armour was drenched in blood and fluid. She grit her teeth – this was just a performance! Nothing to be afraid of –

She wrenched the bolt out. The spike of silver steel glimmered in the air for a moment, tipped by dark red, before crimson liquid poured out of the wound.

Dust yelped as she backed away from the body, one of her hooves still wrapped around the bolt. Without support, the dog’s corpse simply began to slide downwards. A crimson trail followed it, painted on the tree bark.

Tricks floated the body a short distance away from the cliff-edge, before looking downwards. One of the dogs raised a spear.

It was time.

“We’re done here,” Tricks said, ley wrapping around her horn once more. This spell she was familiar with. “Ready.”

She could almost hear the smile in Rolk’s voice. “Go.”

%i% - Operation Firestarter 3

6 - Operation Firestarter 3

C6 Operation Firestarter 3

By N00813

Gilda leapt out of the bush, her target already in her sights. His patrol pattern had taken him just in front of her when the ‘go’ had been received. Poor bastard never stood a chance.

She re-holstered the crossbow and unsheathed the machete strapped to her chest. The glinting blade slid out with a quiet metallic scrape, but the sound was covered by the building drumbeats of her heart as she crept closer and closer to her target.

She leapt forwards and upwards.

The machete blade was a one-and-a-half foot long piece of magically-hardened steel, shaped like a combat knife with a weighted middle. Against the dog’s leather barding, there was no contest.

She felt the resistance against the blade lessen, as the dog stumbled forwards with Gilda latched onto his back as her claws dug into his hide. No matter. She slid a forearm around his throat and wrenched backwards, whilst shoving the blade further in. The squelch of puncturing organs sounded out from beneath her, and a warm wave of fluid spilled out to splash against her chest feathers and fur.

Well, that would be a bitch to clean.

The other dogs had noticed. Come on, how blind would they have to be to not notice? Tricks and Rolk would help for that, though.

Spots of coiling light rose from the ground, before exploding into dense clouds of grey smoke. Tricks’ magic show. The shafts of light streaming in through the sickeningly cheerful Equestrian sky were blotted out in an instant, dispersed by the rolling miasma. Gilda kept low, yanking the machete from her previous victim with a grunt and the wet sound of ripping flesh.

A gun report rang out over the chaos, overpowering even the panicked howls of the remaining dogs.

Meanwhile, Rolk looked down the sights of his rifle and curled his beak into a snarl. A puff of gunpowder smoke drifted upwards from the muzzle, mushrooming into the air before dissipating.

He yanked the bolt back. A small bronze cylinder popped out, still smoking from an open tip as it tumbled to earth.

He could only spot one ranged attacker when he’d pulled the trigger. There usually were more.

He shoved the bolt forwards, feeling the slight resistance as a bullet was worked from the magazine and into the chamber.

The image of the guards in all of their positions was burned into his mind. With luck, the dogs wouldn’t have moved far. People didn’t tend to move when they couldn’t see where the hell they were going – it was a natural instinct. It would also prove to be their downfall.

The wooden stock was smoothed and sanded by many years of use. Like a child being cradled by its mother, he let his cheek rest against it as he looked down the iron sights. He didn’t need a scope – griffon eyes weren’t too different from eagle ones, so he could still see every curl of smoke from Tricks’ smokescreens rising into the air.

He shifted the weapon down a little and to the left. There was another guard just there, before the flowers of smoke had blossomed into a full fog.

He breathed out until only about half of the air remained in his lungs, waited for the emptiness in between the double thumps of his heart, and then pulled the trigger.

The gun bucked backwards, slamming into his shoulder. The gun’s report bounced off the nearby trees, scattering the few remaining birds. Smoke coiled out of the muzzle, like a trained snake. He ignored the stinging pain, reworking the bolt to push another bullet into the chamber.

Tricks still wasn’t sighting – was something off?

“Tricks, come in,” he muttered, shifting his head just a whisker to the side.

“Heh heh, sorry about that,” Tricks’ voice came in through the earpiece. “I, uh… Just helping Dust out.”

“Come again?”

There was a silence that dragged on and on, until –

“There. Done. I gave her the dog’s armour to wear, jury-rigged it. She should hold up better, at least.”

Rolk hissed as another dark shape, warped and twisted by the roiling magical smoke, materialized. He shifted the rifle until the sights came to rest on the target.

He held off from firing, though. Friendly fire was a big mess that deserved to stay in the past.

The shape shrank into a cylinder that tumbled backwards for a little, before snapping open in a pair of wings. Gilda, then. What she was doing also meant the presence of some other enemy, though, and that was bad.

He gripped the wooden forestock in his left claw, feeling the chill soaking in through the yellow scaling. It was comforting. Just him and his rifle, and the targets in front of him lining up for new oles in their heads. He didn’t have to plan, to think about the future, to worry about Spring…

He sighed.

Another shape tumbled out into one of the patches of clear air developing over the clearing. Wind was blowing in from the east, going back out to sea to rest for the night. Gilda’s white feathers, striated with mud until she looked like some feathered, clawed zebra, popped out of the smoke as well. She was right next to the slave pen.

Rolk didn’t even hesitate as he lifted the rifle’s sights, waited for his body to settle and then pulled the trigger.

Even at this distance, he could see the dog’s head explode into a spray of red as the bullet redistributed the hound’s brain matter all over the walls and sandy ground.

Gilda’s voice crackled in his ear. Rolk could hear her panting, and the tiny droplets of sweat and blood that beaded her face and neck glistened like little diamonds and rubies in the light. “Nice shot, dude.”

He merely hummed in reply, gaze searching the battleground once more.

Gilda reworked her grip on her machete as she glanced at the door. The pen was a temporary construction – long, thin rods of lumber were stuck into the ground at regular intervals, like fence-posts, close enough to one another to prevent escape. She could still see through the gaps in the logs, but the darkness and the smoke prevented her from seeing any more detail than an obvious shape standing just in front of the door.

Her claws went for the ruby-red flash bomb hanging off her sash. The spell inscribed on it was Tricks’ design, carved into the gemstone by an Equestrian spellscribe in Canterlot’s mage markets. The griffon hen herself couldn’t care less how the gem was made, only that it did its job.

She sidled over to the ‘door’, some sort of empty hole where the walls should have been. It was covered by a fluttering curtain instead, stained with all sorts of fluids. The predominant colours were all shades of brown.

