…Littlepip woke to the sound of dripping water and the low, mournful groan of metal far overhead. Her PipBuck clicked erratically—radiation levels high but stable, air pressure dropping, no sky network, no Equestrian broadcast bands. Nothing but static and a single repeating pulse in an unknown frequency.

She was not in the Wasteland she knew.

The tunnel stretched ahead, its curved ceiling ribbed with ancient concrete and rusted pipes. Dim emergency lanterns—powered by some flickering crystal source—cast sickly green light over graffiti scrawled in Cyrillic-looking runes mixed with badly-spelled Equestrian. The air tasted of mold, gun oil, and something faintly equine.

“Homage? Calamity?” Her voice came out small.

A soft clank of armor answered. SteelHooves emerged from the shadows, his Ranger plating scarred by fresh claw marks. Behind him, Velvet Remedy supported a limping Calamity, whose hat was missing a chunk. Xenith moved like smoke at the rear, eyes narrowed.

“Where… in the goddesses’ names are we?” Velvet whispered.

Calamity sniffed the air. “Smells like a grave that’s been pissed in by mutants. Ain’t no sky. We’re underground. Deep.”

Littlepip’s horn glowed as she checked her PipBuck map. Blank. No landmarks. Only a single overwritten label someone had forced into the system years ago: **METRO EQUESTRIA – LINE 7 – DO NOT SURFACE**.

Before anyone could speak, a child’s hoofsteps echoed—light, deliberate, unhurried.

A small green earth filly stepped into the lantern light. Her mane was a tangled mess of black and neon green stripes. A patched cloak hung over her barrel, and across her back was strapped the strangest weapon any of them had ever seen: a long, multi-chambered rifle with a bulky air reservoir, pressure gauge glowing faintly, and a crank pump folded against the stock. A quiver of steel bolts—hand-forged spears—hung at her side.

The filly’s eyes were far too old for her face.

“You’re not from the Metro,” she said. Voice flat. Mid-Atlantic accent, pre-war. Strange. “Surface glow got you?”

Littlepip lowered her revolver slightly. “We… don’t know how we got here. One minute we were outside Fillydelphia, next minute—” She gestured at the tunnel.

The filly tilted her head. “Portal storm. Happens. Pulls things from other continents. Other worlds, sometimes.” She tapped the pressure gauge on her rifle. “Name’s Anon. Locals call me the Green Ghost. On account of I kill quietly.”

Calamity whistled low. “That ain’t no gunpowder piece.”

“Powder’s loud. Loud gets you eaten.” Anon unslung the rifle—the Tikhar, though she just called it “the ball-spitter.” She gave the pump handle three sharp strokes. The gauge climbed. “Air does the job. Fifteen-millimeter bearings. I make ’em myself.” She pulled a small hoof-crank compressor from her saddlebag, fed in a crumpled tin can, and turned the handle. In seconds a fresh steel ball clacked into the magazine. “Trash in, death out.”

SteelHooves scanned her with interest. “Crossbow variant?”

“Better.” She swapped weapons, bringing forward a heavier tube with a wicked harpoon loaded. “Helsing. Eight pumps for a lung-buster. Bolts are reusable if you’re lucky and the nosalis doesn’t run off with one in its ribs.”

Velvet Remedy stepped forward, voice soft. “You’re… just a filly.”

Anon’s expression didn’t change. She met Velvet’s gaze for a long moment, then looked away, ears flicking once—almost imperceptibly. “Been down here long enough,” she said. “Longer than most. Age don’t mean much when everything wants to eat you.”

Inside, she felt the old reflex tighten like a valve about to burst: the urge to laugh, to spill the impossible truth, to watch their faces when she told them what she had been before the portals and the curses and the endless dark. But she crushed it. Nopony in the Metro needed to know. Nopony would believe it anyway. And belief was a louder danger than any gunshot.

Better to stay the Green Ghost: small, silent, unexplained.

Littlepip felt the weight of yet another broken world settle on her withers. “We need to get home.”

Anon snorted. “Home’s a direction, not a place. But if you want out of the Metro, you’ll need silent hooves and quieter guns.” She offered the Tikhar. “First lesson: pump slow. Gauge in the green—perfect kill. Redline it and the valve screams. Then everything hears you die.”

In the distance, something large scuttled across metal.

Anon’s ears flicked. She cranked the pump once, twice, three times. The gauge rose without a sound.

“Second lesson,” she whispered, “is learning when to run.”

The Green Ghost melted back into shadow, motioning them to follow.

Littlepip exchanged glances with her friends. Another wasteland. Another war. But this one fought in the dark, with held breath and the soft hiss of compressed air—and with a guide who carried secrets heavier than any air tank.

They followed the filly deeper into Metro Equestria, where some truths stayed buried forever.

===

The first day in Metro Equestria began with the taste of rust on every tongue and ended with the realization that daylight was a myth told to foals.

Anon—Green Ghost to anypony who wanted to stay alive—led them single-file through the service tunnels branching off Line 7. No lanterns. She moved by the faint glow of lichen that grew in patches where crystal radiation leaked through cracked walls. The group followed in uneasy silence, hooves wrapped in scavenged rags to muffle steps.

Calamity kept glancing at the Tikhar now slung across his own back. Anon had traded it for his battered revolver after the third time he’d nearly fired it at shadows. “Feels wrong,” he muttered. “Like cheatin’ death with a whisper ’stead of a bang.”

“Death hears bangs,” Anon replied without turning. “Whispers it ignores until too late.”

Littlepip’s horn glowed dimly, just enough to read her PipBuck’s Geiger counter. The clicks were steady—background poison, not lethal yet. Her EFS showed red blips flickering in and out ahead, then vanishing. Whatever stalked these tunnels knew how to hide from magic as well as sound.

They reached a collapsed maintenance room. Anon motioned them inside and barred the rusted door with a length of rebar. Only then did she allow a small red-filtered lantern to be lit.

First lesson proper began there.

She laid out her weapons on a crate like a surgeon arranging instruments.

Tikhar first. She loaded a magazine of fresh bearings—compressed minutes earlier from a flattened ration tin. “Fifteen pumps for full power,” she said, demonstrating the smooth, quiet strokes. The gauge climbed without a hiss. “Green zone: penetrates hide. Red zone: penetrates hide and bone and the wall behind. But the valve squeals on release. Use red only when you want everything to know exactly where you are.”

Calamity practiced the motion, wings half-spread for balance. His first attempt over-pumped; the gauge trembled into the red. Anon’s hoof shot out and bled the pressure before it could vent. “Slow,” she repeated. “Rhythm like breathing.”

SteelHooves examined the Helsing with professional curiosity. “Crossbow principle, but pressurized. Reusable ammunition is elegant.”

“Elegant gets you killed if you miss,” Anon said. She loaded a bolt, pumped eight times—slow, deliberate. “Hold the last pump half a second longer. Compresses tighter. Flies straighter.” She aimed at a dangling chain across the room and fired. The bolt struck true, clanged softly, embedded. No louder than a dropped spoon.

Velvet Remedy watched with quiet horror. “You’ve done this since you were… how old?”

Anon’s ears flicked. She retrieved the bolt, wiped it clean. “Old enough.” The lie sat easy; she’d practiced it in mirrors made of dark water.

Second movement of the day: a patrol of nosalises—blind, bat-winged pony mutants with elongated snouts and claws like scythes—passed overhead through a ventilation shaft. Anon killed the lantern. Everypony froze.

The creatures sniffed, chittered, moved on.

Littlepip felt her heart hammering loud enough to betray them. Anon’s eyes caught the faint glow of PipBuck light and gave a tiny shake of the head: *Control it.*

Third movement: they reached Polis Station—neutral ground, a sprawling hub carved into an old interchange. Crystal lamps here burned brighter. Ponies of every tribe bartered in whispers: filters, bullets, mushrooms, rumors. Armed guards in gas masks and patchwork barding watched every entrance.

Anon pulled her hood lower. “Keep weapons slung but ready. Talk little. Buy nothing unless I say.”

Calamity’s eyes widened at a stall selling handmade cartridges. “They got real powder here?”

“Black powder only,” Anon said. “Surface scavengers bring it down. Costs blood.” She traded a pouch of pre-war bearings for a strip of dried mushroom and a half-full air cartridge for her own weapons.

A Red Line recruiter—a stern earth pony in red armband—tried to press pamphlets into Velvet’s hooves. “Join the future, comrade. Equality in the tunnels—”

Anon stepped between them, small body suddenly blocking the way. The recruiter backed off without a word. Reputation traveled faster than sound down here.

Evening found them in a quiet alcove off the main platform. Anon produced a tiny spirit stove and boiled water scavenged from a condensation pipe. Mushroom tea, bitter and glowing faintly.

Littlepip finally asked the question that had hovered all day. “How long have you been alone?”

Anon stared into the blue flame. “Long enough to forget what alone feels like.” Another practiced deflection.

Calamity leaned back against the wall, Tikhar across his lap. “Kid’s got ice in her veins.”

SteelHooves nodded slowly. “Discipline of a Ranger. Experience of… more.”

Velvet began a soft healing song—barely audible—to ease the day’s strains. The notes drifted, and for a moment the alcove felt almost safe.

Then the station lights flickered. A distant howl echoed through the tunnels—something larger than nosalises, something that had learned to hunt ponies who thought they were safe behind walls.

Anon extinguished the stove with a hoof. “Day’s not over,” she whispered. “Night shift starts now. Lesson three: sleep light, dream lighter.”

The Green Ghost curled into a corner, eyes half-open, one hoof on the Helsing’s pump handle.

Littlepip lay awake listening to the Metro breathe around them—pipes groaning, distant screams, the endless drip of water counting seconds that no longer belonged to the surface world.

First day survived.

Many more waited below.

===

The first night in Metro Equestria tasted of recycled air and the copper tang of fear held too long in the lungs.

They had claimed a disused side room off Polis’s lower platform—an abandoned guard post with a single heavy door and a ventilation grate that whispered constantly. Anon barred the door, checked the grate twice, then allowed the red lantern to burn at its lowest setting. Just enough light to see faces, not enough to betray them through cracks.

Littlepip sat with her back to the wall, PipBuck dimmed, watching the EFS for red blips that never quite materialized. Velvet Remedy hummed a wordless healing melody, soothing bruises and strained nerves. Xenith meditated in the corner, stripes shifting like living shadow.

But SteelHooves and Calamity could not rest. The pneumatic weapons lay between them on a flattened ammunition crate like specimens on an operating table: two Tikhars (one Anon’s, one freshly traded), a Helsing, a half-disassembled homemade variant some stall vendor had called a “Duplet” conversion, and a scatter of tools—hoof files, pressure valves, a tiny hoof-crank compressor.

Calamity turned Anon’s Tikhar over in his wings, eyes narrowed. “Ain’t never seen a gun that don’t need powder. Whole thing’s just tubes, springs, an’ a big air bottle.”

SteelHooves’ helmet lamps flickered as he scanned the internals. “Pre-war engineering from the old surface world, brilliantly adapted for pony physiology. Reservoir holds compressed air—charged by manual pump or station compressors. No chemical propellant. No flash. No bang.” His voice carried the reverence of a Ranger appraising a new battlesuit.

Calamity gave the pump handle an experimental stroke. The gauge climbed with a soft, almost intimate click-click-click. “Pressure builds clean. Fifteen, maybe twenty full strokes for a lethal charge. Ball bearings—fifteen millimeter steel—sit in a gravity mag. Simple. Reliable.”

He picked up one of the bearings between his feathers. Perfectly round, mirror-smooth, compressed minutes earlier from a flattened tin of pre-war spaghetti. “Scrap in, death out. Any station with a forge an’ a compressor can make ammo forever. No rarity, no bartering blood for cartridges.”

SteelHooves nodded slowly. “Muzzle velocity peaks around 280 meters per second at full charge—subsonic, hence silent. Effective range: thirty to fifty meters hard kill, seventy if you know windage and drop. Beyond that, energy bleeds fast. But in these tunnels?” He gestured at the low ceiling. “Short to medium is all you ever get. Ricochet risk low with spheres. Penetrates mutant hide, shatters bone, tumbles inside. Clean kills.”

Calamity whistled low. “An’ the sound—Celestia weep, the sound. Just a sharp puff. Like spittin’. Nosalis twenty meters away won’t even twitch unless the ball hits it.”

SteelHooves tapped the Helsing’s thicker barrel. “This one’s heavier. Eight to ten pumps for full power. Fires reusable bolts—steel shafts with barbed heads. Overcharge capable, but risks bursting the reservoir. Ammo scarcity offset by recovery. Ideal for larger mutants—demons, librarians, shrimp.”

Anon watched from the shadows, curled small but alert. She said nothing, but her ears tracked every word.

Calamity leaned closer. “Downsides?”

“Obvious ones,” SteelHooves replied. “Pump time. Can’t rapid-fire like a revolver. Pressure management critical—leak a seal and you’re dead. Cold kills efficiency; moisture freezes valves. And if you redline the gauge…” He indicated a hairline crack on the Duplet’s reservoir. “Burst. Shrapnel. Instant suicide.”

Calamity grinned despite himself. “But in here? Tunnels choke sound anyway. Gunpowder flash lights you up like Hearth’s Warming. Black powder smokes, fouls, needs import from topside crazies. These?” He patted the Tikhar. “Native. Sustainable. Silent as a zebra’s step.”

SteelHooves set the weapons back in a neat row. “A philosophy of war. Not thunder, but breath control. The Metro didn’t choose these weapons. The weapons chose the Metro.”

Across the room, Littlepip listened, feeling the shape of this new world settle colder around her heart. No wide skies for Calamity’s wings. No open fields for charging. Just corridors, ambush distances, and the soft, patient rhythm of pumping death.

The red lantern guttered lower. Somewhere far above, metal screamed against metal—a train, or something pretending to be one.

Anon finally spoke, voice barely louder than the ventilation grate. “Talk’s done. Sleep if you can. Dawn’s a rumor down here. Next shift starts when the howls get close.”

She curled tighter, one hoof resting on her own Tikhar’s pump handle—ready to charge in three silent strokes.

The first night passed in shallow breaths and the faint, rhythmic dreams of air compressing, bearings spinning, and the endless dark waiting for the smallest sound.

===

Six hours.  
That was the mercy the Metro allowed them—six fragile hours of shallow, weapon-clutching sleep in the barred guard post off Polis’s lower platform.

Littlepip drifted in and out of exhausted dreams: wide skies that turned to collapsing concrete, the warm glow of a stable that dissolved into red lantern light. Calamity snored softly, wings half-spread over the Tikhar now cradled like a foal. SteelHooves stood motionless in power armor, systems on minimal standby, a silent sentinel who needed no rest. Velvet Remedy curled against Xenith’s striped warmth, breathing steady at last. Anon lay smallest of all, pressed into the corner, eyes slitted, one hoof forever on her pump handle.

Six hours of borrowed quiet.

Then the howls began.

They started far away—low, mournful notes threading through ventilation ducts like smoke. Not the frenzied yips of nosalises or the guttural roars of demons. These were deeper, older, layered in harmonies that no natural throat should produce. They rose and fell, weaving together until the walls themselves seemed to vibrate with them.

Littlepip jolted awake first, PipBuck alarm chiming softly in her ear. EFS lit up with red blips—dozens, swarming in patterns too coordinated for mutants. Moving toward the station.

Calamity was up an instant later, wings flaring. “That ain’t naturals,” he whispered. “That’s singin’. Huntin’ singin’.”

SteelHooves’ helmet lamps snapped to full. “Librarians,” he said flatly. “Surface myths made flesh. Pack hunters. Intelligent. Attracted to noise, light, thought.”

Velvet’s eyes were wide. “They… sing?”

Anon was already moving—silent, swift. She killed the red lantern with a hoof, plunging them into absolute dark. “They echo-locate with sound. Complex calls. Answer each other. If they hear us breathe wrong, they come straight.”

The howls grew closer, threading through the station’s distant corridors. Ponies out on the main platform began to scream—brief, panicked bursts quickly stifled as guards enforced silence protocol. Somewhere a filter mask hissed. A single gunshot cracked—black-powder thunder—followed by immediate, wet tearing sounds and renewed howling, triumphant now.

Xenith’s stripes rippled as she rose, blades glinting faintly in the PipBuck’s glow. “Many. Strong. We cannot fight pack in open.”

Anon pressed her ear to the door. “They’ll sweep the platforms first. Then side rooms. We have minutes.” She slung her Helsing, pumped it four times—slow, soundless strokes. “Back exit. Service tunnel behind the grate. Narrow. Single file. I lead.”

Littlepip levitated her revolver, heart hammering. “What if they follow?”

Anon’s eyes caught the faint green light of the PipBuck. “Then we teach them why noise is death.”

The howls swelled, closer now—close enough to feel in the chest. A chorus of voices that almost formed words, ancient pony syllables warped by mutation and endless dark.

Calamity pumped his Tikhar to full charge, gauge steady in the green. SteelHooves checked his gatling laser—useless for stealth, but devastating if cornered. Velvet began a soft silencing charm, wrapping their hooves in layers of muffled magic.

Anon pried the ventilation grate open with a crowbar taken from the wall. Cold, fetid air rolled out.

One by one they slipped into the narrow service duct—Anon first, then Littlepip, Calamity, Velvet, Xenith, SteelHooves forced to remove sections of armor to fit.

Behind them, the barred door shuddered as something massive tested it. Claws scraped metal. A single inquisitive howl probed the room they had just left.

They crawled into the dark, breaths held, following the Green Ghost deeper into tunnels that had never known mercy.

The six hours of sleep were over.

The hunt had begun.

===

They crawled for what felt like hours—hooves bleeding silently into rag wraps, lungs burning with the effort of shallow, controlled breaths. The librarians’ howls faded behind them, replaced by the endless drip of condensation and the occasional distant clatter of something large moving parallel in adjacent tunnels.

Anon led without hesitation, turning into side ducts too narrow for adult shoulders, forcing SteelHooves to shed more armor plates that clanged softly into the dark. At last she stopped at a rusted maintenance hatch, spun the wheel with practiced twists, and ushered them into a hidden chamber no larger than a stable bunk room.

The door sealed behind them with a final, muffled thud.

Safe.

For now.

The shelter was unmistakably Anon’s—a filly’s fortress carved from forgotten infrastructure. Reinforced walls lined with scavenged metal sheets. A chemical lantern hung from the ceiling, casting steady yellow light. A filtration unit hummed quietly in one corner, scrubbing the air. A tiny spirit stove. A cot barely large enough for one small body.

Shelves lined the walls.

Food: stacks of pre-war canned mushrooms, dried rat meat, and condensed algae bricks. Enough to keep a single filly alive and fighting for months.

Water: sealed barrels of filtered condensate and a trickle purifier rigged to a leaking pipe. Again—months for one.

Medicine: bottles of anti-rad, painkillers, antibiotics, bandages rolled tight. Months of careful rationing.

Littlepip eyed the stocks and felt the arithmetic settle cold in her gut. Six adult ponies—seven counting the filly—would burn through it in under ten days. Maybe a week if they starved themselves.

Calamity let out a low whistle. “Kid’s been plannin’ for the long dark.”

Anon didn’t answer immediately. She moved to a locked cabinet, spun a combination only she knew, and swung it open.

Weapons.

Three spare Tikhars, barrels oiled and gauges steady. Two Helsings with quivers of recovered bolts. Magazines of freshly compressed 15mm bearings—hundreds of them, gleaming in neat rows like deadly candy. A hoof-crank compressor bolted to a workbench, surrounded by tins waiting to become ammunition.

And dominating the back wall on a custom mount: the Gatling.

Six long barrels clustered around a central air reservoir the size of a pony’s torso. A massive crank handle folded against the stock. Pressure gauges clustered like watchful eyes. Feed belts for 12.7x108mm rounds—huge, surface-scavenged cartridges rarer than clean water down here.

SteelHooves approached it with the reverence usually reserved for ancient relics. “Automatic pneumatic. Multi-barrel. Spring-driven rotation?”

Anon nodded once. “Wind the main spring—twenty full turns for a full burst. Air reservoir feeds all barrels sequentially. Cycles fast. Thirty rounds in seconds.” She tapped a half-loaded belt. “These cartridges don’t grow on walls. Surface ponies trade lives for them. Full auto only when there’s no tomorrow left.”

