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!”