Gilda felt for the trigger, a little piece of quartz stuck to the gemstone, before squeezing it. The clear crystal lit up with a faint white light. She tossed it through the curtain.

A brilliant flash of white, like a solar flare, burst out of any and all gaps in the walling. This wasn’t the first time Gilda had used, or seen Tricks use something like this – the unicorn was very proud of her magical skillset, after all – but at this range and in such a sorry structure, her vision was consumed with white-hot, blinding pain.

Just as quickly, the intense white turned into the darkest blacks. Gilda blinked – she could feel the eyelids moving – but nothing happened. Hissing, she spread her legs out into a crouch, recalling her rough position around the door. If she was like this, her opponent would be just as bad –

The blurriest of colours and images spread out from the darkness like water on a page. Good enough for her. She felt the handle of her machete inside the grip of her right claw, comforting with its presence like an old friend. The hard, unyielding wooden grip had been worn down over the years, but was still serviceable.

She hurled herself through the curtain. Time slowed to a crawl. The tempo of her heart increased, until it was like her chest was a drum, and her heart the musician.

Blackness consumed her vision for the tiniest of times, but the pupils of her eagle-eyes dilated until she came face to face with a stumbling dog. His mouth was opening and closing, multiple times, but whatever sound he wanted to make was drowned out by the drums of battle.

Gilda assessed her target in the blink of an eye.

He was big for a rock hound. The fibres of his muscles, from years of manual labour, stood out in his hind legs and around the shoulders. His claws were massive but well-kept. From what Gilda could see around the block of meat that was his arm, his face wasn’t especially strange or different. Sharp teeth hung from the cave of his mouth as he raised his lips in an unconscious snarl, whilst his eyes were slitted.

She hopped to the side as the dog’s. His instinctual flailing left curls of smoke hanging in the air, coiling around the two combatants like ghosts.

Coarse sand flew outwards from her landing. The dog didn’t notice, continuing to flail, his claws glimmering in the dim sunlight that had managed to pierce the walls of smoke and wood.

She leapt towards his neck.

It was bad practice, she knew – leaping meant that you were in the air, with no control other than your wings, which sometimes couldn’t do the job fast enough to stop you from crashing into a waiting blade. This time, however, she guessed right.

The dog fell backwards and to the side. He had a target now, however, and he knew it, swinging the arm closest to Gilda towards the feathery lump on his side.

She kicked, leaping off him as if he was a springboard. The two of them went in opposite directions. He smashed into a wall, leaning against it before shoving himself off whilst shaking his head.

Gilda was much lighter. She went flying towards the opposite wall, her wings flaring open instinctively. They strained and screamed against her bones, but that was much better than the crunching pain of smacking into the wall.

She darted in for another attack, folding her vulnerable wings in as she neared her target. The dog’s vision was returning, it seemed – the swipe aimed at her head was way too close for her comfort.

The machete blade sunk into the dog’s neck with token resistance. She felt warm liquid squirt onto her claws, like hot water from a shower nozzle. She tore it out with a wrench of her arm, and the squirt turned into a veritable waterfall.

To his credit, the dog didn’t succumb instantly. Even as Gilda leapt backwards, he turned around, swinging his fists. Blood poured out of the space where his throat used to be, to explode into brilliant red blossoms on his dirty leather torso and the floor.

He took a step forwards. Then he crumpled, landing face-down in the dirt.

Gilda walked over, before slamming the blade in between the dog’s two vertebrae, eliciting another spray of blood. The little jets of it running between the blade and the skin increased to a trickle when she yanked the machete out.

She looked around, to make sure that nothing had changed. The building was still a rough construct, breaking about fifteen building ordinances and now covered in someone else’s gore.

“Got a problem,” she muttered, kneeling down and opening the first pocket on the dog’s armour. “The slaves aren’t here.”

%i% - Operation Firestarter 4

7 - Operation Firestarter 4

C7 Operation Firestarter 4

By N00813

“What do you mean – right. Right, right.” Rolk’s voice paused for a moment as Dust cannoned from her vantage point, towards a dog who was stumbling out of the curling clouds of grey.

Behind her, Dust could see Tricks give her an encouraging smile. It was somewhat awkward, not because it was obviously false, but because Tricks’ hooves were stained red with diamond dog blood.

Dust’s armour stuck to her skin, even as she pumped her wings harder to try and speed up. It used to be the dog’s armour, in fact. There were still blood stains on it, around the neck collar and in a little stream down the back. The arm-holes were too big, but the collar almost too small. It also weighed a hell of a lot.

But it would keep her alive. Alive enough to perform the tasks she’d signed up willingly for.

“Slavers,” she hissed beneath her breaths, as they were stolen away by the passing wind. The tear tracks still streaked her face, mussing the fur beneath, but her eyes were hard and her mouth set in a thin line.

She grit her teeth as the bloodstains dried on her fur, the shifting armour pulling the hairs here and there as she dove and twisted.

Below her, little circles of bright blue light spun themselves into existence, hovering over random parts of the smog. Curious, Dust dove in –

“Fuck! Get away from that, Dust!”

Tricks’ yell and the thunder of a rifle yanked Dust into a sudden stop. The pegasus’ legs went swinging beneath her, almost scraping the glowing, coiling ring of light –

–and through the red cloud that spurted upwards, slowly dispersing into the smoke as a pale pink tinge. As the bullet whizzed past, the air itself parted like a butterfly’s wings for a nanosecond, warping the mass of grey miasma into curling eddies – a sideways tornado.

“Shit!” Dust squeaked, her voice several octaves higher than natural. She could feel the wetness around her hind hooves, the heat of the passing bullet rising up.

Her next breath tasted especially sweet.

“Sorry,” Rolk mumbled, after Dust dove to ground. He didn’t sound apologetic at all – merely vacant, like he was going through the motions without putting any sort of effort or feeling into them at all.

“Avoid the rings,” Tricks grumbled. “I told you about sighting.”

“You only said that there was going to be a signal,” Dust returned, her voice slowly returning to its normal pitch. “I didn’t know what the hell that even meant!”

“Goldie, any manifest? Shipment times, cargo lists, any timetables?” Rolk’s voice came again over the earpiece.

“No!” Gilda yelled back. The hen grunted for a moment, before the rest of the team heard her exhale heavily. “Guard inside the pen was just a grunt.”