Calamity ran a wingtip along the crank. “Thing’d chew through a demon pack like hay.”

“Or bankrupt us of ammo in one squeeze,” Anon said flatly. “Reserve it. Always.”

Velvet Remedy began sorting the medical supplies, portioning out anti-rads for everypony. Xenith checked the door seals and ventilation filters with silent efficiency.

Littlepip sat heavily, watching the Green Ghost move through her private world now invaded by strangers. “This is yours. All yours. We’re… eating your future.”

Anon paused, ears flicking. For a moment something raw flickered across her face—quick as a valve hiss—then vanished. “Future’s borrowed time down here. Better shared than wasted.”

She cranked the filtration unit higher, masking the sound of their breathing.

Outside, the Metro kept breathing too—slow, patient, hungry.

Inside, they had a week, maybe less, to plan the next move.

The sanctuary held them close, but it was built for one small shadow, not six grown ponies and the weight of another world on their withers.

===

The chemical lantern burned low, painting the small shelter in amber and long shadows. Three days had passed since the crawl from Polis—three days of rationed sips, rationed words, rationed sleep. The air recycler hummed its steady lullaby, but no pony truly rested. Thoughts circled like watchers on the ceiling.

Littlepip sat with her back to the wall, PipBuck dimmed to its faintest glow. She stared at the inventory list scratched on the wall—days remaining dwindling faster than any of them wanted to admit.

Three days.  
It felt like three years.

She thought of the Wasteland above—of open sky, balefire craters, raiders who announced themselves with gunfire and bravado. Here there was no sky at all, only the weight of a dead world pressing down through kilometers of concrete. Danger didn’t shout; it listened. It waited for a hoofstep too heavy, a breath too deep, a valve hiss at the wrong moment.

And the filly who had saved them—Green Ghost, Anon—who moved through this place like she had been born in its darkest vein. Littlepip watched her now, curled on the too-small cot, pretending to sleep. How many years had she survived alone? How many safe houses like this one, each one a little smaller, a little more desperate?

Littlepip’s horn ached from disuse; levitation felt almost vulgar here, too loud in its magic hum. She missed the reckless thunder of her revolver. She missed noise.

Calamity sat opposite, wings folded tight, Tikhar across his lap like a replacement for the sky he couldn’t stretch into. He turned the pump handle idly—slow, silent strokes, just to feel the gauge climb.

“Back home,” he muttered once, voice barely louder than the recycler, “a pony could whoop an’ holler when he dropped a bloatsprite at five hundred yards. Felt good. Here?” He glanced at the gleaming rows of bearings. “Here you kill somethin’ and it don’t even know it’s dead till it hits the ground. Clean. Cold. Efficient.”

He paused, feathers ruffling. “Kid’s teachin’ me a whole new kind of shootin’. Ain’t sure I like how good I’m gettin’ at it.”

SteelHooves stood motionless near the door, helmet lamps off, a statue of scarred steel. His thoughts were slower, deeper, filtered through centuries of memory.

The weapons fascinated him. Not the power—they lacked the raw overwhelming force of his gatling laser—but the philosophy. Every shot required preparation, patience, conservation. No endless belts of energy cells. No megaspell thunder. Just air, scrap, and silence.

He recalled the Applejack’s Rangers of old: honor, firepower, standing tall against hell itself. Here, honor was measured in how quietly you could put a bolt through a librarian’s eye. Survival demanded adaptation.

The filly had built all this alone. A child, yet her shelter rivaled any Ranger outpost in efficiency. He wondered what losses had forged that discipline. He wondered if any of them would leave this place unchanged.

Velvet Remedy sat cross-legged, sorting medical supplies for the third time, humming a fragment of a song too soft to carry. Her magic wrapped bandages, portioned pills, tried to stretch hope the way she stretched medicine.

She thought of the surface—of ministry halls, of concerts under starlight, of healing with song and kindness. Down here kindness was a risk; a healing melody could draw death faster than radiation. She had already learned to sing only in whispers, to heal only when the tunnels were empty.

The Green Ghost watched her sometimes with an expression Velvet couldn’t read—wary, almost hungry. As though kindness was a language the filly had forgotten how to speak.

Velvet’s heart ached for her. A child alone in hell, building walls out of silence and bearings. Whatever had brought Anon here had broken something fundamental. Velvet wanted to fix it. She feared nothing in her songs could reach that deep.

Xenith moved like a shadow between them all, checking seals, tasting the air, listening to pipes the way zebras listened to wind. Her stripes blended with the dimness until she seemed part of the shelter itself.

She thought in older patterns: balance, alchemy, the slow turn of worlds. The Metro was a wound in the earth, poisoned and festering. The ponies here had adapted by becoming small, quiet, lethal. It was survival, yes—but at the cost of something vast.

The filly intrigued her most. Anon carried scars that had nothing to do with claws or radiation. A weight of memory too heavy for such small shoulders. Xenith recognized exile when she saw it.

Anon herself lay still, eyes closed, every sense extended. She listened to their breathing, to the way Littlepip’s tail twitched when she worried, to Calamity’s wings rustling with restless dreams of sky.

They thought she slept.

She catalogued their reflections the way she catalogued ammunition.

They pitied her. They admired her. They feared what this place was making them become.

Good.

Pity kept them gentle. Admiration kept them teachable. Fear kept them alive.

She had been alone so long that their presence filled the shelter like too much air in a reservoir—dangerous, ready to burst. But she could not bring herself to send them away. Not yet.

Three days.

Supplies dwindling.

Decisions coming.

The Metro would force the next move soon enough.

Until then, they shared the small space, the small silence, and the growing realization that none of them would ever be the ponies they had been when they fell through the portal.

The lantern flickered.

The recycler hummed.

Six ponies and one filly breathed carefully, counting days the way surface ponies once counted stars.

===

The shelter was quiet enough to hear the recycler count heartbeats.

Five days in. Rations thinner, patience thinner still. The group sat in a loose circle on the cold floor, passing a single canteen of filtered water. Littlepip finally asked the question that had hovered since the first howl.

“Anon… how did this happen? Your world. The Metro. All of it.”

The Green Ghost sat apart, small shadow against the wall, Helsing across her lap. For a long moment she said nothing, ears flicking at distant pipe groans. Then she spoke—voice flat, practiced, as though reciting a litany she had told herself too many times alone.

“Same story every world tells itself, just with different names for the fire.

“Long time ago—before anypony here was born—the Great War came. Balefire bombs. Megaspells. Whatever you called them on your continent. They fell everywhere at once. Cities burned green. Sky turned to poison cloud. Winter came after—atomic winter. Years of dark and cold that killed what the fire missed.

“Surface became death. Radiation thick enough to melt bone. Mutants bred fast—nosalises, watchers, demons, librarians, things without names. Storms that flay hide from muscle. No shelter lasts up there. No herd. No farms. Ponies who try don’t come back, or come back wrong.

“So the survivors ran below. Into the Metro—the old underground train tunnels built before the war. Deep. Sheltered. Some stations sealed in time, kept air clean for a while. Crystal reactors kept lights on. Mushroom farms grew in the dark. Water dripped from condensation. We learned to live on scraps and silence.

“But living crowded ponies together. Ideas crowded too.

“Factions rose.

“Reds—Line Watch, they call themselves. Believe the old world died because ponies weren’t equal enough. Everypony works, everypony eats the same gray slop, everypony salutes the Council. They control whole lines, run collective farms, execute ‘hoarders.’ Join them and you’re fed, clothed, protected. But think wrong, speak wrong, dream wrong—and you disappear into a side tunnel forever.

“Reich—pure-blood fanatics. Earth ponies only, or those who pretend hard enough. Say the war happened because the tribes mixed too much, because ‘weak’ blood dragged us down. They shave manes into symbols, tattoo flanks with runes, burn books that disagree. Strong, organized, brutal. They take stations by force, cleanse them. Join them and you march in step, hate who they tell you to hate. Refuse and you’re the next cleansing.

“Hanza—rich traders. Ring of stations connected by trade. No big ideas, just profit. They tax everything that moves, run caravans, sell air filters and bullets at ten times cost. Clean stations, bright lights, guards everywhere. Join them and you pay protection, obey contracts, become another link in their chain. Freedom costs extra—and they never give credit.

“Polis—neutral. Old heart of the Metro. Scholars, guards, remnants of the pre-war army. They hoard knowledge, keep the peace between bigger powers, send stalkers topside for relics. They claim enlightenment, but they choose who gets to read the books. Join them and you live comfortable, educated. But you serve their Council, and their truths are the only truths allowed.

“Independents—scattered stations that refuse all flags. Some last years. Most get swallowed eventually. Stalkers go topside alone or in pairs, scavenge ammo, artifacts, canned food. Bring it down, trade it, survive another month. Free. But alone. Always alone.

“No surface society left. Too many mutants. Too much rad-storm wind. A herd up there lasts hours, not generations. So we stay below. Breathe recycled air. Eat mushrooms that glow. Kill quietly or die loud.

“Join any faction and you survive longer. But you stop being you. Leash goes on—red, black, gold, whatever color—and it never comes off. Thoughts get measured. Hoofsteps get counted. Dreams get taxed.

“I chose none. Built my own corners. Move quiet. Kill quieter. Stay free.”

She fell silent. The recycler hummed. Somewhere far off, metal screamed against metal.

Littlepip stared at the floor, seeing her own Wasteland reflected in colder, darker colors. SteelHooves stood motionless, processing parallels to old Ranger codes. Calamity’s wings twitched with trapped sky. Velvet’s eyes shone wet. Xenith nodded once—recognition of cages in many forms.

Anon curled tighter, Helsing ready.

“Freedom down here is just another word for dying last.”

The lantern flickered lower.

The lesson ended.

The Metro listened.

===

The lantern burned steady but low, rationing its chemical heart the way they rationed everything else. Anon had finished her litany of the Metro’s birth and its leashed survivors, then curled into her corner to clean a Tikhar valve with mechanical precision. The others sat in the remaining space, shoulders brushing concrete, thoughts louder than any of them dared speak.

Until Littlepip broke the hush.

“It’s the same war,” she said quietly. “Same bombs. Same poison sky. But… everything else feels inverted.”

Calamity nodded, wings folded tight as if the ceiling pressed them down. “Up home, the wasteland’s wide open. Sky’s poisoned, sure, but you can see the enemy comin’ from a mile off. Raiders hollerin’, hellhounds howlin’, enclaves swoopin’ in with thunderclouds. Noise is life. You shoot loud, you live loud. Down here?” He tapped the Tikhar across his lap. “Noise is suicide. Sky’s gone entirely. Danger don’t announce itself—it listens for you first.”

SteelHooves shifted, armor plates whispering against the wall. “Resource scarcity is universal. But distribution differs radically. In our wasteland, technology is hoarded by orders like my Rangers—preserved, revered, wielded by the worthy. Here, the weapons are democratized scrap: air, bearings, silence. Any pony with a crank and a tin can becomes lethal. No ancient energy cells to covet. No megaspell relics to worship. Just… sustainable murder.”

Velvet Remedy traced a hoof along the floor, drawing invisible ministry symbols that dissolved into nothing. “The factions, though… those feel eerily familiar. The Reds—collective equality enforced by disappearance. Reminds me of Red Eye’s Fillydelphia: everypony works, everypony serves the greater vision, dissenters vanish into the walls. Only Red Eye promised a future on the surface. Here they’ve surrendered the surface entirely.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled in the dim light. “The Reich—purity through exclusion, strength through hate. Like the Enclave, clouds above the ‘impure’ ground-dwellers, or the worst of the old zebra tribalists. They burn difference the way the Enclave burned clouds for those who questioned.”

Littlepip’s ears flattened. “Hanza feels like Tenpony Tower: clean halls, bright lights, safety for those who can pay. Trade rules everything. Morality is… optional. You keep your head down, pay your caps, enjoy the illusion of civilization.”

Calamity snorted softly. “An’ Polis—hoardin’ knowledge, decidin’ who gets truth. Sounds like the Twilight Society remnants, or even DJ Pon3’s tower before Homage opened it up. Guardians of information, but on their terms.”

SteelHooves rumbled agreement. “Yet none match the Goddess’s Unity. Forced oneness, alicorn transcendence through absorption. The Metro factions leash the body and mind, but they do not consume the soul entire.”

Littlepip glanced at Anon’s small, curled form. “And then there’s the independents. Stalkers. Like us, really. No flag, no master. Just trying to do right in a world that punishes it. But up there we could dream of fixing things—of clean water, green fields, a sky worth seeing again. Here the dream is… staying alive another week without a collar.”

Velvet’s voice was barely a breath. “The biggest difference is hope. Our wasteland is broken, but it’s healing in places. Gardens grow. Stables open. Ponies rebuild. Here the surface is myth. Hope is a topside stalker who might bring back a can of real fruit. Everything else is just… enduring.”

Calamity looked up at the low ceiling, eyes distant. “Miss the wind. Miss the sun, even when it burns. Miss knowin’ that somewhere there’s sky enough to fly.”

Anon did not speak, but her ears flicked once—listening, always listening.

The group fell silent again, each nursing the private ache of a world that felt both achingly familiar and cruelly alien. Same apocalypse, different graves.

One built under open poison sky.

One buried beneath a dead one.

Both teaching the same lesson: survival costs pieces of yourself, and the bill always comes due.

===

Day nine.

The last algae brick crumbled between Calamity’s feathers as he divided it into seven equal crumbs. The water purifier trickled its final drops into the communal canteen—barely a swallow each. The shelter’s stocks, built for one small filly’s careful months, had been devoured by six grown ponies in a single desperate week.

Hunger gnawed louder than any librarian’s howl.

Littlepip’s ribs showed faintly under her coat. Velvet’s healing songs came weaker. Even SteelHooves’ armor hung looser on his frame. Xenith’s stripes seemed sharper, etched deeper by starvation. Calamity’s wings trembled when he folded them.

Anon sat apart, as always, watching the inventory wall where the last red circle had been scratched yesterday. Her own belly was hollow, but she had known hunger longer; it was an old companion.

“We can’t stay,” Littlepip said at last, voice cracked. “We’ll die here. Slow or fast.”

Calamity nodded grimly. “Need to move. Find a station. Trade. Beg. Fight.”

SteelHooves rumbled, “Risk exposure. Factions will press recruitment. Independents will demand payment we don’t have.”

Velvet looked at the filly. “Anon… you know these tunnels better than any of us. Is there… any way back? Portal storms—you said they pull things between worlds. Could one send us home?”

Anon’s ears flicked. She had expected this. Planned for it. Dreaded it.

For days she had listened to their stories of the surface wasteland—their wasteland. Poison sky, yes. Radiation, mutants, raiders. But also: wind. Real wind. Sunlight, even if it burned. Vast horizons. Stables opening. Gardens growing in the dirt. Ponies rebuilding, dreaming, flying under open clouds. A world that still had a future worth fighting for, not just an endless dark worth enduring.

Compared to the Metro’s suffocating grave, their wasteland sounded like paradise wearing scars.

She wanted it.

Wanted it with a ferocity that frightened her.

But she said none of this.

Instead, she met their eyes—small, steady, unreadable.

“I can teach you,” she said. “How to move quiet. How to scavenge. How to kill without sound. How to read the storms—the portal kind and the rad kind. Stalkers watch for anomalies. Ripples in the air. Places where the veil thins. I know a few. Dangerous. Guarded by worse than nosalises. But possible.”

Littlepip leaned forward. “You’ll guide us?”

Anon nodded once. “I’ll get you home. Or as close as the Metro allows.”

Inside, her heart pumped faster than any Tikhar reservoir.

*And if the veil opens… I’m stepping through with you.*

She had no home here. Never had. Just corners and caches and silence. Their world offered sky. Space. A chance to be something more than a ghost.

But secrets were her oldest armor. She kept it close.

“First lesson starts now,” she said, slinging her Helsing and checking the pressure gauge. “We travel light. Weapons, tools, medicine only. Leave the rest. Move at night cycle—less traffic. I lead. You follow exactly. One wrong step and the Metro eats us before we reach the first anomaly.”

Calamity pumped his Tikhar experimentally. “Reckon I’m ready for more lessons, kid.”

SteelHooves checked his remaining laser charge—low, but enough. “We adapt or perish.”

Velvet smiled faintly, hope flickering. “Thank you, Anon.”

Xenith simply rose, blades glinting.

Littlepip met the filly’s eyes. “We won’t forget this.”

Anon looked away first.

*You won’t have to,* she thought. *Because I’m coming too.*

The shelter door unsealed with a soft hiss—the first breath of the long journey out.

Behind them, empty shelves waited for a filly who would never return alone.

Ahead: tunnels, storms, anomalies, and—maybe—a tear in the world wide enough for seven.

===

They left the sanctuary at the deepest hour of the false night, seven shadows slipping into tunnels that breathed cold damp around them. Anon led, Helsing cradled like a promise. Hunger had sharpened every sense into a weapon; there was no room left for mercy or ideology.

Three tunnels and one flooded service duct later, they found Reich Outpost 41.

A former maintenance depot converted into a fortress: barricades of scrap metal, crystal lamps burning behind slit windows, swastika-like runes freshly painted in blood-red. Earth pony guards in patched black barding patrolled with disciplined steps. Inside: the smell of cooking mushrooms, the clink of ammunition crates, the low murmur of pure-blood doctrine.

Supplies.  
Food.  
Bearings.  
Anti-rads.  
Everything they needed to reach the next anomaly—or to die trying.

No discussion was needed. Survival spoke for them.

Anon signaled: positions. Sight lines. Patrol patterns. Escape route.

They spread.

Calamity took the high catwalk, Tikhar pumped to full green. SteelHooves circled to the generator shack—silent sabotage if noise threatened. Xenith melted into ceiling shadows. Velvet stayed rear, magic ready to muffle any stray sound. Littlepip and Anon advanced center.

No heroic charge. No speeches. No freeing of slaves—there were none visible anyway. Slaves scream. Screams bring demons. Demons bring death for everypony. Better the Reich keep their chained workers quiet and alive than risk the entire Metro hearing the raid.

The first guard died without knowing why: Anon’s Helsing bolt took him through the throat at twenty meters. Reusable ammunition—practical. He slumped soundlessly against a crate.

Calamity’s bearing punched through a helmet visor next—puff, clatter, body down.

Littlepip’s own Tikhar whispered twice: two more guards folding like broken dolls.

SteelHooves crushed a throat with a single armored hoof when a patrol turned too soon—quick, muffled, final.

Xenith dropped from above, blades flashing once, twice—silent as stripes.

Inside the depot: crates cracked open with crowbars wrapped in cloth. Mushrooms stuffed into saddlebags. Tins of algae paste. Magazines of gleaming bearings. Vials of anti-radiation serum. Filters. Painkillers. A crate of 12.7mm rounds for the Gatling none of them carried today.

No alarms. No survivors left to raise them.

Littlepip worked mechanically, levitating supplies into bags, but her mind circled the same cold thought:

*This doesn’t feel heroic.*

Back home, raids had purpose—freeing slaves, stopping Red Eye’s factories, breaking Enclave armor for a better future. There had been noise, risk, glory in the fight. Here there was only efficiency. Silent kills. No witnesses. No liberation. Just taking what they needed from ponies who would have killed them for being “impure” or simply in the way.

She glanced at a fallen Reich officer—young stallion, mane shaved into their hateful pattern, eyes already glazing. He had died believing in something monstrous. They had killed him for mushrooms.

No better future promised here. Just another week of life stolen from corpses.

Anon moved beside her, stuffing bearings into a pouch. The filly’s face was blank, but her eyes held the same calculation Littlepip felt in her bones: *survive, move, find the anomaly, escape.*

They left the outpost burning quietly—generator sabotaged, small fire to cover tracks, no blaze bright enough to summon help.

Seven shadows slipped back into the tunnels, heavier with stolen survival.

Behind them, Outpost 41 became just another grave marker in the Metro’s endless dark.

Littlepip walked in silence, Tikhar warm against her side.

Heroism was a luxury the surface could sometimes afford.

Down here, there was only the next breath.

The next scrap.

The next silent kill.

===

A week of cautious travel—scavenging, stalking, sleeping in ventilation shafts—had stretched their stolen supplies just far enough. Hunger returned like an old debt. The next Reich outpost appeared on Anon’s mental map: Outpost 88, larger, better stocked, deeper in their territory.

They needed it.

The plan was the same: silent entry, silent kills, silent exit. Take food, bearings, medicine, ammunition. Leave corpses and questions behind.

It began perfectly.

Calamity and Xenith cleared the outer sentries with suppressed puffs and blades. SteelHooves disabled the alarm tripwires. Velvet muffled the faint clanks of armor. Anon and Littlepip slipped inside the main storage hall, Helsing and Tikhar whispering death to the two guards on duty.

Then Littlepip saw her.

A slave—thin earth pony mare, coat dulled by grime, chained to a sorting table stacked with compressed bearings. A heavy leather muzzle strapped tight across her mouth, buckled at the back, designed to silence dissent forever. Her eyes were wide, exhausted, but alive.

Littlepip froze.

In her wasteland, this was the moment. The reason. Free the slave, spark the hope, fight the monsters who chained ponies for ideology.

Here, Anon had warned: slaves scream. Screams bring death.

But the muzzle…

Littlepip’s horn glowed faint. She levitated the pin from the chain lock, then carefully unbuckled the muzzle straps. The slave’s eyes widened further—understanding, gratitude, terror.

The muzzle came free.

The slave screamed.

Not words—just raw, animal release of air and agony held for months, years. A piercing, desperate wail that ricocheted off concrete like a gunshot.

Alarms shrieked. Boots thundered. Reich ponies poured from barracks and side rooms—two dozen, three—black barding, shotguns loaded with precious black powder, hatred sharpened to ritual.

The silent raid shattered.

Calamity’s Tikhar chattered bearings until the reservoir bled empty. SteelHooves’ gatling laser roared awake, painting walls crimson. Xenith danced death through ranks. Velvet’s magic shielded and healed even as she fired a scavenged revolver. Anon’s Helsing bolted throats with mechanical fury, face unreadable.

Littlepip fought in the center, revolver barking loud for the first time in weeks—each shot a declaration she couldn’t take back. She stood over the freed slave, shielding her as Reich ponies closed.

The bloodbath was different this time.

No clean puffs and silent folds. Black powder thunder. Laser screams. Bodies torn, not pierced. Walls slick. The air filled with cordite and burning meat.

They won—barely.

Fourteen Reich dead in the hall. More in the corridors. The outpost burned behind them as they fled, dragging the trembling slave whose name they learned was Dusk.

But the cost:

Calamity took a shotgun blast to the wing—shattered bone, bleeding bad. Velvet’s magic strained to knit it. SteelHooves’ armor cracked, laser charge spent. Xenith bled from half a dozen cuts. Anon’s cloak torn, one ear notched by grazing shot.

And the noise…

Far off, deeper in the tunnels, things began to answer. Librarians. Demons. The Metro’s true owners, drawn by the banquet bell of gunfire.

Anon’s eyes—when she finally looked at Littlepip—held no accusation, only cold calculation.

“You freed her,” she said later, voice flat, pumping fresh air into her Tikhar as they limped through service ducts. “Now everything hunts us.”

Littlepip cradled her revolver, barrel still warm. The freed slave—Dusk—walked between them, shaking, muzzle gone but voice raw.

Heroism had returned.

It felt like a death sentence wearing hope’s face.

The anomaly was still days away.

The Metro had heard them now.

It was coming.

===

They stumbled out of the service tunnels into the approach corridors of Polis Station 3—neutral sanctuary, bastion of knowledge, last refuge of pre-war learning. Crystal lamps burned bright ahead, promising trade, rest, information. Guards in polished barding stood at the reinforced gates, rifles slung but ready.

The group was ragged: Littlepip limping on strained magic, Calamity’s wing bound in scavenged bandages, SteelHooves’ armor scarred and sparking, Xenith bleeding through stripes, Velvet pale from overchanneling heals, Dusk trembling beside her—muzzle scars still raw—and Anon smallest of all, eyes burning with calculation.

They needed entry. Food. Medicine. Maps to the nearest anomaly. A chance to breathe.

The guards saw them first.

Then they heard what followed.

Distant howls—layered, inquisitive, closing fast. The ground trembled with heavier footfalls. Librarians. Demons. The harvest of that single scream a week ago, tracking them relentlessly through the veins of the Metro.

The gates stayed shut.

A Polis officer stepped forward behind the barricade, voice amplified through a crystal megaphone. “You brought them! The noise from Outpost 88—gunfire, screams—echoed for days. Stalkers reported the pack following surface-breakers matching your description. We will not open for plague-bearers. Turn back. Die elsewhere.”

Littlepip stepped forward, hoarse. “We’re not infected. We need—”

“Denied,” the officer cut in. “Polis preserves knowledge. We do not preserve fools who invite extinction.”

Behind the gates, traders and scholars watched in silence. No pity. Only cold preservation.

Calamity’s ears flattened. “Bastards. We saved a life. Now they leave us for dead.”

SteelHooves scanned the walls. “Fortified. Breachable only with heavy ordnance we lack.”

Anon’s gaze flicked upward—to the ventilation grates high in the corridor ceiling, half-hidden by crystal lamp glare.

“No time,” she whispered. “They’re close.”

She levitated a crowbar from her pack—small hooves surprisingly steady—and jammed it into the nearest grate’s rusted bolts. Littlepip’s magic joined, twisting silently. The grate groaned, then gave.

One by one they climbed: Anon first, then Dusk boosted by Xenith, Velvet, Littlepip, Calamity wincing on his injured wing, Xenith, SteelHooves last—armor scraping but muffled by Velvet’s spell.

They crawled into the narrow ducts above the station, metal cold against bellies, air thick with dust and the hum of Polis filtration.

Below, the howls arrived.

The gates held—for moments.

Then the demons hit: massive, hulking shadows with claws that rent steel like paper. Librarians followed—tall, gorilla-like horrors, intelligent eyes gleaming, voices raised in that terrible choral hunting song.

Screams erupted below. Gunfire—disciplined at first, then panicked. Crystal lamps shattered. The megaphone voice cut off mid-order.

The group crawled faster, ducts vibrating with the carnage beneath.

Anon led unerringly—turns memorized from old stalker maps—toward an exit shaft beyond the station’s perimeter.

Behind them, Polis Station 3 died.

Not quietly.

The shredding was thorough: guards torn limb from limb, scholars fleeing into side rooms only to be dragged out, ancient books spattered with blood, crystal reactors cracked and flickering out. The neutral ground became a feast.

The party emerged into a side tunnel far beyond the outpost, collapsing in exhausted silence as the distant screams faded into wet tearing sounds and final, gurgling silences.

Dusk wept quietly—first for her own freedom, now for the cost.

Littlepip stared back the way they had come, guilt and survival warring in her chest.

Anon checked her Helsing’s pressure, voice flat.

“Polis hoarded knowledge. Forgot the Metro doesn’t negotiate.”

Calamity spat dust. “Neutral my flank.”

The anomaly was closer now.

But the dark felt heavier.

And something large still followed.

===

They ran until lungs burned and hooves bled through rag wraps.

Anon led them through forgotten maintenance shafts, collapsed transfer tunnels, and flooded sumps where the water glowed faint green. The howls faded behind—busy with Polis’s corpse—but the Metro never truly forgot. It only waited.

Hours or days later—time had dissolved into tunnel rhythm—they reached the second safe house.

Hidden behind a false panel in a dead-end service corridor, the door was smaller, heavier, sealed with multiple locks only Anon’s hooves knew. She spun the wheels, pumped the pressure equalizers, and ushered them inside.

The space was larger than the first—built for longer isolation. Shelves groaned under months of rations for one small filly: bricks of compressed mushrooms, dried nosalis jerky, algae paste tins, barrels of triple-filtered water. Medical cabinets stocked with anti-rads, antibiotics, sutures, painkillers. Weapons crates: spare Tikhars, Helsings, thousands of bearings, crates of bolts, even a disassembled Gatling waiting for desperate assembly.

Months for one.

With eight mouths now—seven grown ponies and one filly—it became weeks. Maybe four, if they starved carefully.

They sealed the door. Checked seals twice. Killed the lantern to red glow only. Collapsed.

Safety, false and fragile, wrapped around them like a too-thin blanket.

Calamity slumped against a crate, wing still splinted, feathers matted with dried blood. SteelHooves stood watch by the door, systems humming low. Xenith cleaned blades methodically. Velvet began triage—stitching, dosing, singing soft healing notes that barely carried. Dusk curled in a corner, muzzle scars itching, eyes wide at the abundance she had never known.

Anon moved through the space like a ghost reclaiming her haunt—inventorying, portioning, calculating days aloud in a flat voice. “Four weeks if we cut to half rations. Five if we sleep more, move less.”

Littlepip helped at first. Levitated crates. Sorted medicine. Checked her PipBuck’s fading map for anomaly markers.

Then the door sealed fully.

The recycler hummed on.

The silence pressed in.

And Littlepip broke.

She slid down the wall opposite the door, revolver clattering from her magic. Shoulders shook first—small tremors. Then the sobs came: raw, ugly, unstoppable. Not the quiet weeping of the Metro, but the full-throated grief of a surface pony who had forgotten how to be quiet.

“I killed them,” she choked out between gasps. “Polis. All those scholars, guards, traders—torn apart because I… because I couldn’t leave her muzzled. One scream. One life. And now hundreds dead. We’re running. Always running. Stealing. Killing. For what? Another week in the dark?”

Velvet moved to her side, wrapping forelegs around the trembling unicorn. Calamity’s ears flattened; he looked away, wings twitching. SteelHooves remained statue-still. Xenith’s stripes shifted in sympathy. Dusk watched with wide, haunted eyes—grateful, guilty, silent.

Anon paused in her counting.

She set down a tin of mushrooms, walked over, and sat small in front of Littlepip.

“You saved one,” she said, voice flat but not unkind. “Metro took the rest. It always does. Noise buys death wholesale. You paid the price for kindness. Doesn’t make you wrong. Just… costly.”

Littlepip’s sobs slowed, but the tears kept falling. “Back home we fought for something. Gardens. Hope. Here it’s just… not dying today.”

Anon’s ears flicked. She glanced at the sealed door, then back.

“Then we get you home,” she said quietly. “Where hope still grows. Before this place grinds it out of you too.”

The others listened. No one argued.

The recycler hummed.

Four weeks of borrowed time began.

Outside, the Metro waited—patient, hungry, eternal.

Inside, a unicorn cried herself empty, surrounded by ponies who understood the cost better than ever.

The second sanctuary held.

For now.

===

The red lantern burned low, painting the second sanctuary in blood-light and long shadows. Days had blurred since the seal clicked shut—days of careful rations, careful words, careful healing. Littlepip’s breakdown had passed like a storm, leaving her quieter, eyes hollow but steady. The others moved around her with the gentle caution of ponies who had seen their leader crack and feared the shards.

Dusk had watched it all from her corner, knees drawn to her chest, scars from the muzzle still raw ridges across her cheeks. She had eaten when food was pressed into her hooves. Accepted bandages. Said nothing.

Until tonight.

The recycler’s hum was the only sound when she finally rose, hooves shaking, and crossed the small space to where Littlepip sat cleaning her revolver with mechanical precision.

Dusk stopped a body-length away, ears pinned flat.

“I… I need to say this,” she whispered, voice hoarse from disuse and old damage. “Before I lose the words again.”

Littlepip looked up. The others paused—Calamity mid-pump on his Tikhar, Velvet mid-song, Xenith mid-blade-sharpen, SteelHooves mid-system-check, Anon mid-inventory count.

Dusk’s eyes filled, but she forced the words out.

“Thank you. For taking the muzzle off. For giving me my voice back. I hadn’t… hadn’t spoken in so long I thought it was gone forever. You gave me that. You risked everything for that.”

A tear tracked down her grimy cheek.

“But I’m sorry. Celestia and Luna, I’m so, so sorry. That scream—when the air hit my throat, when I could finally breathe without leather cutting my mouth—it just came out. All of it. Years of it. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t even try.”

Her voice cracked.

“That scream killed Polis. All those ponies—guards, scholars, traders, foals maybe—torn apart by librarians and demons because of me. Because I dared to scream my heart out after you freed me. If you’d left me there, muzzled and sorting bearings till I dropped… they’d still be alive. You’d be safer. Quieter. Closer to your anomaly by now. You’d be better off without me.”

She sank to her knees, forehead almost touching the floor.

“I’m poison. A walking alarm bell. You should’ve left me chained.”

Silence stretched, thick as the air before a demon’s roar.

Littlepip set the revolver down carefully. Her eyes were red-rimmed from her own earlier tears, but her voice, when it came, was steady.

“No.”

She moved forward, sat in front of Dusk, and gently lifted the mare’s chin with a hoof.

“We didn’t free you because it was safe. We freed you because it was right. The Metro twists everything—makes kindness a death sentence, mercy a mistake. But that’s the Metro’s crime, not yours. Not mine.”

Velvet joined them, wrapping a foreleg around Dusk’s trembling shoulders. “Your scream wasn’t the sin. The world that forced you to hold it in for years—that’s the sin.”

Calamity’s wings rustled. “Kid’s right. Down here, silence is king. But up where we’re goin’? Screamin’ when you’re hurt is allowed. Hell, it’s required.”

Anon spoke last, small voice cutting clean through the dimness.

“I’ve lived quiet my whole life here. Never screamed once. Not when I lost everything that got me sent to this place. Not when I watched stations burn. But if somepony had taken my muzzle off?” Her ears flicked. “I’d have screamed loud enough to wake the surface dead. And I wouldn’t apologize for it.”

Dusk looked up, tears spilling freely now.

Littlepip pulled her into a careful embrace. “We’re getting out together. All of us. Your voice is part of the price we paid. We’ll pay it gladly.”

The group closed around them slowly—Calamity’s wing, Xenith’s striped warmth, SteelHooves’ massive shadow, Velvet’s soft song restarting, Anon’s small presence at the edge.

Dusk sobbed into Littlepip’s shoulder—not the raw scream of release, but the quieter breaking of guilt meeting forgiveness in a place that usually allowed neither.

The recycler hummed on.

Four weeks became three and a half.

But the sanctuary felt fractionally less cold.

===

The red lantern flickered like a dying star, throwing jagged shadows across the second sanctuary’s cramped walls. Days of enforced stillness had turned into a slow grind—rations measured in crumbs, wounds scabbed but aching, the recycler’s hum a constant reminder that even air was rationed here.

Calamity sat apart from the others, back against a crate of bearings, good wing half-spread as if testing for wind that would never come. His injured wing lay bound tight against his side, feathers matted and splintered. He stared at the low concrete ceiling the way a grounded pegasus stares at clouds he can no longer reach.

He’d been quiet since Polis fell. Quieter than the Metro demanded.

Now the words came, low and rough, aimed at no one and every one.

“Never thought anythin’ could be worse than the wasteland I knew.”

His voice cracked on the last word, but he pushed on.

“Back home—yeah, it’s poison sky, radstorms, raiders, hellhounds, enclaves droppin’ thunder like judgment. But there’s sky. Real sky. You can fly till your wings burn, till the clouds part and you see green patches growin’ in the dirt. You can whoop when you nail a bloatsprite at five hundred yards. You can curse the sun when it scorches you and still know it’s there, shinin’ down on somethin’ worth fightin’ for.

“Here?”

He laughed—short, ugly, nothing like his usual drawl.

“Here there ain’t no sky at all. Just rock and concrete pressin’ down till you forget what up means. Air tastes like everypony else’s breath recycled a thousand times. Light’s always fake—crystal or chemical, never real daylight. You kill quiet or you die loud, and either way nopony hears you scream.

“Raiders up top announce themselves—holler war cries, ride in shootin’. Here the monsters listen for your heartbeat. Factions don’t even pretend hope—they just argue over the best way to rot slower. Reds, Reich, Hanza, Polis—all of ’em collars in different colors. Independents? Just ponies puttin’ off the leash a little longer.

“I thought the Enclave was bad—hidin’ above the clouds, leavin’ us to choke. But at least they had sky. At least there was sky left to take back.”

His good wing twitched, feathers rustling against the crate.

“Never believed any place could make our wasteland look like paradise. Poison wind feels like freedom compared to this grave. Gardens growin’ in irradiated dirt? That’s a buckin’ miracle next to mushrooms farmed in pony shit and darkness.

“This place… it don’t just kill you. It grinds hope out slow. Teaches you to be small. Quiet. Grateful for another day of nothin’.”

He looked around the shelter—at Littlepip’s hollow eyes, Velvet’s strained kindness, Xenith’s silent stripes, SteelHooves’ unreadable helmet, Dusk’s scarred muzzle, Anon’s too-old gaze.

“We gotta get out. All of us. Before this hole teaches us to like the dark.”

The recycler hummed on, indifferent.

No one argued.

The ceiling stayed low.

The sky stayed myth.

===

Calamity’s words hung in the recycled air like smoke that had nowhere to rise. The others let them settle—Littlepip’s ears lowered, Velvet’s song faltering, Xenith’s stripes stilling, SteelHooves’ helmet lamps dimming fractionally. Even Dusk curled tighter, as though the pegasus had spoken her own buried terror aloud.

Anon sat smallest in the circle, Helsing across her lap, pressure gauge catching the red light like a single unblinking eye. She had listened without moving, cataloguing every bitter syllable the way she catalogued bearings.

Then she spoke—voice flat, dry, edged with something that might have been amusement if the Metro allowed such things.

“Nice monologue.”

A pause. The recycler hummed its indifferent agreement.

“Yeah,” she added, tilting her head toward the low ceiling. “This place is… an acquired taste.”

The words landed soft, almost gentle, but they carried weight. The kind of weight earned from years of tasting nothing else.

Calamity snorted, wings twitching. “Acquired taste? Kid, this ain’t mushroom brandy. This is eatin’ dirt till you forget what bread smells like.”

Anon’s ears flicked. She pumped the Helsing once—slow, silent stroke, gauge climbing without a hiss.

“Some ponies are born to it,” she said. “Others get sent here. You learn the flavor quick or you choke. Silence. Scrap. Recycled everything. Hope measured in how long the filters last.”

Her gaze drifted over the group—surface ponies with their wide eyes and their stories of wind and sunlight and gardens pushing through poison dirt.

“Acquired taste means you stop noticing how bad it is. Stop dreaming of anything else. That’s when the Metro wins.”

She didn’t say the rest.

Didn’t say how she had never acquired the taste. How every recycled breath tasted like exile. How Calamity’s rant about open sky and real wind had stirred something hungry and dangerous in her chest. How their wasteland—broken, burning, but breathing—sounded like the first clean gulp of air after drowning.

She wanted out.

Wanted it with the same quiet ferocity she used to put bolts through throats.

But secrets were her native language.

So she shrugged, small shoulders barely moving.

“Guess we just haven’t acquired it yet.”

The lantern flickered.

The ceiling stayed low.

But for the first time in years, Anon felt the faint, impossible stir of wind that wasn’t there.

===

The red lantern had burned to its stubborn core, casting just enough light to outline faces and hide eyes. Rations ticked down another day. Wounds scabbed. The recycler counted breaths like a patient jailer.

Three ponies sat apart from the loose circle of the others, each in their private pocket of shadow, thoughts too heavy for words aloud.

Velvet Remedy traced a hoof along the medical cabinet—her domain now, bottles and bandages rationed like hope. She had sung less since Polis. Songs drew things. Songs cost air. Songs reminded everypony of what the Metro denied: open spaces for melody to soar, audiences who could applaud without fear of summoning death.

Back home her voice had healed bodies and hearts—ministry dreams, crusader kindness, the belief that beauty could redeem a broken world. Here beauty was suspicion. A soft note in the dark might as well be a gunshot. She had stitched Calamity’s wing, dosed rads, soothed Dusk’s nightmares, but every act felt stolen, performed in whispers, as though kindness itself had to hide.

She wondered how long before she forgot how to sing at full voice. How long before the Metro taught her that mercy was just another form of noise.

SteelHooves stood motionless by the door—eternal sentinel, power armor scarred deeper than before. His systems ran on minimal, conserving charge the way the group conserved everything else.

He processed the Metro the way he processed all battlefields: tactics, resources, philosophy of survival.