Dust continued her crawl around the perimeters of the smoke cloud. There weren’t a lot of enemies by the boundaries, surprisingly. Gilda had either been very quick at taking them out, or the smoke had some latent magical properties.

A shape started to solidify in the grey, getting darker and larger by the second. Two arms on either side thrashed about, as if it was swimming in the smoke rather than running.

Dust felt the grip of the knife beneath her hoof, slippery and warm. She clenched it in her grip, before Gilda’s voice seemed to growl at her to not do that very same thing –

Too late to think.

The dog’s eyes blazed with fury as he swung down a dagger, his lithe arms a blur and the blade a flash of steel. Lightning jetted away, leaping to the side with additional unconscious help from her wings.

The dog was young, that much was obvious. He looked as old as a teenager, barely fitting the armour he wore. He was inexperienced, and his rash attack had left him hunched down as he stumbled forwards with the momentum.

Lightning took half a second to pause, before making up her mind.

Damn slavers.

She lashed out with a hoof – the one without the knife. The blow connected with the dog’s side. Lightning’s foreleg jolted as the impulse travelled up her bones.

The rock hound crumpled, clutching at his side. His dagger lay in the dirt, forgotten for the moment. Dust clenched the handle of her own knife.

It was even slicker than before. Sweat travelled down the blade in little rivulets, dripping off the point.

She found herself hesitating as she took a step towards the dog.

He took advantage of that pause, pushing himself forwards and flinging out an arm to clutch at his dagger. Lightning jumped backwards and to the side as his other arm flashed outwards.

Nonetheless, she wasn’t fast enough. The blow left her stumbling, even as the dog dragged himself upwards, the knife in his other hand.

Now, they were even once more.

%i% - Operation Firestarter 5

8 - Operation Firestarter 5

C8 Operation Firestarter 5

By N00813

Dust cursed. Stupid! Her moment of weakness, of honour, had left her with a recovered opponent that looked a lot angrier.

“Dust, keep up.”

Rolk’s voice echoed in her ears, accompanied by a clap of thunder as another round whizzed past overhead.

So now she was letting the team down as well.

Dust swore, out loud. The dog shifted his weight to the front – an obvious signal of a charge – and Dust blinked out of her self-scolding session.

The dog was faster than she expected. She should have known – he was smaller, younger so not as bulky, but definitely faster than the average diamond dog. She jinked to the side – but ice seemed to replace her spine as she saw the knife flash upwards out of the corner of her eye.

She’d forgotten which hand held the knife. She’d rolled under his knife arm.

The dog was also inexperienced, and that was her saving grace. His posture had geared him towards forwards momentum and speed, not upper-body strength. There wasn’t a lot of force behind the blade – but the weapon was sharp, and Dust’s armour only covered her torso.

She screamed. A stripe of burning, searing heat and pain swelled up on her upper forearm, following the blooming red river forming on her skin.

Blinking the bite of tears threatening to spill over her cheeks back, she glared at the dog, choking back the hiss rising in her throat.

He looked as surprised as she did.

“Come on, Dust,” Gilda grumbled, over the earpiece. “Work for your payout.”

Dust ignored her teammate. The dog had whirled around, blood running down his blade in little trails.

Rolk’s voice, a low mumbling, quickly dispersed into the drums of battle pounding inside her head.

The dog charged at her again, pushing off the ground with one leg, his blade flashing through the air as his arms swung. Dust’s wings fluttered, and her eyes widened–

–and she jerked off the ground, wings smashing against the air. Cool wind sliced through her fur. The dog’s blade, a silver slash, missed her hind legs by inches.

She twisted backwards, executing a textbook planar corkscrew – if the Wonderbolts could see me now – and lined her forearms and knife with his exposed back.

The dog had realised something was wrong. His feet kicked up a slew of dust and sand as he slowed down, and looked upwards.

But he was too late. Dust was zooming in from behind him.

She gripped the knife in her left hoof. On the arm above the appendage, the jury-rigged gauntlet of leather was wrapped around her flesh. It had felt way too tight when Tricks had rigged it up for her in those few minutes – her complaints had fallen on the unicorn’s deaf ears – but now, she understood why. It felt like the gauntlet was going to disintegrate or rip away from her skin any moment.

Only the straps and strings criss-crossing her arm kept the homemade gauntlet from falling to pieces as she rocketed towards the dog, blade pointing outwards.

Three. Two. One.

Some part of her marvelled at how easily the knife sunk into the dog’s flesh, like a stone parting a sea of meat. Then the rest of her smashed into the dog’s back.

Her vision blackened for a moment, before stars of all colours but all intensely bright screamed through the darkness, replacing the cold black with painful light.

Blinking away in an attempt to clear her vision, she suddenly remembered that she was in the middle of a life-or-death fight – and lashed out blindly. Her other fore-hoof connected with a solid thump and a yell of pain.

Dust rose shakily to her hooves, her vision clearing just in time for her to catch a small jet of blood to her neck. Her blade was still embedded inside the dog. Given that it was a former kitchen knife, some of the grip had disappeared inside the wound as well, wedging the wound open and displaying the bloody flesh inside.

Bile rose inside her throat. The smell of blood mixed with the dirty, unwashed smell of the dog and the scent of her own coppery blood leaking from her own wound. She held back tears as the sting travelled into her nostrils.

The dog groaned and moaned as he lay on the ground. His own knife lay somewhere in the dirt behind the two of them, Dust confirmed with a quick glance. She was safe for the time being. She could make that permanent…

Dust stepped forwards. As sweat dripped off her foreleg, the fluid mixed with her own blood, her knife-hoof began to shake. She clenched her teeth, and folded her hoof around the handle until she could see the knuckle whitening.

The dog screamed in pain as she wrenched the knife out, falling to his knees as blood spurted out of the hole in his back and cascaded down his cloth shirt like a sticky waterfall. He continued to scream, his forearms shaking as he struggled not to tumble into the dirt.

Dust looked at him. He’d ended up in front of her, his spine and neck exposed. Just one swipe, one thrust of the blade into his filthy grey throat and he would be dead.

Just one move.

Dust lifted the blade, the steel glinting as it caught the sunlight. She looked down at her victim once more, and the knife suddenly felt as heavy as lead.

His screams had turned into sobs. His tears pumped out of his eyes at the same rate blood spurted out of the hole in his back. Lying on his stomach, face pressed into sand that was growing redder and redder with his own blood, he made for a pitiful figure.