The pneumatic weapons still fascinated him. No energy cells to hoard. No ancient tech to worship. Just air, scrap, patience. A war of breath control rather than overwhelming force. Rangers stood tall, met the enemy with thunder and steel. Here thunder was suicide. Standing tall meant painting a target on your helmet.

He had killed quietly now—hoof and laser both muffled. Efficient. Effective. But it felt like surrender. The Ranger code—protect, preserve, prevail—warped here into endure, conceal, persist. He wondered if Applejack would recognize this shadowed version of duty. He wondered how long before his armor felt less like protection and more like a tomb he carried on his back.

Xenith sat cross-legged in the deepest shadow, stripes blending until she seemed part of the wall. Her blades lay across her lap, cleaned and oiled for the hundredth time. She breathed slow, tasting the air for threats that never slept.

Zebras understood balance—alchemy of opposites, harmony in tension. The surface wasteland had been a wound, yes, but one that could scar and heal. Gardens pushed through poison. Tribes clashed and sometimes reconciled. The circle turned, slow and bloody but turning.

The Metro was a different wound: closed, festering, no light to cauterize it. Ponies adapted by shrinking—becoming small, quiet, sharp. Factions were cages painted as philosophies. Even independents carried invisible chains forged from fear.

She watched Anon—the filly who moved like glyph and shadow both—and saw a soul out of balance, exiled deeper than any zebra curse. She watched Littlepip carry guilt like a second PipBuck. Watched Calamity’s wings ache for sky that did not exist.

Xenith wondered if the Metro’s true poison was not radiation but resignation. How long before the circle stopped turning entirely and simply rusted in place.

None of them spoke these thoughts.

Velvet hummed a single note—barely audible—then stopped.

SteelHooves shifted once, armor whispering.

Xenith’s stripes rippled, then stilled.

The three vigils continued in silence, each pony measuring the slow erosion of who they had been against the concrete certainty of where they were.

The lantern burned lower.

The Metro waited, patient as stone.

===

Weeks bled away in the second sanctuary—measured not in days but in dwindling tins, shrinking water barrels, and the slow tightening of belts around hollow bellies.

The last mushroom brick was divided eight ways: crumbs that tasted of dust and regret. The recycler wheezed harder, scrubbing air that grew thicker with unspoken panic. Wounds had healed into scars, but hunger carved new ones deeper.

Anon waited until the silence became unbearable—until even Calamity’s restless wing-twitches stilled.

She rose, small shadow moving to a hidden panel in the wall. Hooves spun a combination only she knew. A rolled tube of pre-war stalker maps slid out—laminated, annotated in her precise marks.

She spread it across the floor under the red lantern’s dying glow.

“This is us,” she said, tapping a side tunnel far from any station. “First anomaly I know—old portal storm scar. Stable readings last time I scouted. Veil thin. Could pull you home.”

Eight heads leaned in—Littlepip’s horn glowing faint to illuminate details, Calamity’s eyes narrowing, Velvet’s breath catching.

Anon’s hoof traced the route: service ducts, abandoned lines, a maintenance ladder down to deeper levels.

Then stopped.

“Here.” A thick red X crossed the main tunnel. “Collapsed. Big quake two seasons ago. Rockfall sealed it solid. No way through below.”

Silence stretched, heavier than the ceiling.

Calamity broke it. “So we’re trapped? Starve slow?”

Anon shook her head once. “One way around.” Her hoof moved upward on the map—to a dotted line marked in warning red. “Topside. Cross the surface ruin above the collapse. Half a day’s walk in open air. Then ladder down on the far side. Back into tunnels. Anomaly three days after that.”

The word topside landed like a demon’s roar.

Littlepip’s ears flattened. “Surface here… you said it’s death. Radiation. Mutants. Storms.”

Anon met her gaze—steady, unreadable. Inside, her heart pumped faster than any reservoir. Surface meant sky. Real sky. Wind. The chance to step through with them and never come back.

But she kept it buried.

“Death, yeah,” she said. “But not instant. Stalkers do it. Short bursts. We gear right, move fast, we cross.”

She listed it clinical, like pumping a Helsing.

“Need anti-rad needles—full doses, multiples. Surface glow’s thick; burn you in hours without. Filters—best ones, doubles for masks. No leaks. Gatling—assemble it, belt the 12.7s. Mutants up there are big. Demons nest in ruins. Shriekers swarm. Need something that chews loud if silence fails.”

SteelHooves rumbled approval. “Heavy firepower for open ground. Acceptable.”

Calamity’s wings twitched. “Open ground. Wind. Even poison wind…”

Velvet swallowed. “We’ll need suits. Patched ones at least.”

Dusk shrank smaller. Xenith’s stripes rippled calculation.

Littlepip stared at the map—at the red X forcing them into forbidden light.

“How do we get the gear?” she asked. “We’re out of everything.”

Anon rolled the map tight again.

“Raid. One last big one. Independent stalker cache I know—near a surface hatch. They hoard topside kit. We take it quiet. Then we climb.”

She didn’t say the rest.

Didn’t say how the thought of real air—of stepping out under a sky that might kill her but would never bury her—made her hooves shake with something perilously close to hope.

The lantern guttered lower.

The sanctuary’s end had come.

Topside waited—balefire sun, mutant wind, and the first taste of freedom in years.

For all of them.

Or none.

===

The independent stalker cache was a fortified burrow off a forgotten branch line—barricades of scrap and sandbags, crystal trip-lamps flickering warnings, the sharp tang of oiled pneumatics and desperate hoarding.

They hit it at the false dawn cycle: eight shadows against five defenders. Silent at first—Anon’s Helsing whispering bolts, Calamity’s Tikhar puffing bearings into throats, Xenith’s blades flashing from vents, SteelHooves’ armored mass crushing resistance points.

The stalkers fought back hard—veterans of surface runs, masks scarred, weapons charged. A Tikhar barked. A Helsing bolt grazed Littlepip’s barding. Velvet’s shield spell flared. Dusk fired a scavenged revolver with shaking hooves.

They were winning. Supplies in sight: crates of anti-rad needles gleaming like salvation, sealed packs of high-grade filters, belts of 12.7mm rounds for the Gatling, patched radiation suits folded neat.

Then the lights flickered.

A low hum rose—deep, oscillating, felt in bone more than heard. The air ionized, raising manes and fur. Crystal lamps dimmed as though drinking from the same current.

Anon’s ears snapped back. Her voice cut through the fight like a valve slam.

“Dark Star! Sides—now! Cover!”

No questions. They scattered—diving behind barricades, crates, into alcoves. The remaining stalkers hesitated half a second too long.

It arrived.

A perfect orb of coruscating blue-white energy, floating serene down the tunnel center—no sound but the crackle of discharge, no heat but the promise of annihilation. Electricity arced from its surface in lazy spirals, tasting metal, tasting flesh.

The stalkers turned weapons on it—puffs, bangs, desperate pumps. Bearings and bolts passed through harmlessly or vaporized mid-flight.

The Dark Star paused.

Then it pulsed.

Three stalkers simply ceased—flash-vaporized into drifting ash and the sharp stink of cooked meat. Armor melted into slag. Weapons fused. One moment ponies, next moment absence.

The orb hovered, rotating slowly as though listening to screams that never came. Arcs licked the walls, blackening concrete, grounding through puddles into blue fire.

Then, satisfied or bored, it stilled—perfectly motionless for three heartbeats.

Before reversing path, drifting back the way it came with the lazy grace of something that owned the tunnels entirely.

Silence returned, broken only by the soft patter of cooling slag and the recycler’s distant hum somewhere deeper.

The group emerged slowly. The cache was theirs now—untouched by the visitation, supplies intact.

Littlepip stared at the ash outlines on the floor—perfect pony shapes, manes still suggested in carbon.

Anon checked her Helsing gauge, voice flat.

“Dark Stars don’t hunt. They just… pass. Ball lightning, maybe. Living current. Doesn’t matter. You see one, you hide. Or you don’t exist anymore.”

Calamity’s wings trembled. “Sweet Celestia. Even hellhounds give warnin’ growls.”

Velvet swallowed bile. Dusk whimpered.

They loaded the gear in silence: needles into saddlebags, filters sealed, 12.7 belts coiled heavy, radiation suits patched and folded.

The cache yielded everything they needed for the surface crossing.

Paid for in five lives that became nothing but shadows on stone.

The Dark Star was already gone—back into the veins, waiting for the next tunnel, the next mistake.

The Metro’s truest owner needed no faction, no weapon, no mercy.

It simply was.

===

They worked in the cache’s aftermath by the faint glow of salvaged crystal lamps—hooves shaking as they sorted the blood-price spoils.

Radiation suits patched and sealed: heavy pre-war fabric, lead weave cracked but serviceable, hoods with cracked visors. High-grade filters slotted into masks—doubles, triples, no leaks allowed. Anti-rad needles loaded into bandoliers: glowing blue serum, multiple doses each, enough to blunt the surface burn for a day’s crossing. The Gatling assembled at last—six barrels gleaming, crank handle folded, belts of 12.7mm rounds coiled heavy like chains.

Everything they needed to breathe poison air and walk under poison light.

But the Dark Star’s visitation lingered.

Ash outlines on the floor stared up like accusing shadows. The air still tasted of ozone and sudden absence. Hooves trembled as they packed. Eyes darted to tunnel mouths, expecting the hum.

Littlepip finally asked, voice small in the echoing cache.

“That thing… the Dark Star. How does something like that even exist? What made it?”

The others paused—Calamity’s wings half-spread, Velvet’s magic flickering unsteady, Xenith’s stripes rigid, SteelHooves’ helmet lamps dimmed, Dusk curled tight.

Anon sealed the last filter with deliberate calm, small hooves steady where adults’ weren’t.

“Just another anomaly,” she said. “Metro’s full of them. Portal storms, ghost trains, voices in the vents, rivers that flow uphill. Dark Stars are… rarer. Older stalkers call them living lightning. Ball lightning gone wrong—energy that learned to wander.”

She shrugged, checking a mask seal.

“No pony made them. No megaspell backlash. No experiment. They just… are. Float the tunnels, follow currents maybe, or nothing at all. Radiate electricity till metal sings. Touch you and you’re vapor. Ash and echo. Doesn’t hunt. Doesn’t hate. Doesn’t care.”

Calamity’s ears flattened. “So it’s not… alive?”

Anon’s gaze flicked to the scorch marks.

“Not like us. Not like mutants. No brain. No hunger. Just phenomenon. Natural hazard wearing death’s face. Like rad-storms topside or black water below. You respect it. Hide from it. Or stop existing.”

Velvet swallowed. “It killed them… instantly. No pain?”

“Instant,” Anon confirmed. “Cleaner than most deaths down here.”

Littlepip stared at the ash ponies. “Everything in this place kills without reason.”

Anon pulled her own mask on—small filly size, patched green cloth matching her cloak.

“Reason’s a surface luxury. Down here things just kill. Indiscriminate keeps you honest.”

She slung the Helsing, checked the Gatling’s crank.

“Masks on. Needles ready. Surface hatch in two tunnels. We move quiet till we climb. Then we run.”

The group donned their gear—heavy suits rustling, filters hissing soft, visors fogging with nervous breath.

The Dark Star was gone.

But its lesson lingered: the Metro’s deepest horrors needed no malice.

Just existence.

They sealed masks.

The ladder to topside waited.

Poison sky beyond.

===

They climbed the ladder into hell wearing heaven’s name.

The surface hatch groaned open onto a ruined cityscape—twisted spires of pre-war steel clawing at a sky the color of old bruises. Wind howled through skeletal buildings, carrying rad-dust that stung even through suits. The sun hung low and bloated, a balefire eye glaring down on a world it had murdered.

Mutants owned the streets.

Demons perched on rooftops—massive, winged horrors with beaks like scythes. Watchers slunk in packs through rubble. Shriekers wheeled overhead in swirling clouds. Nosalises poured from subway mouths like black tides.

No time to gawk.

Needles first—anti-rad serum slammed into necks, blue glow spreading cold fire through veins. Filters checked, rechecked, replaced with fresh ones from the cache. Masks sealed tight. Gatling unslung but silent for now.

Anon’s voice crackled over the suit comms scavenged from stalker gear.

“Run. Quiet weapons only. No loud. Surface hears everything.”

They ran.

Eight suited figures sprinting across cracked asphalt and collapsed overpasses—hooves pounding muffled by dust. Pneumatics whispered death: Tikhar puffs dropping watchers mid-leap, Helsing bolts pinning shriekers to walls before they could cry warning. Calamity’s injured wing slowed him, but adrenaline carried. Littlepip’s magic levitated the Gatling when weight threatened to drag.

Mutants noticed.

A demon dove—SteelHooves cranked the Gatling once, twice—thunder of 12.7mm chewing wings to rags, body crashing behind them in wet ruin. Too loud. More came.

They replaced filters mid-stride—hiss of canisters swapping as lungs burned with surface poison. Another needle each when PipBucks screamed red.

Half a day blurred into nightmare miles: leaping chasms in broken highways, skirting rad-pools that bubbled like acid stew, silent kills stacking behind them like breadcrumbs for worse things.

The far hatch appeared—rusted ladder descending into blessed dark.

They slid down one by one—masks fogged, suits scarred, bodies trembling from rad-sickness and exhaustion.

Darkness swallowed them.

Relief lasted three heartbeats.

They landed muzzle-first into Line Watch territory.

Red banners hung from tunnel walls—hammer and sickle faded but proud. Earth pony guards in patched red barding surrounded them instantly, black-powder rifles leveled, faces stern behind filter masks.

A commissar stepped forward—stallion with a voice like grinding gears.

“Surface-breakers. Armed. Supplied.” His gaze swept their gear: weapons, remaining needles, filters, the half-empty Gatling belts. “Line Watch welcomes comrades in need. But equality demands sharing.”

Littlepip tensed. “We just need passage. We’re heading deeper.”

The commissar smiled without warmth.

“Passage granted. After redistribution. All excess belongs to the collective. Weapons, medicine, filters, ammunition—shared for the greater good. You leave with what every Line Watch pony is afforded: one pneumatic sidearm, basic filter, ration chit for the next station.”

Guards closed tighter.

Calamity’s wings flared under his suit. “That’s robbery with a manifesto.”

“Contribution,” the commissar corrected. “Refuse and you stay—as guests of re-education.”

Anon’s small form tensed beside Littlepip—eyes flicking to exits, calculating. The Reds outnumbered them three to one. Black powder meant noise. Noise meant everything else hearing.

The anomaly waited beyond—days away still.

But stripped bare, they would never reach it.

The wind of the surface still howled in their ears, carrying the taste of freedom almost touched.

Now the dark offered a different leash.

Red.

===

The tunnel air hung thick with the scent of collective kitchens and oiled black-powder rifles. The Line Watch guards formed a red wall—unyielding, polite in the way of ideologues who believe politeness is a form of control.

No way back: surface wind still howled above, mutants circling the hatch like sharks scenting blood. No way forward by force: outnumbered, low on pressure, exhausted from the crossing.

The commissar waited, patient as the Party itself.

Littlepip exchanged glances with the others—Calamity’s wings twitching fury under his suit, Velvet’s eyes pleading silence, Xenith’s stripes coiled tension, SteelHooves motionless calculation, Dusk shrinking smaller, Anon’s small face unreadable behind her cracked visor.

They surrendered.

One by one, the loot was laid out on a requisition table: crates of anti-rad needles glowing blue temptation, sealed packs of high-grade filters, remaining 12.7mm belts coiled like golden chains, patched radiation suits folded neat, spare Tikhars and Helsings oiled and gleaming.

The Gatling last—heavy, beautiful, cranked and offered barrel-first.

The commissar’s eyes widened fractionally. “A generous contribution, comrades. The collective thanks you.”

Guards moved forward to catalog and carry.

SteelHooves’ armor drew stares—ancient, scarred, irreplaceable.

A younger Red reached for a plate. “This too. Power armor serves the many, not the one.”

Anon stepped forward—small filly voice cutting clean.

“Can’t. Life support. Seals, filters, reactor ties direct to his biology. Remove it and he dies slow—rads, pressure failure, organ shutdown. Ranger tech. Pre-war. Not transferable.”

The commissar considered, hoof on chin. SteelHooves remained statue-still, helmet lamps dim. The lie—or truth, depending on the angle—held. The armor stayed.

Then eyes turned to Littlepip’s foreleg: the PipBuck, glowing softly, EFS flickering red blips of the guards themselves.

Reds crowded closer, curiosity sharper than ideology.

“Stable-Tec miracle,” one muttered. “Mapping, inventory, vitals—perfect for the collective.”

Hooves reached.

Anon again—voice flat, edged.

“We’re giving the Gatling. Heavy automatic. Worth ten of those wrist toys. More than enough for passage.”

The commissar paused, weighing ideology against practicality. A weapon that could hold a tunnel against demons versus a curious artifact.

Greed and doctrine wrestled briefly.

Doctrine won—barely.

“Accepted,” he declared. “For the collective’s defense.”

They were left with the promised minimum: one basic Tikhar each, single filters, ration chits for gray mushroom slop at the next station. Suits stripped to basic barding. Needles reduced to one emergency dose apiece.

“Comrades may rest here under watch,” the commissar added, gesture magnanimous. “The Gatling’s gift earns respite. Barracks available. Surveillance ensures equality—no hoarding, no sabotage.”

Calamity’s jaw clenched behind his mask. Velvet’s ears flattened. Littlepip felt the PipBuck’s weight like a last tether to home.

They accepted the barracks—bunks in a monitored hall, red banners overhead, guards at every exit. Rest under eyes that never blinked.

The anomaly waited deeper still.

But now they traveled light.

Red light.

The collective had spoken.

Equality enforced.

The Metro swallowed another piece of them.

===

The Line Watch barracks were a long hall of identical bunks—triple tiers of metal frames bolted to the floor, thin mattresses stuffed with recycled fiber, gray blankets that smelled of many bodies and strong disinfectant. Crystal lamps burned low and constant, never allowing true dark. Guards patrolled slow circuits, boots soft but deliberate. Loudspeakers in the corners whispered ideology in endless loop: equality, contribution, the bright future below.

The group claimed a row of lower bunks near the back—eight strangers granted “respite” for the Gatling’s sake. Masks off at last, but suits folded nearby. Basic Tikhars under pillows. One emergency needle each hidden in mane or barding seam.

Sleep came uneasy.

Littlepip lay rigid, staring at the underside of the bunk above. The PipBuck’s glow was dimmed to nothing, but she felt its weight like an accusation. Reds had eyed it hungrily. She listened to the loudspeaker drone about shared burdens and felt the collective’s hand already closing around her last private thing. Home felt farther than ever—stripped of weapons, medicine, momentum. Sleep teased but never took her.

Calamity curled on his side, injured wing bound tight, good wing draped protectively over his Tikhar. He dreamed in fragments: wide skies turning to concrete ceilings, wind becoming recycled air, the thunder of his old revolver reduced to pneumatic puffs. He muttered once—“Ain’t equal… ain’t free…”—then fell silent under a guard’s passing shadow.

Velvet Remedy lay on her back, eyes open, tracing cracks in the ceiling that formed no patterns worth singing about. Her healing magic felt muffled here, as though the collective disapproved of individual miracles. She thought of the surface wind—poison but alive—and wondered how long before she stopped missing it.

SteelHooves did not sleep. He stood at the foot of the bunks like a scarred monument, helmet lamps off, systems on minimal. The armor had stayed—thanks to Anon’s quick words—but he processed the cost: Gatling gone, charge low, allies diminished. He calculated escape vectors, threat assessments, the probability of re-education versus compliance. None comforted.

Xenith curled small, stripes blending with gray blanket shadows. Her blades were confiscated—“for the collective”—but she had hidden two thin stilettos in her mane. She breathed slow, listening to guard patterns, tasting the air for weakness. Zebras understood cages. This one wore red paint and called itself utopia.

Dusk slept fitfully—first real bunk in years, first meal that wasn’t scavenged. Nightmares of muzzles and screams chased her, but exhaustion won. She whimpered once; Velvet’s hoof reached across the gap to rest on hers.

Anon lay smallest, curled tight, eyes slitted under blanket edge. She watched everything: guard rotations, loudspeaker volume dips, the way Reds glanced at Littlepip’s PipBuck with poorly hidden want. She catalogued exits, ventilation grates, possible distractions.

Sleep visited her least. The collective grated against every instinct honed in independence. But she stayed still—small, unthreatening, forgotten.

The loudspeakers droned on: tomorrow’s work roster, contribution quotas, the eternal struggle for equality below.

Eight ponies breathed carefully under red watch.

Dreams, when they came, were gray.

The first night passed without incident.

But the collar tightened in sleep.

===

Dawn in Line Watch territory was announced not by light but by loudspeaker—bright, cheerful voice proclaiming the new work cycle, contribution quotas, the eternal gratitude of the collective.

The group rose stiffly from their bunks—bodies sore from surface crossing, wounds aching under scabs, bellies gnawing empty. Guards herded them to the communal hall: long tables, rows of tin bowls, steam rising from vats of gray mushroom slop thickened with algae paste and anonymous protein.

They ate.

No choice. Rations were collective; refusal was deviation.

The soup was warm, filling in the way mud fills a grave—barely sustained, barely flavored, equal parts for every pony. Littlepip spooned it mechanically, tasting nothing but the faint grit of tunnel dust. Calamity grimaced with every swallow, wings twitching against the urge to bolt. Velvet forced it down for strength. Xenith ate slow, watching. SteelHooves consumed his portion with Ranger efficiency. Dusk shoveled faster than any, hunger older than ideology. Anon ate smallest, eyes on exits.

The loudspeakers droned overhead: stories of heroic contribution, warnings against hoarding, promises of equality forever below.

The words wormed.

Littlepip felt them settle in her mind like spores—repetitive, soothing in their certainty. *Share. Contribute. The many over the one.* For a moment the PipBuck felt heavy, selfish. Private.

Calamity’s ears flicked. He caught himself nodding along to a phrase about collective skies—there were no skies—and shook his head hard.

Velvet’s healing instinct stirred toward the sick Red at the next table—then recoiled at the thought of unequal aid.

Even SteelHooves’ calculations shifted fractionally toward group efficiency over individual preservation.

Anon saw it first—the subtle glazing of eyes, the slowing of private thoughts.

She set her spoon down quietly.

“We leave,” she whispered across the table, voice lost under the chant. “Now. Before the soup settles and the speakers finish the job.”

No argument.

Bellies barely sustained—enough to walk, not to fight. Bodies sore but functional. Minds still their own—for minutes more.

They rose together, bowls empty, moving casual toward the hall’s rear exit. Guards watched but did not stop—passage had been granted, after all. Contribution complete.

The loudspeakers followed them down corridors: brighter future, shared struggle, equality in the dark.

They walked faster.

Out of the station proper, into connecting tunnels—basic Tikhars slung, single filters ready, emergency needles hidden. The anomaly waited deeper, days away on foot, stripped of everything but will.

Behind them, the red voices faded with distance.

But echoes lingered in their ears—promises of a world where no pony dreamed alone.

Because no pony dreamed at all.

The exodus began quiet.

The Metro watched.

The collective waited for return.

===

They left the red station at the edge of the false dawn cycle—eight ponies moving quiet through connecting tunnels, basic Tikhars slung, bellies sustained by gray slop but souls gnawing deeper. The loudspeakers’ echoes chased them for corridors: shared future, equal struggle, contribution eternal.

Then the tunnels narrowed, side passages opened, and the red grip loosened.

They stopped in a disused maintenance alcove—collapsed benches, dripping pipes, faint crystal glow from a cracked lamp. Safe enough. Private enough.

Calamity lasted ten steps into the alcove before he broke.

He slumped against the wall, wings flaring then folding tight, feathers trembling like leaves in wind that wasn’t there. His hat—scavenged replacement, too clean—tipped forward over eyes that suddenly shone wet.

“I thought…” His voice cracked, drawl fracturing. “I thought this place was the worst thing in Equestria. Worse than hellhounds. Worse than Enclave thunder. Worse than losin’ the sky to clouds and lies.”

He laughed—short, broken, nothing like his old whoop.

“But it just gets worse. Every buckin’ layer deeper, it gets worse.”

Littlepip moved toward him. Velvet reached a hoof. Xenith stilled. SteelHooves’ helmet lamps dimmed. Dusk shrank back. Anon watched silent.

Calamity didn’t stop.

“Surface… we finally climbed up. Real air. Real light. Poison, yeah—burned lungs, rads cookin’ us—but sky. Open sky. I thought… I thought I’d look up. Just once. Feel wind. See clouds. Remember why wings matter.”

His good wing twitched hard enough to ache the splint.

“Didn’t even glance. Eyes down. Scanning rubble. Watching rooftops for demons. Listening for shriekers. Pumpin’ the Tikhar quiet so nothin’ bigger heard us. Ran like rats crossin’ a bonfire. Sky was right there—burnin’, hateful, but there—and I couldn’t look. Too busy survivin’.”

Tears tracked clean lines through tunnel dust on his cheeks.

“This ain’t a wasteland. It’s hell wearin’ concrete. Hell with ceilings. Hell that teaches you sky’s a lie. Hell that makes you forget how to dream of flyin’. Reds want your stuff, your thoughts, your last private inch. Reich wants your blood pure. Polis wants your mind in their box. Independents? Just delayin’ the collar.

“And the things down here—Dark Stars vaporizin’ ponies for existin’, librarians singin’ you to death, demons ownin’ the air we finally tasted… it don’t stop. Just worse. Layer after layer of worse.”

He slid down the wall until he sat hard, wings draped like broken sails.

“I miss home. Poison wind. Open fights. Sky worth dyin’ under. Here there ain’t even that.”

The alcove fell silent except for dripping pipes and the faint, distant echo of red loudspeakers somewhere far behind.

Littlepip sat beside him, shoulder to shoulder. Velvet wrapped a foreleg around his withers. The others closed in slow—Xenith’s striped warmth, SteelHooves’ shadow, Dusk’s small presence, Anon’s quiet vigil.

No one spoke.

There was nothing to say that the Metro hadn’t already stolen.

Calamity cried himself empty—quiet, pegasus tears for a sky he couldn’t look at.

The anomaly waited ahead.

But the dark felt heavier now.

Hell had many ceilings.

And they were still falling.

===

The alcove’s cracked lamp cast just enough light to outline exhaustion. Calamity’s breakdown had passed like a storm—tears dried, wings folded tight, resolve hardened again but thinner now, like metal tempered too many times. Littlepip sat beside him still, shoulder to shoulder, her own earlier fracture echoing in the quiet.

Velvet Remedy watched them both—her most stubborn hearts, cracked open by the Metro’s relentless grind.

Littlepip, who had carried the Wasteland’s hope on her small unicorn shoulders, weeping for lives lost to one act of kindness. Calamity, sky-born and proud, shattered by the realization that even poison wind was a mercy compared to this buried grave.

Two ponies she loved like family, broken in ways surface scars never reached.

Then her gaze drifted to Anon.

The Green Ghost sat a little apart—small body curled against a crate, Helsing across her lap, pressure gauge catching the faint light like a third unblinking eye. She had not cried. Had not raged. Had not even flinched when Calamity’s words filled the alcove like smoke.

Velvet’s heart ached with a different pain.

This filly—barely more than a foal—had lived here all her life.

Every breath recycled. Every meal scavenged or stolen. Every kill silent and necessary. No memory of real sky, real wind, real sunlight that didn’t burn flesh from bone. No ministry dreams, no crusader songs, no wide horizons to dream under.

Velvet tried to imagine it: growing up in the dark, learning to walk quiet before learning to run free. Building safe houses alone. Pumping death into reservoirs instead of playing games. Watching stations fall, ponies vaporize, ideals rot—and never once breaking.

Because breaking was a luxury the Metro never allowed.

Or because something inside had already broken long ago, and the filly had simply built walls around the shards.

Velvet’s healing magic stirred, reaching instinctively toward the small green shadow. She wanted to sing—to wrap Anon in melody, mend whatever childhood the tunnels had stolen. But the notes caught in her throat. Songs drew things. Songs were noise. And noise…

She saw it now: the cost of survival here was stillness. Emptiness. The slow erosion of everything soft and bright until only the sharp and silent remained.

Anon’s ears flicked once—aware of the gaze—but she did not look up. Did not need comfort. Or perhaps had forgotten how to accept it.

Velvet’s eyes filled with tears she did not let fall.

Two stubborn hearts had cracked before her.

The third—the smallest, the strongest—had never been whole enough to break.

The anomaly waited ahead.

But Velvet wondered if any of them would reach it still recognizable.

Especially the filly who had never known another world to miss.

===

The tunnels after the red station were older—pre-war maintenance veins, ribbed concrete weeping slow condensation, crystal lamps long dead and replaced by nothing. The group moved single file, hooves wrapped in rag scraps, breaths shallow and controlled.

Anonfilly took point—smallest, quietest, eyes catching every flicker of distant movement. Xenith flanked her left, stripes melting into shadow until she seemed part of the wall itself. SteelHooves flanked right, armor plates dulled with ash, each step a calculated whisper of servos on minimal power.

The three of them formed a silent vanguard, the rest trailing in their wake.

Anon and Xenith found rhythm first.

They moved like mirror images: low to the ground, weight on outer hooves, ears swiveling in tandem. When Anon froze at a distant scuttle, Xenith’s stripes rippled once—acknowledgment. When Xenith tasted the air and veered left around a suspicious grate, Anon followed without question.

Between threats, words came rare and soft.

“Glyphs on the wall,” Xenith murmured once, nodding to faded zebra warnings etched beside cyrillic script. “Old curses. Still potent.”

Anon’s ears flicked. “Seen ’em ward off nosalises sometimes. Respect the old marks.”

Xenith’s eyes glinted faint approval. “You move like one taught by stripes, not hooves.”

Anon’s mouth twitched—almost a smile. “Taught by necessity. Same teacher.”

They shared a silence after that—comfortable, earned. Two exiles recognizing the shape of isolation in each other: one by tribe and war, one by… something the filly never named. Survival without herd. Alchemy of shadow and patience. The understanding needed no more words.

SteelHooves bonded differently.

His conversations with Anon were shorter, sharper, edged in efficiency.

When a watcher pack ghosted parallel in an adjacent tunnel, Anon signaled halt—three pumps on the Tikhar ready. SteelHooves calculated angles, threat vectors, ammunition conservation in one silent scan.

“Left flank exposed,” he rumbled low, voice filtered through helmet speakers. “Single burst if they commit.”

Anon nodded once. “Wait till they bunch. One bolt pins alpha. Your laser cleans stragglers. Minimal noise.”

He tilted his helmet fractionally—Ranger approval. “Ruthless economy. Effective.”

Later, clearing a collapsed choke point, Anon scavenged a pressure valve from debris while SteelHooves covered. She tossed it to him without looking.

“Gatling’s gone. But this fits your armor seals. Boost efficiency ten percent.”

SteelHooves caught it mid-air. “Accepted. You anticipate need before request.”

“Waste nothing,” Anon said. “Kill clean. Move on.”

“Ranger doctrine adapted for constraint,” he replied. “I approve.”

No warmth. No sentiment. Just the clean mesh of minds honed to the same edge: eliminate threat, conserve resource, advance objective. Ruthless efficiency as the only honest language left in the dark.

Behind them, the rest of the group followed in their wake—Littlepip watching the trio with quiet gratitude, Calamity’s wings less restless under their protection, Velvet’s healing magic saved for true emergencies.

The point trio moved as one organism: striped shadow, green ghost, steel sentinel.

The anomaly drew closer.

The Metro watched.

But for the first time, three ponies walked point without loneliness sharpening their edges quite so deep.

===

The tunnels grew narrower, older, forgotten by even the factions—side veins where the air tasted of rust and abandoned hope. Anonfilly’s ears flicked at a false panel in the wall, half-hidden by collapsed rebar. A stalker’s mark—her own, from seasons past.

She pried it open with a crowbar wrapped in cloth. Inside: a Uboinik stash.

The revolving shotgun lay cradled in oiled rags—six-spring clamps glinting, toggle joint gleaming faint, barrel thick and unforgiving. Boxes of shells stacked beside it: buckshot, slugs, even a few dragon’s breath rounds that glowed faintly with pre-war malice. Enough ammunition to last a determined pony months. Enough noise to wake the entire Metro.

Anon lifted it carefully—small hooves dwarfed by the weapon’s brutal lines. She worked the action once: short recoil toggle hinging smooth, cylinder rotating with a soft metallic kiss, spent imagination ejecting into shadow.

The group gathered close, eyes reflecting the lantern’s red glow on the gun’s steel.

Calamity whistled low. “That’s a room-clearer. Loud as sin, but sin that keeps you breathin’.”

SteelHooves scanned it with professional hunger. “Close to medium range dominance. Recoil-operated efficiency. Reload slow, but each chamber guarantees termination.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled interest. “Thunder when silence fails. Useful.”

Littlepip levitated a shell—heavy, promising overkill. “We’ve been quiet too long. But noise… noise brings everything.”

Velvet’s ears flattened. “It’s mercy for dire moments. Or a death sentence wearing power’s face.”

Dusk stared wide-eyed. “It… makes things stay dead?”

Anon cradled the Uboinik, voice flat.

“Found it seasons ago. Stashed for when quiet wasn’t enough. Shoots buckshot that turns nosalises to mist. Slugs that punch through demon hide. But every shot’s a scream. Reload’s six individual shells—slow, clumsy. Use wrong and everything hears you die.”

The debate began low, urgent.

Calamity spoke first. “Give it to me. I’m used to loud. Back home I lived by revolver thunder. Wing’s busted, but I can still crank it one-hoofed. When silence breaks, I break louder.”

SteelHooves rumbled counter. “My armor absorbs recoil. Laser’s low charge, but this complements. I calculate breach points, demon nests. Heavy firepower suits heavy frame.”

Xenith’s blades glinted as she considered. “I move fastest. Appear behind, unload chambers into vitals, vanish. Noise draws to me, others escape.”

Velvet shook her head. “None of us. Noise risks the group. We stay silent.”

Littlepip’s horn glowed faint around the barrel. “I’ve carried responsibility for louder choices before. If we need thunder, I call it.”

Dusk shrank back. “Not me. I’d… drop it.”

All eyes turned to Anon.

The filly met them steady—small, unreadable.

“I found it. I know it. Short recoil’s forgiving if you respect momentum. I’m smallest—recoil kicks hard, but I’ve handled worse. When quiet fails, I make the noise. Draw everything to me. You run.”

Calamity’s ears flattened. “Kid, that’s suicide.”

Anon’s mouth twitched—almost smile. “Better one ghost than eight corpses.”

Silence stretched.

No decision yet.

The Uboinik waited—heavy, loud, honest in its promise: anything it shoots stays dead.

But the price was written in echoes.

The debate continued in whispers.

The Metro listened for the first shot.

===

The tunnels widened into Hanza territory—cleaner corridors, brighter crystal lamps powered by guarded generators, armed merchants in ring-marked barding patrolling with professional boredom. Outpost 9 loomed ahead: a fortified interchange turned marketplace, barricades of luxury and necessity, air thick with the haggle of survival.

The group arrived ragged—wounds from surface and raid festering under scabs, rad-sickness lingering in bones, bellies hollow again despite red slop memories. Basic Tikhars slung, emergency needles spent, no caps, no trade goods.

Except one.

The Uboinik—still undebated, still unfired—hung heavy at Anon’s side, shells rattling soft in pouches.

Hanza guards eyed them at the gate: professional, calculating.

“Trade or toll,” the captain said. “Ring protects commerce. No freeloaders.”

They had nothing but the shotgun’s promise.

Debate was brief, desperate.

Littlepip nodded to Anon. The filly unslung pouches—heavy with buckshot, slugs, dragon’s breath. The Uboinik itself stayed—too valuable, too loud, too necessary for the anomaly ahead.

Bullets traded for passage, medical kit restock, mushroom rations, fresh filters. The merchant weighed each shell like gold, smiling thin.

“Generous,” he said. “Ring welcomes cautious customers.”

They entered under watch—allowed to browse, to rest in a side alcove rented by the trade’s grace.

Wounded Hanza ponies lay in a guarded infirmary corner: surface stalker returned wrong, rad-burns blackening hide, shrapnel wounds festering, one earth pony stallion gasping wet breaths through punctured lung.

Velvet saw them.

Her healer’s heart—battered but unbowed—stirred. Back home she would have sung full voice, melody wrapping broken bodies in golden repair. Here… noise was death.

But whisper songs—soft, careful, magic threaded thin as filtration mesh.

She approached the captain. “I can help. Quietly.”

Permission granted—cautious curiosity outweighing suspicion.

Velvet knelt among the wounded, voice barely above breath: fragments of old ministry hymns, crusader lullabies, notes shaped small and precise. Magic flowed weaker, diluted by silence, but it flowed—closing shallow cuts, easing rad-fire, knitting flesh slow.

Most stabilized. Grateful nods. Merchant smiles—potential future trade in a singing healer.

But one—the stallion with the punctured lung—did not mend enough.

Whisper magic lacked the power of full song. Internal bleeding slowed but did not stop. Fluid built slow, drowning him from inside over hours.

Velvet stayed at his side longest—whispering harder, voice raw, magic straining until her horn ached and nose bled faint.

He died at false dusk—gasping quieter and quieter, eyes locked on hers in confused gratitude, until the light left.

No scream. No drama. Just the slow, inevitable fade of a life that almost made it.

The Hanza medics shrugged—practical. “Better than most. He lasted longer.”

Velvet returned to the alcove hollow.

She sat against the wall, forelegs wrapped around herself, eyes dry but burning inside.

Kindness again—whispered, weakened, insufficient.

One pony saved from muzzle, costing Polis.

Now one pony almost saved from wounds, costing nothing but the ache in her chest that would not heal.

The Metro took everything eventually.

Even the mercy you tried to give.

The group gathered close—Littlepip’s hoof on her shoulder, Calamity’s wing careful, Xenith’s striped silence, SteelHooves’ shadow, Dusk’s small presence, Anon watching unreadable.

Velvet did not cry.

There was no sound safe enough for it.

The outpost lights burned bright.

The trade continued around them.

The anomaly waited deeper.

But something in the healer dimmed forever.

===

The tunnels between outposts were quiet in the way only deep veins can be—quiet enough to hear hearts slow, quiet enough to hear the Metro feeding.

Anonfilly walked point, small shadow leading the column. Xenith matched her stride on the left, stripes drinking the faint glow of distant crystal shards. SteelHooves marched right, armor plates dulled to ghost-gray, each step measured to minimize echo.

The three of them had fallen into rhythm days ago—shared vigilance leaving room for shared truths.

Anon spoke first, voice barely above the drip of condensation.

“They’re eroding.”

No names needed. The trio knew who trailed behind: Littlepip’s careful steps grown heavier, Velvet’s healing hums rarer, Calamity’s wings folded tighter with every ceiling they passed under.

Xenith’s ears flicked once. “The unicorn carries guilt like extra barding. The singer’s mercy turns inward, cutting her. The pegasus looks up at nothing and flinches.”

SteelHooves rumbled low, helmet lamps dimmed to slits. “Observed. Morale degradation progressive. Hope vectors diminishing. Surface memories conflict with current environment.”

Anon’s small hooves made no sound on the grit.

“Slowly. But surely. Littlepip blames herself for every death we couldn’t prevent. Velvet sings quieter each time, like she’s afraid kindness itself draws monsters. Calamity… he doesn’t talk about sky anymore. Just checks his Tikhar and moves on.”

She paused at a junction, ears swiveling, then waved them forward.

“The Metro only takes. Doesn’t give back. Takes noise first—makes you whisper till you forget how to speak loud. Takes light—teaches you to love the dark. Takes hope—replaces it with next tunnel, next breath, next quiet kill. Takes pieces of who you were until you fit the veins better.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled slow. “I have seen tribes broken by war. Spirits eroded by loss. But this place… it grinds without hatred. Just patience.”

SteelHooves’ voice was flat steel. “Sustained environmental pressure. Psychological attrition. No respite cycles. Projected outcome: full adaptation or total collapse.”

Anon glanced back once—quick, almost guilty—at the faint silhouettes trailing in their wake.

“They’re from a wasteland that still had sky. Choices. Gardens growing in poison dirt. Here there’s only down. And down takes everything eventually.”