Dust hesitated for just a moment – and the scene seemed to stop in time. She could see Tricks disappear from her position on the cliff in an imploding ball of light, and then explode somewhere deep in the smog – the smoke billowing out from the camp, stopping just at the edge of her hooves – the sun streaming down through the canopy leaves of a massive tree, in sunbeams that made the blood on her hooves glow.

Gilda’s grunts and mutterings filled her earpiece, and the effect was lost. The dog’s arms flashed, quicker than she’d thought – clearly, fighting for his life had made him ignore the pain and his gaping wound. There was no more time.

She screamed as she plunged the blade downwards.

%i% - Operation Firestarter 6

9 - Operation Firestarter 6

C9 Operation Firestarter 6

By N00813

Tricks had finished with her work by the time Dust’s sobs had calmed into little putt-putts that echoed out over the desert of her earpiece. No one else had spoken anything – Gilda had grunted into the comms with each scream that she could hear emanating from the smog, but other than that, everyone let Dust recuperate in silence.

The tunnel looked no different than before to her eyes. Her horn was far more suited to sensing traps of this nature, however. Errant ley wound around the tunnel walls and floor, ready to trigger the explosives she’d buried in the floor. It wasn’t too different from the stage tricks she’d set up when she’d worked as a travelling magician. The fireworks were packed with more actual explosive, and shrapnel rather than confetti, whilst the trigger was set to be a lot more delicate than anything she’d dare get close to. But she could handle her bombs from a distance.

The dogs, lacking in any sort of conscious magic, wouldn’t be able to sense them until it was too late.

“Bust the screen,” Gilda muttered, and Tricks dispelled the spell. The smoke faded into the air.

There had been fifteen or so dogs at the beginning of the op. There were fifteen or so dog corpses at the end.

Rolk sighed, his voice layered with static. Tricks could almost taste the annoyance in his words. “Take what we can. See if the slavers have anything on them – information, scraps of parchment, whatever. Spring, hold position.”

Tricks had almost forgotten about Spring. Granted, the earth mare never did much besides pull the wagon, carry hefty loads and sit quietly away from them. She had seemed like a nice type when Tricks had talked to her, a long time ago – friendly, quiet and awkward – but she’d never seemed quite right next to Tricks, and the feeling was mutual.

She shook the thoughts out of her head, and strands of her silver mane wafted in front of her eyes. She blew them away, before turning to Gilda. In the quiet, every clink and scrape of the Gilda’s odd armour was as loud as thunder.

I’ve always wondered why she chooses those overlapping plates instead of something solid like a breastplate. With that, a single swipe at the right angle can knock the metal right off, and then she would have nothing.

Gilda was drenched in gore. Loose curls of meat hung from her machete, which she’d strapped to her chest. She stopped, and Tricks watched with morbid curiosity as the blood dripping off her feathers turned the sand below her red.

“What are you lookin’ at,” Gilda said, raising her head and looking Tricks in the eye.

“You, moron,” Tricks replied.

A pause, ugly and pregnant, grew in between the two. Gilda’s eyes narrowed just the tiniest bit, before the two of them burst out into simultaneous chuckles.

I would have been scared shitless just a few years ago. Things change, huh?

Rolk’s voice cut in through the dying sounds of their merriment. “Get to work.”

Both of them acknowledged him, and with a nod at one another, split up to begin their work.

Tricks walked around the side of the encampment. There was less gore on the ground here, and the occasional squelch as she stepped in sticky red sand drew a frown from her lips. The smell of blood had been a common enough presence in her life since she’d started her work, but blood was still blood, and getting it out of her cloak was going to be a pain.

Still, at least it wasn’t going to like suffering as bad as a wound as the dog in front of her. He’d been stabbed in the back, the blade going clean in-between the ribs and cleaving the heart in two. It was a mortal wound, but by no means one that would kill instantly. He’d had time to reflect on his life as he bled out into the soil.

She turned the corpse over, rifling through his pockets, and came up with nothing but a few gems. There was no power in them, although they were worth a fair bit of money to the right people.

Nothing else but that. She moved on, trotting around towards the next body. The head was non-existent, with only a few curls of flesh spreading out from the neck like the tentacles of an octopus. Bits of gore littered the area around him. That made sense – when his head was blown apart, the brain and skull had to go somewhere. It wasn’t like they vanished into mid-air.

She rifled through the pockets, finding nothing but another clutch of gems.

The next body already had a mare looking over it. Dust was clutching herself, her knife lying inside the throat of the dog she’d killed. There was a patch of whitish, green-yellow liquid on the sand beside her. Vomit.

Standard stuff. She’ll be over it in a couple of days.

Tricks trotted up to her, and Dust’s eyes snapped up to face the unicorn’s own magenta pools. Her amber ones were wide, twitching and unfocused, and for a second Tricks thought she’d been possessed, until Dust’s voice cracked the almost-silence.

“Fuck…” she whispered, alternating between Tricks and her own hooves.

Tricks nodded. Indeed. That must have been a painful death. Look at the cut! Horrible technique! She scanned the body. There was nothing of note in the two pockets on the front – not surprising. The corpse belonged to some dog just out of his teen years. Too bad he fell in with the wrong people.

Tricks stepped over the body until she was on the same side as Dust. The latter still hadn’t moved a muscle, even as her eyelids were sweeping up and down in sync with her rapid breaths.

Tricks sighed, before grasping Dust’s shoulders with her own hooves. Amber eyes met magenta ones, and Tricks’ face contorted into a snarl as she beheld her partner’s witless, all-consuming fear and horror. Not the time for moralising now.

A shred of confusion flickered across Dust’s face, before terror, keen and hungry, once again consumed her. She didn’t speak, but chose simply to flap her mouth open and closed.

“Get a grip or die here with him,” Tricks growled, shoving Dust away from the dog’s body. Her own hooves were damp, and she could feel liquid, viscous and hot, pool around them as they sank almost imperceptibly into the soil. “And that would be a shame.”

Anger crossed Dust’s turquoise face, but gave way to simple, mute horror and disgust. Her face creased, and Tricks groaned internally. She could remember that face – she’d made it herself, just a few short years ago. Disgusting, but at least this will only happen once.

Dust’s vomit splashed out onto the ground, a white-green mix of stomach acid and greenery that had been mixed into a mush not unlike pulverised brain. Tricks looked on, one eyebrow raised, before a hiss in her ear yanked her head around.