She adjusted the Uboinik’s sling—still unfired, still waiting.

“We keep them moving. Toward the anomaly. Toward whatever’s left of out.”

Xenith nodded once—zebra acceptance of necessary cruelty.

SteelHooves’ helmet tilted fractionally. “Affirmative. Objective remains extraction. Collateral preservation prioritized.”

The trio fell silent again—three shadows moving as one.

Behind them, the others followed.

Eroding.

The Metro took without hurry.

It had all the time in the world.

And none of them did.

===

They resupplied in the Hanza alcove with the last of their shotgun shells—buckshot and slugs divided careful, dragon’s breath rounds saved for apocalypse. The Uboinik remained undebated, unfired, slung heavy at Anon’s side like a promise or a curse.

The anomaly was close now—days, maybe less. Tunnel markers Anon knew by heart: warped air, faint portal shimmer reported by stalkers who never returned. Hope flickered weak but persistent.

They moved deeper—quiet again, point trio leading: Anon’s small shadow, Xenith’s stripes, SteelHooves’ steel.

Then the hunt began.

Reich scouts had tracked them—rumors carried on black wings through the veins: surface-breakers who burned Outpost 41, shattered Outpost 88 with forbidden thunder, escaped Polis’s fall carrying impurity like plague.

Pure-blood vengeance does not forget.

It waits.

First sign: shaved-maned patrols in adjacent tunnels—black barding, rune tattoos glowing faint under crystal light, flamethrowers slung, voices low in ritual hate.

Anon signaled halt. The group melted into side alcoves.

But the Reich pressed—organized, relentless. Blockades ahead. Flanking parties behind. Whispers carried on ventilation: “Impure. Mixed tribes. Zebra. Armor relic. Filly ghost. Burn them clean.”

No escape upward—surface too far, rad-storms raging.

No surrender—Reich cleansed, did not capture.

They ran.

Tunnels became a gauntlet: pneumatic whispers dropping scouts before alarms rose, Uboinik still silent—too loud, too soon. Xenith’s blades tasted blood in shadows. SteelHooves’ armor took grazing flamethrower bursts—scorching but holding. Littlepip’s revolver barked rare, precious shots when silence failed.

Calamity’s wings ached for sky that did not exist. Velvet’s whispers healed burns mid-flight. Dusk ran wide-eyed terror.

Anon led detours—forgotten maintenance shafts, flooded sumps, collapsed veins barely passable.

But the Reich closed.

A running battle: buckshot finally unleashed when a flamethrower squad cornered them—Uboinik roaring thunder, chambers cycling in brutal rhythm, turning pure-blood zealots to red mist and charred bone. Noise echoed like judgment.

Everything heard.

Nosalises poured from side vents, drawn by the banquet bell. Librarians howled distant answer.

The Reich pressed harder—purity demanded the impure burn first.

The group bled forward—wounds reopening, ammunition dwindling, hope eroding faster than concrete under acid rain.

The anomaly shimmered somewhere ahead—veil thin, portal storm scar pulsing faint.

But the hunt was closer.

Black barding in the dark.

Runes glowing hate.

Flamethrower hiss promising cleansing fire.

The Metro took sides.

And it chose the ones who never forgave.

===

They ran until running became a different kind of death.

Days dissolved into tunnel blur: breath ragged as torn filters, ammunition spent to echoes, anti-rad needles emptied into veins that still cooked, medicines swallowed dry until tongues bled, rations depleted to dust in saddlebags.

The Reich had pursued with pure-blood fury—black barding masses, flamethrower hiss, ritual chants promising cleansing fire.

But the Metro is impartial.

It gave the pursuers to its older children.

Demons descended from ceiling nests—massive wings blotting crystal light, claws rending barding like paper. Librarians rose from side vaults—tall, gorilla horrors singing their layered hunting chorus, tearing pure-blood zealots limb from limb in wet symphonies. The Reich died screaming ideology into indifferent dark.

The monsters inherited the hunt.

Now eight ponies fled things that needed no doctrine—only meat.

Anon led still—small ghost knowing every collapsing vein, every flooded shortcut. Xenith’s stripes blurred with speed. SteelHooves’ armor sparked from claw strikes. Littlepip’s horn glowed faint for light and levitation. Calamity’s wings beat useless in narrow spaces. Velvet’s whispers healed only the worst. Dusk ran on terror alone.

They reached the anomaly at exhaustion’s edge.

A vast chamber—pre-war interchange warped by portal storm scar. Air shimmered like heat haze, veil thinned to tissue. Faint outlines of other places flickered: green sky, balefire craters, wide horizons ghosting through.

Home.

So close.

But closed.

The veil rippled, teased, showed glimpses—Fillydelphia ruins, open wasteland wind, sunlight unfiltered by concrete—but no tear opened.

They circled desperate.

Littlepip pressed horn to shimmering air—magic sparking, feeding, nothing.

Calamity beat wings against it—feathers singed by anomaly static.

Velvet sang soft—notes warping, veil trembling but holding.

SteelHooves scanned—energy readings off charts, no protocol.

Xenith traced zebra glyphs in dust—old portal rites, useless.

Dusk touched tentative—nothing.

Anon stood smallest before it, Uboinik unfired, eyes reflecting ghost skies.

“We don’t know how,” she said flat. “Stalkers who reached it… never came back to tell. Storm needs trigger. Blood? Magic surge? Noise? Sacrifice?”

Behind them, the hunt arrived.

Demons crashed into the chamber—wings folding, claws scraping. Librarians loped from tunnels—singing, eyes intelligent hunger.

The veil shimmered mocking—home visible, unreachable.

Eight ponies backed to it—exhausted, spent, cornered.

Monsters closed.

The anomaly waited.

Unopened.

The Metro prepared to take the rest.

===

The chamber shook with the hunt’s arrival.

Demons crashed through the ceiling grate—wings folding, claws rending stone. Librarians poured from every tunnel mouth—tall horrors singing their layered, bone-deep chorus, eyes gleaming intelligent hunger.

The veil shimmered mocking—ghosts of home flickering: open sky, poison wind, gardens in dirt.

Unopened.

Eight ponies backed against it—exhausted, spent, cornered.

Anonfilly stood smallest at the edge, Uboinik heavy in her hooves, pressure gauge long empty, chambers loaded with the last of the traded thunder.

She cursed—small, vicious word that cut the dark like a Helsing bolt.

“Fuck.”

The others turned—Littlepip’s horn flaring weak, Calamity’s wings half-spread, Velvet’s breath catching, Xenith’s stripes rigid, SteelHooves’ armor scarred, Dusk’s eyes wide.

Anon met their gazes—old eyes in a filly’s face.

“I wanted to come with you.”

The confession spilled raw, no whisper, no silence.

“Whole time. Heard your stories—sky, wind, gardens growing in poison. Real light. Choices. A wasteland that still had tomorrow. Wanted it. Wanted out. With you.”

Her voice cracked—once.

“But now… if we don’t distract them, we’re all dead. Veil won’t open in time.”

She gritted teeth, small hooves working the Uboinik’s action—toggle hinging smooth, cylinder kissing the next shell home.

“Fuck it.”

She turned.

Faced the monsters.

Uboinik roared—thunder in concrete hell, chambers cycling brutal rhythm, buckshot turning demon wings to red mist, slugs punching librarian chests into ruin. Dragon’s breath blooming fire that lit the chamber like forbidden sun.

Noise.

Glorious, suicidal noise.

Monsters turned—enraged, drawn to the banquet bell.

Anon ran the opposite direction—small green shadow diving into side tunnels, Uboinik barking again, again, thunder echoing eternal.

Drawing them away.

She shouted back—voice raw over the roar.

“OPEN IT! DON’T WAIT! GO HOME!”

The veil trembled—shimmer intensifying, ghost images solidifying.

Littlepip screamed her name—horn blazing against the anomaly.

Calamity beat wings useless.

Velvet sang desperate—full voice now, noise be damned.

Xenith reached striped hoof.

SteelHooves calculated too late.

Dusk wept.

But the Green Ghost was already gone—small shadow swallowed by dark and thunder, monsters thundering after.

The veil tore.

Light poured.

Home waited beyond.

Seven ponies stood at the threshold.

One filly’s thunder echoed farther—buying seconds with her life.

The Metro took the last thing it hadn’t yet claimed.

The ghost who dreamed of sky.

===

The chamber roared with monsters and thunder.

Anon’s Uboinik barked defiance—chamber after chamber cycling, buckshot and dragon’s breath painting the dark in fire and ruin. Small green shadow running deeper, drawing the hunt away, voice raw over the roar:

“OPEN IT! DON’T WAIT! GO HOME!”

The veil answered.

Velvet’s full song—unwhispered, unleashed—shattered the last barrier. Melody of ministry dreams, crusader hope, surface sunlight poured into notes that tore reality like paper.

Littlepip’s horn blazed white-hot against the shimmer—magic feeding the rift, PipBuck screaming overload.

Calamity beat wings against the tear—feathers singed but forcing it wider.

Xenith traced final zebra glyph in her own blood—old portal rite demanding balance.

SteelHooves stood shield—armor taking claw and song, buying seconds.

Dusk reached small hoof.

The veil tore wide.

Light poured—real light, poison green but open, vast, alive.

Home.

Fillydelphia ruins ghosted solid: cratered horizon, balefire sky, wind that howled free.

Seven ponies lunged through—tumbling, falling, rolling onto wasteland dirt that tasted of radiation and freedom.

The tear snapped shut behind them.

Silence.

No monsters.

No thunder.

No small green shadow.

They lay scattered on the surface—suits torn, bodies burned by rads and exhaustion, lungs gulping real air that scorched but breathed.

Littlepip rose first—PipBuck flickering stable network again, Equestrian bands crackling faint. Home. Real home.

Calamity spread wings wide—wind catching feathers, lifting him inches off the ground before pain dropped him. He laughed—broken, wet, free.

Velvet’s song died in her throat—full voice again, but silent now.

Xenith traced stripes in wasteland dust—balance restored, cost carved deep.

SteelHooves stood sentinel—helmet lamps bright under real sky.

Dusk wept openly—surface wind drying tears that had never known it.

They were seven.

Not eight.

The Metro had taken its final piece.

The small filly who dreamed of their sky.

Who paid with thunder so they could feel wind again.

Home stretched vast around them—poison, broken, but breathing.

The anomaly scar sealed forever behind.

No way back.

No small green ghost stepping through late, cloak torn, eyes older but smiling under real light.

Only echoes of Uboinik thunder fading in memory.

And the vast, indifferent wasteland sky that finally looked down on seven ponies who would never forget the dark they left behind.

Or the eighth who stayed to make it possible.

===

They emerged into the wasteland like ghosts exhaled from a grave that refused to keep them.

Seven ponies—ragged, rad-scarred, lungs raw from real air—lay scattered across Fillydelphia’s outer ruins. The balefire sun glared down unforgiving, wind howled free through skeletal towers, radiation ticked steady on PipBucks that suddenly remembered home networks.

No monsters singing in the dark.

No ceilings pressing eternal.

Just vast, poisoned sky.

And the absence of an eighth.

The aftermath unfolded slow—days blurring into weeks as they limped toward familiar landmarks: Tenpony Tower’s distant spire, New Appleloosa’s smoke, the faint broadcast hum of DJ Pon3 welcoming wanderers home.

But home had changed.

Or they had.

Littlepip walked quieter now—hooves deliberate, revolver checked with Metro caution. The wasteland’s open horizons once felt like freedom; now they felt exposed. Raiders announcing themselves with gunfire seemed almost courteous compared to things that listened for heartbeats. She caught herself pumping an imaginary Tikhar before fights, conserving shots that no longer needed silence but felt wrong loud.

The pneumatic weapons they carried—scavenged Tikhars, one Helsing salvaged—changed everything.

Wasteland battles had been thunder: revolvers barking, battle saddles roaring, energy weapons screaming. Noise drew attention, but the wastes were wide—room to maneuver, to fly, to overwhelm.

Now they fought different.

Silent puffs dropping raiders before alarms rose. Bearings tumbling inside armor, liquefying organs without flash or bang. Helsing bolts reusable, pinning hellhounds mid-leap without echo.

Steel Rangers stared when SteelHooves demonstrated—subsonic death from scrap and air. Enclave patrols fell from clouds never knowing what whispered them down.

A new doctrine: stealth kills at range, pressure management like breath control, ammunition forged from trash.

The wasteland wasn’t prepared.

Raiders died confused. Hellhounds charged into invisible death. Even alicorns hesitated when silent bearings punched through shields.

They gained advantage.

But lost something deeper.

The Metro’s horrors lingered in comparison.

Wasteland monsters—hellhounds, bloatsprites, deathclaws—roared warnings, charged in open light. You saw them coming. Had sky to evade. Wind to carry scent away.

Metro horrors listened. Waited. Owned the dark you could never escape. No sky. No retreat. Only forward or down.

Red Eye’s slavers had been evil with purpose. Reich purified with hate that at least had shape.

Metro took without reason—Dark Stars vaporizing for existing, librarians singing you to dinner.

The wasteland felt… merciful now. Brutal, yes. Poisoned, broken. But breathing. Healing in places. Gardens grew. Stables opened. Ponies rebuilt under open sky, however green and deadly.

Metro only endured. Buried. Took pieces until nothing soft remained.

They lost the Green Ghost.

The small filly who dreamed of their sky harder than any of them. Who confessed in thunder and paid with it. Whose absence carved deeper than any claw wound.

They gained Dusk—muzzle-scarred mare who walked surface wind like miracle, eyes wide at every horizon, gratitude a weight she carried quiet.

Seven returned.

One stayed to make it possible.

One joined because of it.

The wasteland took them back—scarred, changed, carrying silence in their hooves and thunder in memory.

They fought smarter. Loved fiercer. Looked at the poison sky with new gratitude.

And sometimes, in quiet nights under stars that didn’t press down, they heard faint echoes of a Uboinik barking defiance in dark they would never return to.

The Metro took.

But it also gave—perspective forged in concrete hell.

Home was poisoned.

But it had sky.

And that was enough.

For now.

===

The camp was small—crater’s edge outside Fillydelphia ruins, fire built low from scavenged timber, balefire glow on the horizon painting the night poison green. Tikhars leaned against rocks like silent sentinels. The wind howled free, carrying rad-dust and the faint scent of distant rain.

Seven ponies sat around the flames.

No rush. No hunt. Just the vast, indifferent sky above and the slow unraveling of words held too long in silence.

Littlepip spoke first—voice soft, staring into the fire.

“I keep expecting her to step out of the shadows. Small green cloak. That flat way she said everything like it didn’t matter when it mattered most.”

Calamity’s wings rustled. “Kid had ice in her veins. But… she wanted sky. Wanted it bad. Heard it in her voice that last time. ‘I wanted to come with you.’ Buck… she paid for ours with hers.”

Velvet’s eyes shone wet in the firelight. “She never broke. Not once. We cracked—me, you, Littlepip. But her? Lived it her whole life. Built walls out of silence and bearings. And still… still chose to burn bright so we could feel wind again.”

Xenith traced a stripe in the dirt with one hoof. “Exile recognizes exile. She carried a weight older than her body. Never named it. Never needed to. When she turned… it was balance. One life for seven. Zebra rites approve. Heart does not.”

SteelHooves stood beyond the fire’s edge—armor catching flames like stars. “Tactical sacrifice. Optimal outcome. But… inefficient. One irreplaceable asset for seven recoverable. Logic fails. She was… asset beyond calculation.”

Dusk—muzzle scars silver in moonlight—whispered, “She gave me my voice back. Indirectly. Because you freed me. And she… she gave you the sky to use it in. I never knew her name. Just Green Ghost. But I’ll carry it.”

Silence stretched—wind filling it with wasteland song.

Littlepip pulled the Helsing closer—the one Anon had taught her to pump slow. “Metro took everything. Pieces of us we’ll never get back. Silence in our steps. Caution in our dreams. But it gave us… perspective. This?” She gestured at the vast sky, the fire, the wind. “This is miracle now. Poison air feels clean. Open fights feel fair. We fight quieter, smarter. Win cleaner.”

Calamity nodded slow. “Kid’s thunder echoes in how we shoot now. Silent death from trash. Wasteland wasn’t ready. Raiders drop before they holler. Hellhounds charge into nothing. We’re… better. Because of what we lost.”

Velvet’s voice broke the hush. “We mourn her every time we look up and remember she never got to. Every time the wind catches our manes and we think of a small filly who dreamed of it harder than we ever did.”

They fell quiet again—fire crackling, stars wheeling indifferent overhead.

Seven ponies around a wasteland fire.

Mourning the eighth who stayed behind so they could feel sky again.

The Green Ghost.

Whose real name they never learned.

Whose thunder bought their wind.

And whose absence taught them the true cost of open air.

The campfire burned lower.

The sky stayed vast.

The mourning began slow.

And never ended.

===

The wasteland took them back, but they brought the dark with them.

Gangs and hellhounds learned first.

Raider camps that once thundered with battle cries and black-powder roar now fell in eerie quiet.

Seven ponies approached at dusk—hooves wrapped rag-soft, Tikhars and Helsings slung low. No heroic charge. No adrenaline lightning raids blazing glory.

Just clinical routine.

Anon’s lessons lived in their muscle memory: pump slow, gauge green, bearing to vitals. Unlimited ammunition forged from trash—tin cans, scrap metal, hoof-crank compressors turning garbage to death forever. No scarcity. No desperation.

Kill. Loot. Leave.

A raider sentry dropped first—15mm bearing puffing silent through helmet visor, tumbling inside skull, liquefying brain. Body folded without alarm.

Hellhound pack next—beasts charging with roars that once froze blood. Now Helsing bolts whispered reusable death: eight pumps, overcharge rare, spears pinning throats mid-leap. No echo. No warning for the rest.

Gangs woke to comrades already cooling. Black-powder ammo gathered dust deep in saddlebags—loud, wasteful, wrong now. Traded instead for food, medicine, favors. The thunder of old revolvers felt vulgar. Screaming battles felt… obscene.

Wasteland fights had been adrenaline symphonies: noise, flash, heroic stands under open sky. Now they were surgery: precise, bloodless from distance, horrifying in efficiency.

No monsters that killed without reason anymore.

No Dark Stars vaporizing for existing. No librarians singing you to dinner. No demons owning dark you couldn’t escape.

Everything here died if you pumped quiet and aimed true.

Liberating.

Horrifying.

Littlepip felt it deepest—raids once fueled by righteous fury now cold execution. Loot taken without resistance. Lives ended before pleas began.

Calamity’s wings ached less for sky when fights ended before he lifted—silent bearings dropping flyers mid-dive. But the whoop died in his throat. Victory tasted clinical.

Velvet healed wounds that barely happened—fights over too fast for serious hurt. But the absence of chaos left room for memory: Metro’s unstoppable horrors that silence alone saved you from.

Xenith moved like she always had—but now with bearings backing blades. Kills clean, no ritual needed.

SteelHooves approved the doctrine—Ranger efficiency perfected. Waste nothing. End threats before they escalate.

Dusk—newest, muzzle-scarred—learned fastest. Surface monsters died. Didn’t listen. Didn’t wait. Just charged and fell.

The wasteland shifted around them.

Raiders whispered of ghosts—camps emptied bloodless, loot gone, no shots heard. Hellhound packs thinned without roar.

Seven ponies walked quieter paths.

Carried Metro silence in their hooves.

Killed with the horrifying efficiency of ponies who once hid from things that couldn’t be killed.

Only pumped slow.

Aimed true.

And left the thunder gathering dust.

The sky stayed vast.

But the dark they carried made it feel smaller.

===

The wasteland sun beat down merciless on a stretch of cracked highway outside New Appleloosa—wind carrying the distant clang of repair hammers and the lowing of brahmin.

Seven ponies moved quiet caravan-style: Tikhars slung, Helsing across Littlepip’s back, bearings clinking soft in endless pouches. Clinical efficiency had become habit—raider ambushes ended before they began, hellhound packs thinned without roar.

Word travels fast in the wastes.

Especially when it threatens hoarded power.

Steel Rangers appeared on the ridge—ten strong, power armor gleaming scarred pride, Elder leading with gatling laser humming low. Applejack’s Rangers remnant, but twisted by years of isolation: preservation above all, technology theirs by right.

They blocked the road.