“Caravan coming,” a voice – too high to be Gilda, too feminine to be Rolk, and Dust’s still gaping like a goldfish – Spring! – came over the earpiece, and she frowned. Spring usually wasn’t a combatant – that had been made very clear to her in her first few months – so she usually kept quiet. It was an arrangement that worked for all of them. The less interference on the line, the more effective their communication, and so the more efficient they would be at their jobs.

Spring piping up, however, meant a change of plans.

She could distinguish Rolk’s sharp intake of breath over the network. “Spring! I’ll be there,” he muttered, the little growl in it painfully obvious to her.

Tricks glanced once more at Dust. The pegasus had finally stopped hyperventilating, and now she simply sat on the dirt, her head staring at her bloody hooves.

“Team, form up. Ambush convoy.” Rolk’s order sounded somewhat off to Tricks, even as she glanced over to Gilda. They met gazes, and Gilda gave a short, sharp nod. Professional. Tricks reciprocated with one of her own.

She sighed, and began to trot towards the forest, her hooves pounding against the sand with soft, repetitive thumps. She could hear the slower, unsteady pounding of Dust’s hooves for a short while, before a short void of sound – and then the pegasus swung over her head, her wings beating in rhythm. Only her eyes, tired and red and puffy, betrayed her.

Good enough. “Dust, go with Gilda,” she said, tossing her head to point to the hen, who was already nearing the treeline. “You’re on spearhead.”

“And you?” Dust’s voice was cracked and dry, and it sounded like she’d flown fifty laps in the few seconds between.

“Giving them a show they won’t forget.”

%i% - Operation Firestarter 7

10 - Operation Firestarter 7

C10 Operation Firestarter 7

By N00813

I am not a killer.

The mantra bounced off the walls of her mind. It was futile.

Maybe if I repeat it enough, I’ll start believing it.

Dust scowled, shaking her head. The wind burned in her eyes, and she felt the screaming, violent need to just close her eyes to the world and shut down. Her eyelids slammed shut –

Get a grip or die here.

Tricks’ words exploded into her ears, and then her inner ear screamed for her to pull up, pull up –

With a hasty flutter or her wings, she gasped, eyes snapping wide open. The ground, just a few centimetres in front of her eyes, was braided with roots the thickness of her hooves. A hiss, just up ahead, sucked the blood from her face and she looked up in terror –

Gilda’s camouflaging had somehow made her white head blend in with the dark, murky-green forest. Stripes of bloody-white hung off of her form, like opaque sunshafts. They twisted and turned unnaturally as the body they were attached to slunk off into the jungle.

Dust snapped her wings back until they lay flat against her back. The jungle’s vines and branches seemed to close in, the shadows reaching for her form as spindly black claws. Suddenly, the warm, humid Haysead felt like a freezer.

She hurried after Gilda’s retreating form.

Rolk’s brows furrowed as he ran.

This wasn’t the worst fuck-up they’d – or he’d – ever had. In fact, this probably didn’t make it into the top ten. Dust’s reaction to getting her murder cherry popped was a bit more than he’d thought, though. Tricks’ reaction hadn’t been that bad.

Not that that’s much difference from what she’s usually like.

The tree branches made for an odd obstacle course, a detached part of him noted. He leapt for a thicker limb sticking out at about two metres higher than he was. A short flap, and his claws and paws met the wood for the barest split-second, before he launched off again.

Spring…

He narrowed his eyes.

Sunlight stabbed through the holes in the canopy, lighting the forest floor with shafts of whitish-yellow light. Dust particles hung in the air, spiralling through the beams as they danced.

He hurtled past.

Tricks settled down beneath an overhanging mesh of moss and leaves. She drew her cloak around her form, and it shimmered with the faintest hint of white-blue before mixing into the shade of her surroundings. She raised a hoof, watching the light patterns splay across it as if it was glass instead of flesh, and smiled.

“Ready,” she whispered, pressing her form into the soil. The stale, heavy odour of decomposition stung her nostrils, but she ignored it. Turning her head, she could just make out the mass of shadows that was Gilda, behind a piece of foliage just up from her position. Rolk was just gone – typical, really.

As it turned out, they didn’t have to wait long.

The convoy rumbled into view. A shorter, wiry dog led the group – presumably a scout – and behind him, a burly rock hound tugged on a chain. Guards surrounded the slave chain, all dogs with cheap leather armour, speckled here and there with pieces of metal. Attached to the links in regular spaces were chunky, rusty collars that were fastened around the necks of several motley earth ponies and pegasi. Many of them looked to be in shock. Some were sobbing soundlessly, and others simply trudged along in resignation. Even through the gloom, she could see that the metal collars were stained brown with blood.

“Ready to initiate,” Rolk hissed through the comms.

Something deep inside Tricks stirred. She ignored it, focusing on the spell in the gem. A spark to set the timer, a toss with her horn, and as the gem tumbled through the air with a trail of sparkles behind it, she wove another spell into her horn.

A sound of thunder, and then the big dog’s head exploded into strips of flesh, coating the slaves behind in a spray of gore. Rolk’s signal.

Tricks’ spell sparked out, and blue circles drew themselves into existence above the dogs’ frozen bodies. Almost simultaneously, smoke poured out from the ground, filling the space with a blinding, grey-blue miasma.

She grinned, blood pounding in her ears.

Another thunderclap from her side, and one of the circles winked out of existence.

Tricks shook her head, mumbled a quick phrase for luck and wove a new spell. Even as she dived into the coiling fog, orange silhouettes flickered into existence before her eyes. Several large outlines, crisscrossed in the middle by orange contours, swung around in the fog at random. Their arms were lengthened by thin, unnaturally straight lines – spears. In the middle, a mass of orange squirmed like fireflies trapped in translucent slime. Now and then, some appendage unfolded, and Tricks could see hanging chain links leading from the end into the mass.

Another thunderclap. An orange figure tumbled onto its knees, before falling chest-down onto the ground minus its head.

Tricks ignored the pitter-patter of airborne blood droplets on her cloak. Just a few metres more…

Gilda’s form, bulky and yet oddly graceful, peeled off from the orange mass, and Tricks saw a train of ponies trailing behind as the griffon hen wrenched on the chain. Some bodies were moving, but others dragged their hooves, even as they stumbled and their faces met dust – probably think we’re slavers too – and Tricks turned back to the mass and remembered her goal.

Dust was overhead, hovering like an unwieldy orange vulture. Tricks looked back down, and realised that she’d gotten so close that the mass’s mesh had darkened into specific shapes, resembling heads and legs…

She toned down the setting, and the mesh thinned until she could see the many eyes staring back at her, all different colours and set on a multitude of hungry, hopeful faces.

She could feel her own face settling into an odd half-smile. Huh. Looked like years of mercenary work still hadn’t shorn away all of her dignity.

She tapped the one closest to her, and as his eyes swivelled up to focus on hers, squinting, a spark of yellow light sprang into existence in the shape of a cross – the pony symbol for healing.

She suppressed a smirk at the irony as she turned away, the cross hanging in mid-air behind her. The shuffling of steel and flesh behind her mixed into a dulled rumble as she picked her way towards Gilda’s form.

Dust hovered high above.

Her turquoise wings beat at the air, a steady whump-whump that drew her mind towards her goal and away from the errant thoughts swirling around her consciousness.

This was a performance. There could be no interruptions – the show had to go on, regardless of everything. That was her downfall, five years ago – and it was her salvation here, in this jungle.

A dog stumbled out of the gloom, his stance low and balanced, a solid wooden crossbow in his paws. Just by chance, he’d turned – and all it took was one split-second before he was raising the stock to shoulder height, his finger tightening on the trigger all the while.

Dust swerved on instinct. Corkscrew turn. The dog hadn’t the time to aim his weapon, and the bolt cannoned by, a silver sliver of lethal steel mere inches from her torso – but it was way, way too close.

The dog didn’t have a chance to correct his error, however. A sound of thunder, and his head exploded into red chunks, showering the surrounding earth with crimson mist. Blood gushed out even as he fell onto his back, like a broken ragdoll.

Rolk’s lethally accurate sniper fire was demonstrated to her once more.

If I’d ever tried to leave, just desert or help the enemy or whatever, he could just put a bullet through my head. I wouldn’t even be able to go two metres.

She shivered, the spasm travelling to the tips of her wings, and she fell slightly before recovering into a stable position.

Perform.

Dust turned, angling her wings until she was above the mass of miasma and then propelled herself, hard into a loop. At the azimuth, she braked into a hover, wings flaring. A quick twist and she’d tilted her body downwards, her nose being the tip of a biological lightning bolt.

The blackish-brown lumps that were Gilda and Tricks led two separate slave trains out of the grey, and Dust grinned sincerely for what seemed like the first time since the day had started – at least some ponies would get the chance to lead happier lives. She was helping.

The smile washed off her face as another dog stepped out, arms swinging, the spear drawing figure-of-eights in the air. One of her teammates raised a limb, and Dust saw the glint of amber eyes as cold and hard as the stone itself before a crossbow bolt buried itself into the dog’s head.

The crossbow…

Her eyes widened, and she slapped herself – stupid, stupid! – before swooping downwards towards the body, lying on its back with its head missing. The miasma hung unnaturally still, never straying past its circular boundary even as the mists roiled. Her hooves hit wet dirt, and on instinct she reared up, settling into a low hover as she lifted her forelegs.

Red blood coated the hooves from the hard, bony surface to the top of the fetlock. The symbolism wasn’t lost on her.

Her face twisted in disgust, but she didn’t stop. The crossbow’s hard wooden stock was slick with the blood and bits of skull that also belonged to its former owner. After brushing the wood with what dry parts of her foreleg she could find, she slung the weapon across her shoulders, in between her wings, and turned the body over. She didn’t dare let her eyes stray above the collarbone – the lack of anything above still seemed so wrong.

Seven crossbow bolts spilled onto the red earth, each of which she grabbed and put into the myriad pockets on her armour.

“Careful with the weapon, Dust,” Rolk’s voice sounded out over her earpiece. “No one wants friendly fire.”

No one wants to be shot at, she thought, whether them or us.

She took a quick glance at the mechanisms. It was ridiculous. She knew she was looking at a cheap piece of kit, but even then, strings seemed to lead everywhere and nowhere, and little gears stuck out near the rough curve of the trigger. Her brilliant plan had decayed into nothing.

This happens to me a lot, doesn’t it.

With a sigh, she swung the thing over her back, flinching as one of the bits smacked into her wing. Just as well it wasn’t loaded. Losing a wing on her first mission – her first performance – would just be her luck.

Her knife gripped in a hoof, she flapped her wings hard, jetting into the air above the fog.

%i% - Operation Firestarter Debriefing

11 - Operation Firestarter Debriefing

C11 Operation Firestarter Debriefing

By N00813

“Sit-rep?” Rolk’s voice murmured over the comms.

“Cargo secured,” Gilda muttered, watching the dog struggle on the ground as her earpiece hummed. “Tricks is with them.”

Dust’s crossbow bolt hadn’t gone flying off to who knows where. Gilda had to give her credit for that. Shooting a crossbow wasn’t easy for ponies, who lacked the digits needed to pull on the mechanical trigger. They could make do with a hoof, but slamming a limb into the rear of the weapon tended to mess with their aim.

At least the bolt hadn’t buried itself in a tree somewhere, or in the slaves. The dog continued to howl in pain, clawing forwards with his front paws, the hind ones twitching. The injury looked like a spinal.

She turned her head, away from the dog, towards Dust. The pegasus was even greener than normal around the face, and her cheeks bulged out as she clamped a hoof to her mouth. A red hoof. At least the blood had dried.

Gilda smirked, shaking her head as she drew her own crossbow. The dog looked up at the sudden sound, and his ears folded as he stared down the bolt, sitting in the guide like a tiger ready to spring.

She pulled the trigger. The weapon kicked backwards, the pistol grip ramming into her palm. She folded the weapon, before walking towards the dog’s body and wrenching the crossbow bolt out of its eye.

Dust gagged, turning away and shouldering her weapon just as the earpiece hissed. “Search the bodies.”

It took only a few minutes before Tricks hissed in grim satisfaction, pulling a gold-embroidered gem out of the pockets of the biggest dog in the group. Gilda recognised it. It was a sign of ‘pack leader’ – a quick glance at it would tell new incomers who the boss was, and who they ought to fight to take that position for themselves.

“Good work, people,” Rolk said, dropping down from the mess of branches and leaves onto the dirt path. His rifle was already slung on his back. He opened a claw towards Tricks, and she hesitated for a moment before tossing the gilded gem towards him.

He eyed it for a moment, before sticking it in a pouch by his side.