SteelHooves stepped forward first—his own armor marking him kin and traitor both.

The Elder’s voice boomed amplified. “Halt. Reports of unknown pre-war weapons in your possession. Pneumatic projectile systems. Subsonic. Sustainable ammunition. Lost technology. Surrender them for cataloguing and preservation. Ranger property.”

Littlepip’s horn glowed faint—ready, cautious. “They’re not pre-war. Not yours. Scavenged. Adapted.”

The Elder’s helmet tilted. “All advanced weaponry falls under Ranger mandate. Hand them over. Refuse and we take them.”

Calamity’s wings flared. “Try it, tin cans. We’ve faced worse than loud walkers.”

But the Rangers advanced—disciplined, overwhelming.

Fight was brief.

Not thunder.

Silence.

Tikhars whispered from cover—bearings punching through armor joints, tumbling inside plating, shattering servos and flesh. Helsing bolts pinned gatlings mid-spin. No flash. No bang. Rangers dropped confused—systems failing, blood leaking quiet.

SteelHooves fought his former kin with cold precision—laser low-charge, conserving for the doctrine he now lived.

The Elder fell last—bearing through visor, body slumping heavy.

Seven ponies stood over ten armored corpses.

Loot taken clinical: energy cells, medical kits, spare parts.

But no joy.

Littlepip stared at the fallen Elder—once ally order, now obstacle.

“They thought it was theirs by right. Hoarded it like Polis books. Like Red equality. Like Reich purity.”

Velvet’s voice soft. “We took it from a place that takes everything. Now we defend it the same way. Quiet. Efficient. No warning.”

Calamity pumped his Tikhar slow. “Feels wrong. They charged loud, like wasteland should. We ended ’em before they knew. Like Metro ghosts.”

Xenith wiped a blade. “Balance shifts. Technology democratized. No more gatekeepers.”

Dusk whispered, “They’ll send more.”

SteelHooves rumbled agreement. “Ranger command will declare us heretics. War now.”

The wind howled free over the bodies.

Seven ponies moved on—carrying silence deeper into the wastes.

Pneumatics no longer secret.

Wasteland doctrine shifting.

Steel Rangers learning the cost of demanding what the dark had already claimed.

The Metro’s lessons spread.

Quiet.

Inevitably.

===

The campfire burned low in the crater’s shelter—sparks rising free into the vast poison sky, wind carrying them like small, defiant ghosts.

Seven ponies sat close—blankets shared, Tikhars within reach, the night’s chill kept at bay by flames and the slower warmth of words finally spoken.

Littlepip stared into the fire longest, PipBuck dimmed, horn tracing idle patterns in the dust. The others waited—Calamity’s wings folded tight, Velvet’s eyes soft, Xenith’s stripes still, SteelHooves’ shadow steady, Dusk curled small.

Then Littlepip spoke—voice quiet, careful, like testing thin ice over deep dark.

“She told me once. Anon. Green Ghost. About the portals. How they didn’t just pull from other worlds… sometimes just other continents. Far ones. Places the bombs hit different. Places where the sky died harder.”

The fire crackled. Wind answered.

“She mentioned Luna and Celestia. Same names. Same goddesses. References that didn’t fit a completely alien place. The bombs—balefire, megaspells—same apocalypse, just… shaped different by distance. By oceans. By whatever walls the world has.”

Calamity’s ears flicked. “You’re sayin’…”

Littlepip nodded slow. “The Metro might still be here. Same world. Just another continent. Far east, maybe. Across oceans nopony crosses anymore. Portals thin there because the veil tore uneven—storms dumping things both ways. Surface-breakers falling in. Metro ponies sometimes… falling out.”

Velvet’s breath caught. “She could be…”

“Alive,” Littlepip finished. “Or pulled through somewhere else. Another storm. Another tear. Green Ghost—small, quiet, impossible to kill. If anypony survives that dark alone…”

Xenith’s stripes rippled thoughtful. “Balance demands possibility. One life for seven… but worlds curve. Portals echo.”

SteelHooves rumbled low. “Probability low. But non-zero. Anomaly patterns suggest intermittent connectivity.”

Dusk whispered, “She dreamed of sky. If she found it…”

Calamity looked up—real stars wheeling indifferent overhead. “Kid deserved it more than us. Fought harder for it.”

Silence stretched—wind filling it with wasteland song.

Hope flickered fragile as the fire.

Not certainty.

But possibility.

The Metro might still hold her.

Or the world might have given her back somewhere under the same poisoned sun.

Seven ponies stared into the flames.

Mourning softened by a thread of maybe.

The Green Ghost—out there.

Somewhere.

Still quiet.

Still impossible.

The campfire burned brighter for it.

The sky stayed vast.

And for the first time since the veil closed, seven hearts beat with something perilously close to tomorrow.

===

The wasteland whispered warnings long before the Rangers came in force.

Scouts fell silent. Caravans spoke of armored columns moving with purpose. Broadcasts crackled with Ranger declarations: heretics wielding forbidden pre-war relics. Pneumatic systems—subsonic, sustainable, revolutionary. Lost technology resurfaced. To be claimed. Preserved. Controlled.

They were partially correct.

The weapons were revolutionary.

Silent shots killed anything that didn’t notice. Infinite bearings forged from trash rendered ammunition supply lines obsolete. A combat doctrine that ended fights before they began—clinical, bloodless from distance, horrifying in its efficiency.

But not pre-war.

Born in darkness. Forged from necessity and pure spite.

The Metro’s gift: desperation distilled into death that needed no thunder.

The Rangers declared war.

Columns converged—fifty strong, then more. Power armor gleaming under balefire sun, gatling lasers humming, missile launchers loaded, Elders preaching mandate over open channels.

Littlepip’s group—seven ponies—did not run.

They prepared.

Tikhars pumped full. Bearings compressed endless. Helsing bolts sharpened reusable. Positions chosen: ruined overpass, crater fields, chokepoints where open sky favored the silent.

The Rangers charged loud—doctrine of overwhelming force, thunder and steel.

They met silence.

Bearings whispered from cover—punching joints, tumbling inside plating, shattering servos and flesh. No flash to target. No bang to echo. Rangers dropped mid-advance—confused, systems failing, blood leaking quiet.

Gatling lasers spun up—too late. Helsing bolts pinned barrels. Toggle actions cycled smooth—subsonic death reclaiming the hoarders.

SteelHooves fought in the center—his own armor turning on kin, laser low-charge but precise, voice broadcasting final truth:

“Not lost technology. Born from spite. From a place that takes everything. You want it? Earn it in the dark you fear.”

Elders fell. Columns fractured.

The wasteland watched a new kind of war: thunder versus the dark’s patience.

Rangers learned horror—advancing into invisible death, no warning roar, no heroic stand. Just clinical end.

Seven ponies held.

Loot taken: energy cells, medical kits, armor scraps.

But no victory cheer.

Littlepip stood over a fallen Elder—helmet cracked by bearing tumble.

“They thought it was theirs to hoard. Like everything else. But this… this was made because there was nothing left to lose.”

Calamity’s wings spread wide—wind catching real feathers. “We didn’t win loud. We won quiet. Like ghosts.”

Velvet’s eyes distant. “The Metro taught us to kill what can’t be fought. Now we kill what charges proud.”

The Rangers retreated—broken, mandate cracked.

Word spread: seven ponies wielding darkness’s spite.

Wasteland doctrine shifted forever.

Thunder gathered dust.

Silence reigned.

Born from a place that only took.

Given to a world that wasn’t ready.

The war was not over.

But the Rangers learned fear.

Quiet fear.

The kind that listens.

===

Littlepip walked the wasteland roads again—PipBuck ticking steady radiation, revolver at her side, the weight of eyes that still called her Lightbringer.

They said it in New Appleloosa taverns: “Lightbringer’s back—brought new weapons, ended raider packs clean.”

In Tenpony whispers: “Lightbringer returned from nowhere—quieter now, but gardens grow because of her.”

Even DJ Pon3’s voice crackled over airwaves: “Folks, the Lightbringer walks among us again—bringing hope wrapped in silence.”

She heard it.

And felt nothing.

The name had once fit—small unicorn from Stable 2, carrying spark of change through poison dirt. Single Pony Project. Gardens Project. Ending Goddess, Red Eye, Enclave lies. Light in the dark.

But the Metro…

In the Metro she had been nothing.

Small shadow among smaller shadows. Whispering kills. Running from things that didn’t die to bearings. Watching Polis burn because kindness screamed once. Watching a filly choose thunder so seven could feel wind.

No gardens grew there.

No megaspells to break.

No evil with a face to shoot.

Just endless concrete taking pieces until nothing soft remained.

Lightbringer?

She couldn’t even begin to solve it.

Even if another portal tore open—even if wind carried her back to that buried hell—what then?

Ride across oceans? No ships sailed anymore. No zebras crossed poison seas.

Find the continent? Maps burned with the world. Storms shifted land itself.

And the surface there…

She remembered the crossing: rads cooking flesh in hours, mutants owning every ruin, storms flaying hide from bone.

No relocation possible. No exodus. Millions buried deep—adapted to dark, breathing recycled grief.

No light to bring.

Only deeper dark.

Green Ghost—small filly who dreamed harder of sky than any surface pony—might still walk those veins. Quiet. Impossible. Surviving on spite and bearings.

But even if Littlepip found her…

What salvation could she offer?

“This is better,” she would say, gesturing at poison wind and balefire sun.

And Green Ghost—old eyes in young face—might look up.

And see only another ceiling.

Green.

Burning.

Endless.

Littlepip walked quieter roads now.

Saved ponies with silent shots.

Healed with careful words.

Carried the name Lightbringer like ill-fitting barding.

Because some lights reach gardens.

Others only flicker against concrete that never yields.

And the darkest places teach you:

Some shadows have no dawn.

The wasteland called her hero.

She mourned the filly who taught her why some darkness cannot be fixed.

Only escaped.

At terrible cost.

===

Calamity flew higher now—wings beating real wind under poison sky, clouds parting for a pegasus who once lived for the rush.

But the rush was gone.

He circled above raider camps and slaver caravans—eyes sharp, Tikhar slung barrel-down like an old friend he couldn’t let go. The pneumatic rifle—pumped slow, gauge steady green—wasn’t just a weapon.

It was a lifeline.

A piece of her.

Green Ghost’s lessons lived in the crank strokes, the silent puff, the bearing forged from trash. Lose it and he’d lose the last tangible thread to the small filly who burned so seven could feel wind again.

He avoided the old ways.

No more diving charges—whooping loud, revolver thunder drawing fire to himself, redirecting shots from the group like the hero he used to be. That was surface bravado. Wasteland glory.

Now he ghosted.

High. Quiet. Invisible.

When slavers marched below—chains rattling, captives stumbling—he didn’t announce. Didn’t draw attention. Didn’t play shield.

He pumped once. Twice. Gauge green.

Bearing whispered down—puff softer than wind.

Slaver dropped mid-stride—headshot clean, body folding without alarm.

Another. Another.

Dark killing ponies before they realized death had wings.

No scream. No warning. Captives freed in confusion—chains cut later, quiet.

The group safe below—never targeted, never noticed.

Liberating.

Horrifying.

Calamity felt it in his primaries: the old adrenaline missing. No thunder to match his heart. Just clinical end from altitude.

He flew in the dark now—night patrols, moonless skies—silenced shots making him truly undetectable. Shadow with wings. Death from nowhere.

Raiders around campfires told stories of ghosts. Hellhounds charged empty air.

He carried the Tikhar like part of his wing—crank handle worn smooth by his feathers. Lose it and part of her died again.

The kid who never saw real sky.

Who taught him silence was survival.

Who paid thunder for his wind.

Calamity soared higher—wind real, vast, free.

But the dark flew with him.

Invisible.

Undetectable.

Killing quiet.

The lifeline held.

But the sky felt heavier for it.

===

Velvet Remedy sat alone on the crater’s rim—campfire low behind her, wasteland night vast and star-scattered above. The wind carried real sounds: distant brahmin lowing, rad-scorpion clicks, the faint hum of a far-off generator.

No ceilings.

No recycled grief.

Just open sky.

She opened her mouth to sing.

Old habit. Old comfort. Ministry dreams, crusader hymns, melodies that once wrapped broken bodies in golden repair and broken hearts in hope.

The first note came croaked—raw, ragged, like a throat lined with concrete dust.

She stopped.

Tried again.

Lower. Softer.

Still croaked—voice unused fully for so long, muscles atrophied by weeks of whispered healing, months of silence-is-survival.

The hesitation settled cold in her chest.

She remembered.

The Hanza infirmary—bright lamps, guarded hope. Wounded ponies on cots. The stallion with the punctured lung—earth pony, strong once, gasping wet breaths through pain.

She had whispered songs then.

Notes shaped small, careful, magic threaded thin to avoid drawing things.

Most healed enough.

But not him.

Whisper magic lacked power. Bleeding slowed but lingered. Fluid built slow, drowning him from inside over hours.

She stayed longest—whispering harder, voice raw, horn aching, nose bleeding faint.

He died quiet—eyes on hers, gratitude confused with why the song stayed small.

No full voice.

Because full voice was noise.

Noise brought monsters.

Monsters brought death for everypony.

One life for many.

Mercy measured in silence.

Now—under open sky, wind free—she could sing loud.

But the note croaked.

Hesitation deeper than disuse.

Fear lingered: full voice might still summon something.

Or worse—full voice might remind her how much she had muffled.

How kindness itself had learned to hide.

Velvet closed her eyes.

Tried once more—soft, then building.

The croak cracked into something raw but true.

A fragment of old hymn—about light in darkness, healing in pain.

Wind carried it free.

No monsters answered.

Only stars.

And the memory of a stallion who died slow because her song stayed small to save them all.

The hesitation remained.

Voice healing slow.

Like everything the Metro took.

It gave back in pieces.

If at all.

Velvet sang quieter again.

Not from fear.

From grief.

The sky listened.

Unmoved.

===

They sat apart from the campfire’s circle—Xenith cross-legged on a flat rock, stripes blending with night shadows until she seemed part of the dark itself; SteelHooves standing sentinel beyond the light, armor plates catching star-glint like distant, indifferent eyes.

The others slept or pretended to—Littlepip curled small, Velvet humming fragments too soft to carry, Calamity’s wings folded tight as though guarding dreams of sky he no longer trusted.

Xenith spoke first—voice low, striped cadence slow.

“The unicorn walks lighter now. Not in step—in spirit. Once she carried hope like a banner, charging noise and chaos to plant gardens in poison dirt. Now she moves like one who learned darkness listens. Guilt rides her heavier than any PipBuck. Every quiet kill, every life ended before it knew threat—she sees the stallion who died slow because kindness whispered. Sees the filly who burned so we could breathe. The Lightbringer name fits less. She brings no dawn to places that never knew one.”

SteelHooves’ helmet lamps dimmed further—processing, acknowledging.

“Confirmed. Littlepip’s decision matrix altered. Prioritized overwhelming action shifted to preemptive elimination. Heroic risk aversion increased. Guilt loops reinforced by observed Metro attrition. Irreversible adaptation: surface optimism tempered by absolute constraint awareness.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled slow agreement.

“The singer’s voice croaks where it once soared. Mercy once poured full—melody wrapping the wounded in gold. Now she hesitates at the first note, remembering whispered healing that came too weak. One stallion drowned slow because full song was noise, and noise was death. She sings softer even under open sky. Kindness learned to hide. The Metro taught her that some wounds cannot be sung shut—only endured quieter.”

SteelHooves rumbled. “Velvet Remedy healing output reduced. Vocal projection inhibited. Psychological barrier: noise-equals-threat association persistent. Mercy recalibrated to conservation over expression. Irreversible: surface altruism constrained by Metro survival imperative.”

Xenith’s gaze drifted to Calamity’s sleeping form—wings folded like shields.

“The pegasus no longer whoops when he flies. Once he dove loud, drawing fire, redirecting death from the herd with thunder and bravado. Now he ghosts high—silent shots from darkness, invisible killer. Wings beat for altitude, not glory. He carries the Tikhar like part of her—the filly who never felt wind. Lose it and he loses the last piece of her thunder. Sky feels heavier because he knows what real weight is: ceilings that never end.”

SteelHooves’ voice flat, final.

“Calamity aerial doctrine revolutionized. Aggressive engagement replaced by stealth elimination. Adrenaline reward loop disrupted. Psychological anchor: pneumatic weapon as proxy for lost asset. Irreversible: surface bravado eroded by Metro invisibility imperative.”

They fell silent—zebra and steel, watching three ponies sleep under stars that suddenly seemed too bright.

The Metro had taken pieces.

Irreversible.

Littlepip’s blazing hope—tempered to cautious ember.

Velvet’s golden voice—croaked to careful whisper.

Calamity’s thunderous sky—muted to invisible ghost.

The dark gave gifts that could not be returned.

Only carried.

Forever.

The campfire burned lower.

The sky stayed vast.

But three hearts beat quieter for it.

===

Calamity’s Tikhar never gathered dust.

Not once.

Every camp, every quiet hour under wasteland stars, every dawn after silent kills—he took it apart.

Slow. Ritual.

Hooves steady, feathers precise: reservoir bled careful, toggle joint wiped mirror-clean, pressure gauge polished till it reflected his eyes back at him—older now, haunted by ceilings that weren’t there.

The weapon was pristine.

Barrel bore scrubbed flawless. Springs oiled just enough—no excess, no waste. Bearings in pouches sorted by size, gleaming like deadly candy forged fresh from trash. Crank handle worn smooth by his touch, but never scarred.

Obsession.

He carried it like a lifeline.

Because it was.

Piece of her.

Green Ghost’s lessons lived in every stroke: pump slow, gauge green, kill clean. The Tikhar wasn’t just tool—it was the last tangible thread to the small filly who never felt real wind. Who taught him silence was survival. Who burned thunder so he could soar again.

Lose it and part of her died twice.

He flew with it slung barrel-down—high patrols, night ghosts. Silent puffs dropping slavers mid-stride, hellhounds mid-charge. Invisible death from altitude.

Clean.

Efficient.

No thunder.

No whoop.

The old Calamity—revolver thunder, diving charges, drawing fire with bravado—felt like myth now.

This one cleaned his lifeline ritual.

Because in the dark, maintenance was control.

The only thing the Metro couldn’t take.

If he kept it flawless, kept the silence perfect, maybe the grief stayed clean too.

Maybe she lived in the gauge’s steady green.

Maybe the wind he finally felt again carried her echo.

He polished.

Pumped.

Aimed.

Killed quiet.

Carried the obsession like wings that no longer needed to whoop.

The Tikhar gleamed.

Pristine.

Lifeline.

Obsession.

The only thunder left was memory.

And even that he kept silent.

===

The campfire had burned to embers—wasteland night vast and star-scattered, wind howling free through the ruins like it had a debt to collect.

Calamity slept uneasy—wings folded tight, body curled small on his bedroll as though the sky itself might press down again.

In his hooves: the Tikhar.

Cradled.

Not slung. Not leaned. Cradled close to his chest like a foal that never was.

Feathers wrapped gentle around the reservoir, barrel pressed to his barrel, crank handle tucked under one wing like a blanket edge.

He nuzzled it in sleep—muzzle buried in cold steel and oiled wood, breathing deep.

Listening.

To the faint, steady hiss of sealed pressure.

As if it was her voice.

Small. Flat. Unreadable.

Whispering lessons he already knew by heart: pump slow, gauge green, kill clean.

In dreams he heard her—Green Ghost, Anonfilly—small shadow teaching him silence from a place that never knew wind.

“Noise is death,” the pressure sighed.

“Waste nothing,” the valve whispered.

“Stay invisible,” the bearing pouches rustled.

He pressed closer—muzzle to metal, listening for the voice that bought his sky with thunder.

The Tikhar never spoke.

But in sleep he cradled it anyway.

As if he could cradle her.

Small green filly who dreamed harder of wind than he ever had.

Who never felt it.

Who stayed behind so he could.

The wasteland wind howled around the camp—free, vast, merciless.

Calamity slept on.

Cradling the only piece of her left.

Listening to silence that sounded like her.

The lifeline held.

But the dream weighed heavier than any ceiling.

===

The rumors reached the clouds fast—whispers carried on vertibuck downdraft and Enclave broadcasts: ground-walkers wielding revolutionary weapons. Silent. Sustainable. Subsonic death from scrap and spite.