“Dust, your aim is rubbish. Still, keep that crossbow. It’ll fetch a nice price.”

Dust nodded, her cheeks suddenly feeling as if they were on fire.

“Wonderful. We’re done here, then,” he said, tensing his wings and giving them an experimental flap. “Should be back at Dodge at sunset –”

“What about the slaves?” Dust said, pointing to the motley group. Her face was still green, but at least she was breathing normally now.

Three pairs of eyes locked onto her, and she shrunk a bit under all of their gazes.

“What about them?” Rolk finally spoke, his gaze even.

Dust couldn’t see any spark of emotion on his face at all. It was just a blank mask. She gulped down her rising dread, and coughed as her words prepared to elbow their way out of her too-tight throat. “What do we do with them? We can’t just leave them here.”

Tricks made a quick gesture with her head, catching Rolk’s eye for a split-second and redirecting his gaze towards the tunnel dug into the cliff. He nodded, and she pulled the hood of her cloak back onto her head. Even as she trotted towards it, Dust’s eyes began to water as they flickered between the spaces around Tricks’ form. Pegasi had good eyes, but even then, it was becoming quite difficult to pick out her silhouette. The magic of the cloak, she surmised.

“We’re not,” Rolk said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. For him, it could have been. “We’re going back to Dodge City Guards to hand them off in exchange for the bounty.”

Dust nodded, slowly. Suddenly, the crossbow balanced on her back seemed a lot heavier.

“No more missions, chief?” Gilda raised an eyebrow, before inspecting the reinforced steel claws of her gauntlet. She headed over to the slaves, before giving them a quick once-over. They didn’t seem too badly damaged. A bit worn and dusty, sure, but that was to be expected.

Gilda took up the chains, giving them an experimental tug. The pony attached closest yelped in fear. She rolled her eyes.

Rolk shook his head, before remembering that Gilda couldn’t see him from her place by the slaves. “Not for a little while.” He pursed his flexible beak, before nodding. “Dust, I’ll talk to you later. In private.”

Dust nodded, her wings flaring out as she felt the crossbow begin to slip from the dip in her back. “Alright.”

“Good. Get everything you want, and we’ll leave.”

%i% - Operation Firestarter Briefing

3 - Operation Firestarter Briefing

C3 Operation Firestarter Briefing

By N00813

Haysead Forest, South-eastern Equestria

“There’ve been reports of a slaving camp in the forest,” Rolk muttered, as he plodded alongside Dust. “We’ve been paid to clear it out. Unlike Khamelu, they want the slaves alive and freed – if it’s a choice between the slaves and the slavers, go for the slaves.”

“In this forest!?” Lightning squeaked, her pupils shrinking. She gaped, her jaw hanging open, yet no words came out. Had she simply been lucky all this time? “This one?”

“Yes,” he said, in that same low voice. Somehow, the forest’s entrapping canopy had that effect on all of them – he couldn’t shout, or yell or scream. It was like the forest itself was alive – and it was, in a sense, he thought with a wry grin – and wanted them all out. They were trespassers on a hostile land. “You seem surprised.”

“In Equestria!? What about the Princesses? Why aren’t they doing anything about it?”

“Equestria’s a big place,” Rolk said, his smile faltering just slightly. “And they are, indirectly… but that’s none of our concern. Right now, we’ve been paid to kill them.”

Slavers. Dust’s eye twitched, even as her pupils remained shrunk. They stripped ponies – ponies like her – of their freedoms, and sent them far away from home to some hell-hole where the only way out was death, and life wasn’t much better.

And she could have been one of them. She lived the furthest from town, in a hut that could barely be called a home – no one would have cared if she’d suddenly disappeared, or stopped showing up for work.

Her hoof curled, and an inner fire lit up inside her. It was sick and disgusting, what they did. They were vile people – barely people, one could say. She snarled silently, and images of the upcoming carnage – the murky, misty bodies of the slavers lying in pools of blood – swam through her mind.

They deserved to die, Dust thought to herself. They had to be stopped – at all costs. In her mental list, she ranked slavers about the same as mass-murderers.

A laugh, bitter and choking, seemed to stick in her throat. She coughed. The forest seemed to take the hiss of exhalation into itself, replacing the sound of rushing air with the chirping of crickets and cicadas.

How was that different to the ones she was with? She was going to be a murderer – quite soon, she guessed.

The only difference was that these guys killed so that others wouldn’t be hurt. Like the Royal Guards, or the Wonderbolts, really. Sure, they – and she – would only work for the guys who paid them. But all of the Guards were paid wages. This… ‘Outcast Company’ was no different from the Guards.

Right?

Dust sighed, breathing out. After her anger had left her, there was nothing – just a cold realisation of what she was going to do. When she had tried out for the Guards, a couple of weeks after ‘the incident’, they’d asked her if she was willing to kill for her country. Of course, she answered yes. The possibility of war with other countries, of needing to get her hooves bloody, was remote at worst.

Now? Dust shook her head. Perhaps it would be easier to approach this like she would - or had – with a stunt. Keep all other thoughts out, remember the motions, and perform.

Rolk’s mutter of ‘Stop’ brought the rest of the team to a halt. Dust glanced around, but he was nowhere in sight. Her breathing hitched in her throat. A ghostly trickle of ice-cold water ran down her spine.

She shivered.

A leaf fell onto her back.

She jumped up, sucking in a breath, and prepared to screech. She wasn’t prepared for a tendril of magic to wind around her mouth, leaving her eyes bulging comically as she struggled.

“Shut up,” Tricks mumbled.

“I see smoke,” Rolk’s voice sounded, from above her.

Dust’s head instantly swivelled upwards, even as she rushed towards Tricks, ignoring the unicorn’s muffled sigh. Rolk’s blue eyes stared down at her from his position, standing on a thick branch like a squirrel.

Under more careful scrutiny, Dust could see that he wore a black shawl that broke up his silhouette. One could say that the cloak was unnecessary, given that his natural black feathering and fur was almost invisible in the gloom.

“You were like this once, Tricks,” Gilda laughed, quietly, as Tricks’ azure skin flushed pink with Dust’s forelegs still wrapped around her neck. “I still remember.”

“Just… just shut up.”

“Going scouting,” said the voice in Dust’s left ear – the earpiece!

Just like that, Rolk was gone, with nary a leaf falling as he slunk away into the forest’s tangle of branches.

Dust simply stood with her jaw hanging, as Tricks edged away, to the side. Even with their lighter colours, Dust was finding it difficult to spot them. Gilda’s white feathers gleamed in the darkness, although not for long – the griffon was smearing what looked like mud all over them, grimacing as she did so.

“What are you doing?” Dust hissed, her eyebrow cocked.

Gilda looked up, as if she hadn’t noticed Dust’s hooves hovering in the edge of her vision. “Camo. Easier to hide.”

The griffon hen tilted her head slightly. “You have your jacket?”

Dust nodded.

Gilda raised an eyebrow in response. “Wear it.”

Over to the side, Tricks sniggered, shaking her head. Gilda showed her an odd hand-sign – sticking one of her fingers, the third one, up.

Gilda turned her eyes back towards Dust. The jacket was a snug fit, wrapping around the pegasus’ forelegs and chest. Gilda could see the tiny sweat popping up beneath the skin of Dust’s fur - perhaps it was a little too snug.

“Now would be a good time to sharpen your knife,” Tricks added, slinging her own starry shawl over her body – inside out. The fabric on the outside, now, was lint-free and tightly woven, coloured dark matte blue, whilst the side with the stars faced her body. Tricks flicked the hood over her head, before clasping together one edge of the cloak to the other. It shimmered faintly in the dim light for a moment, turning Tricks’s outline into some sort of blurry shape, before everything went back to normal. “Good on my end.”

Gilda nodded as she stuck pieces of metal armour plating onto her leather tunic, the pieces roughened and scratched by what looked like years of abuse. Her sash hung from her neck. The sharp steel attached to it spun slightly in the air, like a deadly wind chime.

Giving a little grunt of satisfaction when her chest was fully armoured in plating, the griffon hen readjusted the sash around her body until it was just like before. “All good.”

Dust simply sat and played with the grindstone. She felt ridiculously ill-prepared next to her colleagues. The stone was simply a pebble with a vague grip on one end, and scratches on the other. She picked it up with a hoof, feeling the coldness of the stone seep into her skin, and looked at the knife.

She was… supposed to rub it, right? Dust held the stone to the flat of the blade, before running it down the length. Oddly, the action felt quite relaxing, and she found herself growing hotter –

Gilda’s sigh and the clink of metal meeting metal snapped her out of it, and she sucked up the drool that had somehow formed inside her mouth.

“You never sharpened a blade in your life?” the hen muttered.

Dust thought about lying, saving face - going so far as to open her mouth – but then, the realisation struck her. She could die out there, and she needed the best gear possible. Next to the cold, impartial presence of death, her pride suddenly seemed petty.

Besides, lying wouldn’t do much anyways. Gilda’s claw-on-face gesture had a fairly cross-cultural meaning to it.

“Watching that was torture,” Gilda muttered, walking the few steps closer. She scooped up the stone, and with a practiced grip, angled the knife outwards until she deemed it suitable. The sound of scraping steel soon filled the air. “See, you do this…”

A minute or two later, and Dust found a newly-sharpened blade by her feet, honed to near-perfection. Gilda stuck the stone back into a pocket on the front of her person.

“Thanks,” Dust muttered, truly sincere. The hen might have been brusque and irritable, but she was –

“Yeah, yeah. I hope you learned from that. I won’t babysit you.”

Or maybe Gilda was just an asshole who wanted a better, more effective meat shield. Dust pondered that for a moment, before shrugging. Most likely. “Now what?”

“Now we wait.”

As it turned out, they only had to wait about three quarters of an hour before Rolk’s voice filtered through their earpieces. The silence around the group suddenly felt a lot more pressing – rather than simply being present in the background as they waited, it was the uncomfortable, overbearing quiet before the storm.

“Yo,” Gilda replied, as she lathered mud all over her armour. She shook the gunk from her fingers as she got to her feet, still talking. “What’s up?”

“I’m on a ledge, north-west, about 500 metres away from the camp. Camp’s due north-east of your position – I’m assuming you stayed put. I’ve got eyes on. Whole camp is inside some sort of clearing, with a cliff-face to the north. I can see a cave there. Patrolling guards, rock hounds by the looks of it. The ones on the outside edge are alone – the ones near the pen are in pairs. Fifteen total, not counting however many there are inside. Goldie, your best bet is to go from the south upwards – Tricks and Dust, you can stand on top of the cliff-face to get overview of the area. I’m positive there’ll be some resistance there – dense jungle tips the fight in your favour, Tricks, but the best thing to do is if Goldie goes up and clears the place out with you, before she makes her way down by herself. Hmm…”

As the low thrum of Rolk’s absent-minded humming filled her ear, Dust’s head boggled with the information being thrown at her left, right and centre. How was anyone supposed to remember all of this?

Gilda was hunched over, her claws scratching at the ground. As Dust squinted, she saw the griffon hen’s claws rip out furrows in the earth and dirt, creating a series of lines and curves. That ‘map’ only served to confuse her all the more.

“Yeah, I’m sure they’ve got guys in the treeline.” Rolk sighed, the earpieces spouting crackles as he did so. “Dense forest, so I can’t see exactly where – but I can see moving shadows. Be on your guard.”

Gilda nodded, giving her crossbow a final check. “Got it.”

“No buildings apart from the middle pen. The guard’s just standing there… wonder what he’s up to?”

Tricks merely listened in silence, face creased as she frowned.

“Clearing’s about thirty metres across, in all directions. Pen is dead-bang in the middle… yeah, you’re just going to have to run. Sorry, mate.”

“Won’t change anything,” Gilda muttered, hoisting herself up. She slid a few shorter, symmetrical knives into the gauntlet covering her left claw.

“No big ones, by the way. Not that I can see, anyways. Leader’s probably inside the pen. Beats standing around in the sunlight. If you can draw him to the door or something –”

“You’ll take the shot,” the hen said, clenching her left fist. An orange glow appeared around the knuckles, and she smiled grimly.

Tricks merely looked down at her many-pocketed vest, hidden under her shawl. She pulled out a red gemstone, examining the script layering its side, and nodded.

Dust simply glanced from one to another. Her knife was in her hooves, held securely by the grip. Maybe too securely. Gilda had said not to clutch at it – if the knife got caught whilst she was flying past, it would be best to let go rather or the jolt would wrench her leg out –

Rolk’s voice crackled in their earpieces, a little too cheery for Dust’s comfort.

“Right! Let’s get going!”