The Enclave claimed them.

“Lost technology,” the Grand Pegasus Enclave declared over open channels. “Pre-war cloud arsenal prototype. Surface contamination has rediscovered it. To be reclaimed. Purified. Returned to proper hooves.”

They descended.

Vertibucks blotting the poison sun, power-armored pegasi dropping like judgment—energy lances humming, plasma rifles charged, superiority etched in every wingbeat.

They demanded surrender of the pneumatics.

SteelHooves faced them first—his own armor marking him kin and apostate both.

The Enclave commander hovered—visor gleaming arrogant white.

“Ranger relic. You carry forbidden ground-tech. Surrender the pneumatics. They are Enclave patrimony. Lost prototypes from cloud arsenals. We will reclaim what the surface stole.”

SteelHooves did not move.

Offense burned cold in his processors.

“Negative.”

The commander’s wings flared. “Explain.”

SteelHooves’ voice rumbled flat, ancient.

“These weapons were not lost. They were born. From necessity. From spite. In darkness you never touched. Short to medium range—tunnels, corridors, places your thunder cannot reach without echoing your own death.

“Your plasma burns bright. Your lances scream. You fight in open sky—altitude, overwhelming force, energy without limit.

“These?” He gestured to the Tikhars slung silent. “These kill what listens. What waits. What your noise awakens.

“You have no use for them.

“You never did.

“You remind me of the Reich.”

The commander recoiled as though struck.

“Impurity! Treason!”

SteelHooves continued, unmoved.

“Purity through exclusion. Strength through hate. Hoarding what you deem superior while fearing what the ground forges better. The Reich shaved manes and burned books for blood. You hide in clouds and burn ground for impurity.

“Both claim mandate over what you never earned.

“Both fear what the dark taught us: silence kills cleaner than thunder.

“Both are wrong.”

The Enclave attacked—plasma screaming, lances flashing.

They met silence.

Bearings whispered from cover—punching power-armor joints, tumbling inside plating, shattering servos and flesh. No flash to target. No bang to echo. Pegasi dropped mid-dive—wings folding, bodies falling like judgment reversed.

Vertibucks spun—pilots dead before alarms.

The commander fell last—bearing through visor, body crashing heavy to wasteland dirt.

Seven ponies stood over cloud-white corpses.

No victory cheer.

SteelHooves stared at the fallen commander—once kin, now echo of another fanaticism.

“They claimed what they could not use. Feared what they could not control. Like the Reich—purity in the name of superiority.

“The Metro taught us better tools.

“The wasteland keeps them.”

The wind howled free over broken armor.

Seven ponies moved on.

Carrying silence deeper.

Enclave learning the cost of claiming what the dark birthed from spite.

The sky stayed vast.

But the clouds felt heavier for it.

===

The wasteland, ever hungry for edges, tried to copy what it could not understand.

Whispers spread faster than rad-storms: the seven’s silent death. Tikhars whispering from shadow. Bearings tumbling inside flesh without flash or bang. Ammunition endless—trash into termination.

Blacksmiths in New Appleloosa. Tinkerers in Tenpony basements. Raider warlords with stolen schematics. All tried to birth the weapons from scratch.

They failed beautifully.

Inferior. Overdesigned. Lethal to the wielder first.

Reservoirs forged thick—too thick—seals crude, valves prone to catastrophic bleed. Pumps ornate, gears added for “reliability” that only multiplied failure points. One twitch of overcharge and the canister burst—shrapnel turning the user to red mist before the enemy noticed.

Ball bearings? They used expensive steel—pre-war stock, scavenged rare—machined perfect instead of compressed trash. Cost blood for every magazine. No endless supply. No spite-forged infinity.

The copies barked louder—hiss too sharp, puff too violent. Gauge needles jittered unreliable. Recoil kicked wrong.

Raiders died testing them—canisters exploding in hooves, bearings jamming mid-fight.

The seven noticed.

In a roadside camp, Calamity cleaning his pristine Tikhar—ritual slow—spotted a trader caravan hauling crude copies.

“Buck… look at that mess,” he muttered, wings rustling. “Overbuilt like they’re tryin’ to impress. Ours were born simple—’cause simple survives when nothin’ else does.”

Littlepip examined a seized copy—reservoir cracked, valve weeping pressure.

“They think it’s tech. Hoardable. Pre-war magic. Not… necessity. Not spite.”

Velvet’s croaked voice soft. “They’ll kill themselves faster than enemies. Metro taught us minimal. Clean. These… these scream before they shoot.”

Xenith traced a crude weld. “Imbalance. Decoration over function. Like painting targets on armor.”

SteelHooves scanned one—cold disapproval.

“Ranger mandate would claim these failures as proof of superiority. But they miss the point: the weapons worked because the dark demanded nothing extra. Only death. Quiet. Endless.”

Dusk whispered, “Green Ghost would laugh. Or not. She didn’t laugh much.”

The seven moved on.

Leaving the wasteland to its clumsy thunder.

Copies exploding in hooves that never learned silence.

Spite’s children misunderstood.

Born wrong.

Dying loud.

The true pneumatics stayed with them—clean, quiet, forged from a place that only took.

The wasteland learned slow.

Some lessons kill the student first.

===

The campfire burned steady in the wasteland night—embers rising free into stars that no longer pressed down. Seven ponies sat close, the vast sky a mercy they still couldn’t fully trust.

Littlepip stared into the flames longest—PipBuck dimmed, horn tracing restless patterns in the dirt. The others watched her—Calamity’s wings folded tight, Velvet’s eyes soft with worry, Xenith’s stripes still, SteelHooves’ shadow steady, Dusk curled small.

Then Littlepip spoke—voice quiet, but edged with the old Lightbringer fire tempered by concrete dark.

“We go back.”

Silence crashed heavier than any ceiling.

“We find the portal. The same storm scar that spat us there. It’s still in us—on us. My PipBuck logged the anomaly signature. Magic residue. We find another tear. Go through. Find her.”

Calamity’s ears pinned flat. “Pip… that’s insane.”

Littlepip didn’t flinch. “Green Ghost is alive. Has to be. Small. Quiet. Impossible to kill. She knows those tunnels better than anypony. If anypony survived alone…”

Velvet’s croaked voice soft, breaking. “Littlepip… she turned back. Chose thunder so we could live. Going back… it undoes that. Makes her sacrifice nothing.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled slow. “Balance was paid. One for seven. To demand more risks tipping the scale to zero.”

SteelHooves rumbled low. “Probability of stable portal recurrence low. Survival inside without preparation lower. Tactical suicide. Emotional override detected.”

Dusk whispered, “She stayed so we could feel sky. Going back… drags her from the dream she bought us.”

Calamity’s wings trembled. “Kid wanted out. Wanted wind. Real light. We got it because she didn’t. Chasin’ her back into that grave… it spits on what she did.”

Littlepip’s eyes shone wet in the firelight—stubborn, fractured.

“I know. I know it makes her sacrifice… less. But leaving her there—small filly alone in endless dark, surviving on spite because we didn’t come back? That’s worse. Lightbringer doesn’t leave ponies behind. Not if there’s a chance.”

The fire crackled.

Wind answered—vast, free, merciless.

Seven ponies around the flames.

Debating the impossible return.

One small green absence carved deeper than any wound.

The proposal hung.

Insane.

Necessary.

The sky stayed open.

But the dark below called one name.

Quiet.

Impossible.

Waiting.

The debate burned slower than the fire.

And no pony slept easy that night.

===

Littlepip waited until the campfire burned to embers and the wasteland night wrapped the camp in its vast, indifferent hush.

The others slept—or pretended to. Calamity curled around his Tikhar like a foal. Velvet’s breathing soft and croaked. Xenith’s stripes still as shadow. SteelHooves on watch but systems dimmed. Dusk small and trusting.

Littlepip rose quiet.

PipBuck dimmed to nothing. Revolver checked. Helsing slung. Bearings pouches full. One emergency needle. No note. No goodbye.

She looked at them once—six ponies who carried Metro scars in their souls.

Then turned toward the horizon where the anomaly signature still flickered faint in her memory.

Alone.

The sacrifice would mean something.

Green Ghost burned so seven could live under sky.

If Littlepip dragged them back into the dark, it undid that.

Made the thunder nothing.

So she walked alone.

Hooves soft on wasteland dirt—Metro caution in every step. Wind real in her mane. Stars vast above.

But the dark called ahead.

She would find another tear.

Cross oceans of poison if needed.

Descend again.

Find the small green shadow who dreamed of wind harder than any of them.

Bring her home.

Or die trying.

Lightbringer didn’t leave ponies behind.

Not if there was a chance.

Morning found the camp empty of one.

Calamity woke first—wings flaring, Tikhar clutched tighter.

“She’s gone.”

Velvet’s croak broke. “Alone?”

Xenith traced hoofprints leading away—single file, deliberate.

SteelHooves scanned horizon. “Direction matches recorded anomaly vector.”

Dusk whispered, “She went back. For her.”

Calamity’s ears flattened. “Stubborn little… buck. She’ll get herself killed. Or worse.”

The six looked at the vast sky.

Then at the single set of tracks leading toward impossible dark.

The Lightbringer walked alone.

To reclaim what the Metro took.

Or to join it forever.

The wind howled free.

But carried no answer.

The sacrifice doubled.

For one green ghost.

Who might still be waiting.

Quiet.

Impossible.

Alone.

===

They chased her across the wasteland—six ponies driven by grief sharper than any bearing.

Calamity flew high—wings beating real wind, eyes scanning horizons for the small unicorn’s tracks. Velvet ran beside Xenith—stripes and croaked breath in rhythm. SteelHooves thundered steady. Dusk kept pace on terror and loyalty.

No words needed.

They knew where she went.

The original scar.

The thin veil that spat them into hell and sealed behind their escape.

Days blurred—raider camps avoided, hellhounds ghosted past with silent puffs. The six moved like Metro shadows under open sky.

They found her at dusk.

Littlepip stood alone before the shimmer—vast crater where the portal storm once raged. Air rippled faint, veil thinned to tissue but closed. Ghost images flickered: concrete ribs, crystal lamps dying, endless dark beyond.

She faced it—horn glowing weak against the haze, PipBuck screaming anomaly readings, revolver slung but untouched.

The six approached slow—hooves soft on wasteland dirt.

Calamity landed first—wings folding, Tikhar cradled like accusation.

“Pip… buck, what’re you doin’?”

Littlepip didn’t turn.

“It’s still here. Closed. But possible. I can feel it. Same signature. Same tear. Just… needs the right push. Song. Magic. Blood. Something.”

Velvet’s croak broke. “You left without us.”

“Because you were right,” Littlepip said quiet. “Going back undoes her sacrifice. Makes the thunder nothing. So I go alone. You stay. Make it mean something.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled. “Balance does not allow half-payment.”

SteelHooves rumbled. “Solo probability of success near zero. Group increases marginally. But cost remains absolute.”

Dusk whispered, “She’d hate this. You going back alone.”

Calamity stepped closer—wing brushing her shoulder.

“Kid wanted sky. Wanted out. You drag yourself back into that grave… it spits on what she did. But leavin’ you to do it alone? That spits on what we are.”

Littlepip finally turned—eyes wet, stubborn fire dimmed by Metro weight.

“I can’t leave her there. Small filly. Alone. Surviving on spite because we didn’t come back.”

The veil shimmered mocking—ghost concrete beyond.

Six ponies stood behind one.

The tear waited.

Closed.

But possible.

The wind howled free.

Carrying no answer.

Only the choice.

Seven hearts at the threshold again.

This time choosing to descend.

Or not.

The dark beyond listened.

Quiet.

Patient.

Waiting for thunder.

Or silence.

===

They stood before the shimmer—seven ponies at the threshold of the original scar.

No debate left.

Only choice.

Littlepip’s horn blazed first—magic pouring raw into the veil, feeding the rift like blood to a wound.

Velvet sang—full voice now, croak burned away by need, notes shattering the last barrier.

Calamity beat wings against it—feathers forcing width.

Xenith traced blood glyph—balance demanded payment again.

SteelHooves anchored—armor shield against backlash.

Dusk reached small hoof—hope trembling.

The veil tore slow—agonizing, reluctant.

Light poured both ways.

Then sound.

A string of foul-mouthed curses and slurs no pony expected—raw, vicious, creative enough to scorch concrete.

“—motherbuckin’ cock-garglin’ shit-stained valve-leakin’ son of a nosalis whore—OPEN YOU STUPID FUCKIN’ RIP ALREADY—”

Small voice.

Familiar voice.

Flat. Mid-Atlantic accent. Pre-war human edge sharpened by endless dark.

Green Ghost.

Anonfilly.

On the other side.

Cursing a blue streak as she hammered something—metal on metal, frantic pumps, Uboinik thunder barking distant answer to monsters she was still diverting.

The tear widened—hands and hooves pulling opposite directions.

Seven on this side.

One small green shadow on that.

Swearing like a sailor who learned profanity from hell itself.

Trying to find a way through.

The veil stretched.

Thunder echoed closer.

Curses louder.

The dark tried to keep her.

But the small filly who dreamed of sky harder than any of them?

She was coming.

Foul-mouthed.

Alive.

Impossible.

The tear held.

Just wide enough.

For eight.

===

The veil tore wide—seven ponies pulling with horn, song, wing, glyph, steel, and desperate hope.

Light poured both ways.

Curses poured louder.

“—you absolute cockwaffle of a reality-tearing shitstain, OPEN WIDER YOU—”

A small green blur tumbled through.

Anonfilly.

Cloak scorched and torn, mane wild tangle of black and neon stripes, eyes older than continents but burning alive. Uboinik slung empty—chambers spent, barrel hot. Saddlebags ragged, bearing pouches near-flat. Coat matted with blood (some hers, most not), one ear notched fresh, but standing.

Breathing.

Cursing.

She rolled to her hooves in wasteland dirt—real dirt, poison wind whipping her cloak like a flag of defiance.

Looked up.

Saw sky.

Real sky.

Vast. Burning. Free.

The curses died mid-stream.

Her mouth opened.

Closed.

Opened again.

“...fuck.”

Small voice.

Raw.

Then the seven rushed her—Calamity’s wings wrapping first, Velvet’s forelegs second, Littlepip’s horn glowing gentle, Xenith’s stripes warm, SteelHooves’ shadow sheltering, Dusk’s small body pressing close.

Eight again.

Anonfilly stood stiff—small body trembling from exhaustion, adrenaline, something perilously close to feeling.

“Didn’t… think you’d come back,” she muttered into Calamity’s feathers. “Thought the thunder bought you permanent wind.”

Littlepip’s voice cracked. “Couldn’t leave you.”

Anon pulled back—old eyes scanning them, sky, wind, dirt.

“Survived. Quiet. Spite. Like always. Monsters got busy eating each other after the noise. Found the veil flickering. Been cursing it open for days.”

She looked up—really looked.

Sky.

Wind in her mane.

Real light burning her eyes.

A single tear tracked clean through grime.

“...worth it.”

The eight stood together.

Under poison sun.

Wind howling free.

The veil snapped shut behind—sealed forever, perhaps.

Or waiting.

Didn’t matter.

The Green Ghost felt sky.

The thunder had not been in vain.

The dark lost one small shadow.

And the wasteland gained an impossible eighth.

Who cursed like a sailor.

Survived like spite incarnate.

And finally, finally, felt wind.

===

The campfire crackled low in the wasteland night—embers rising free into stars that no longer pressed down. Eight ponies sat close: blankets shared, Tikhars and Helsing leaned nearby, wind carrying real scents of dust and distant rain.

Anonfilly—Green Ghost no longer, just Anon now—sat smallest in the circle, cloak patched and scorched, Uboinik across her lap empty but gleaming clean in the firelight. Her mane tangled wild, eyes older than continents but alive with something new: wind in her face, sky above, real dirt under hooves.

The others watched her—hungry for the story, afraid of it too.

Calamity nudged gentle. “Kid… how? We heard the thunder fade. Thought…”

Anon’s mouth twitched—almost smile, edged with old flatness.

“Ran toward the Reich main outpost. Big one. Heavy guards. Flamethrowers. Pure-blood central.”

Littlepip’s ears flattened. “You diverted them there?”

Anon nodded once. “Knew the layout. Old stalker maps. Slipped a grate—small. They couldn’t follow fast. Shot enough to draw everything. Demons crashed their barricades. Librarians sang their way through patrols. Reich fought loud—flamethrowers, black powder, purity chants.”

She paused, staring into flames.

“Monsters don’t care about purity. Just meat. Reich died screaming ideology. Monsters died full. Wiped each other out. I hid. Quiet. Waited. Scavenged. Found the veil flickering again—your side pulling. Cursed it open from mine.”

Velvet’s croak soft, eyes shining. “You survived hell. Again.”

Anon shrugged small shoulders. “Spite. Always spite. And… knew you idiots might try something stupid. Like coming back.”

Calamity laughed—wet, relieved, wings spreading to wrap her gentle.

“Buck… glad you’re safe, kid. Thought we lost you.”

Littlepip leaned close—horn glowing faint comfort.

“We did. For a while. But you’re here. Wind in your mane. Sky above.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled approval. “Balance restored. Eight again.”

SteelHooves rumbled low. “Irreplaceable asset recovered. Optimal.”

Dusk pressed small against her. “You feel wind now.”

Anon looked up—really looked.

Sky.

Vast. Burning. Free.

Wind whipping her cloak.

A single tear tracked clean through grime—unashamed.

“Yeah,” she muttered. “Worth the curses.”

The eight sat closer.

Fire crackling.

Wind howling free.

The filly who survived endless dark on spite and silence.

Finally felt sky.

And the seven who chased her back.

Finally breathed full.

Together.

The wasteland night stretched vast.

But eight hearts filled it.

The Green Ghost—Anonfilly—was home.

The thunder had not been in vain.

===

The campfire crackled steady—wasteland night vast above, wind howling free through ruins like it had stories to tell.

Eight ponies sat close.

Anonfilly—cloak torn, Uboinik empty but cradled like old friend, eyes wide taking in stars that didn’t press down—stared at the poison-green sky, then at the group, then back at the sky.

She finally spoke—voice flat, edged with the old Metro bite.

“What kind of fresh hell are we in now?”

The others exchanged glances—relief still raw, grief softened by her impossible return.

Littlepip answered first—voice gentle, horn glowing faint to light her face.

“Same world. Different continent. Equestrian Wasteland. Balefire bombs fell here too—megaspells, war, end of everything. Radiation, mutants, ruins. But sky. Open sky. Wind. Gardens growing in poison dirt. Ponies rebuilding, slow.”

Anon’s ears flicked. “So… surface hell. Not buried hell.”

Calamity grinned crooked—wings spread to catch wind. “Poison wind beats recycled breath. You can fly. Fight loud if you want. Die under stars, not concrete.”

Velvet’s croak soft. “Raiders. Slavers. Hellhounds. Enclave pegasi hiding in clouds. Steel Rangers hoarding tech. But hope too. Stables opening. Towns. Music under real light.”

Xenith’s stripes rippled. “Factions war for scraps. No pure collective. No buried purity. Just… survival with choices.”

SteelHooves rumbled. “Threats visible. Engagements optional. No inescapable dark.”

Dusk whispered, “And friends. Real ones.”

Anon processed—small hooves digging into real dirt, wind whipping her mane.

Then the practical question—Metro-sharp.

“Which group’s trying to kill us right now? And which ones should we start killing first?”

The group laughed—relieved, ragged, real.

Littlepip’s smile crooked. “Steel Rangers want our pneumatics—think it’s their lost tech. Enclave claimed it too. Both got… educated. Raiders everywhere. Slavers always. But no one’s hunting us this minute.”

Calamity leaned in. “We pick fights careful now. Quiet when it works. Loud when it don’t. You taught us that.”

Anon’s mouth twitched—almost smile.

“Fresh hell with choices. And sky.”

She looked up again.

Wind in her face.

Real light burning her eyes.

“...I can work with that.”

The eight sat closer.

Fire crackling.

Wind howling free.

The filly who survived endless dark.

Learning a new hell.

With friends this time.

The sky stayed vast.

And for the first time, Anonfilly didn’t check for ceilings.

Just breathed.