It was overwhelmingly familiar, the burn and sizzle of his own flesh blistering in the heat, the flames scalding his hooves at each step; and yet he found sudden respite upon her body, the thud of his hooves on pale skin and gray muzzle and sooty wings. Lashing out at her felt good, and her warm body put a layer between his feet and the burning ground. Yet with every moment trickling through his hooves, the stench of her charred flesh filled his nostrils, pungent and hot, and he was shivering. It wasn’t remorse he was feeling, no, but his gut was twisting with each moment, even as unbidden her smile sprang to the forefront of his mind. The stallion’s whole body is not just throbbing from pain, but screeching, each nerve ending- and there were so many of them- more alive than ever before, and his mind too.

Guns was howling at him, Ricochet could hear it dimly in the background, a never-ending keening that sawed at his ears.

He wants to beat her into the ground, until Alina the kind of heart and naïve of mind was but a slick of red and white and gray, covered in mud and bruised and battered, broken beyond repair. For a horrible, yet somehow satisfying moment, she doesn’t scream. Maybe she’s dead. But then it begins, a hideous screaming that grates, a screech unlike anything Ricochet’s ever heard before.

Somewhere he is panicking too. She will be one of his earlier murders in his lifetime, and there was joy and pride in vanquishing one of the freaks, but there was also something tremendously terrifying about it too, not that the Incendiary would ever admit it.

When the black mare had spied on Dragomir and him, Ricochet had leaped into the fight with eyes bright and tail wagging… he didn’t have any qualms at attacking a mare with a wing broken, didn’t even see anything unethical about it. It was his duty to remove those who were in his way, and she was a danger as well as a blight on the eyes; she knew of the Equine Empire. Yet here, with Alina, where was the strength in beating an opponent already weaker than him, who couldn’t fight, who could only talk with a cheerful tone? No. Gunslinger had long since beaten into his mind his superiority. Alina’s death was inevitable; the Incendiary was only delivering it to her early.
Not even her. It.

She was probably dead by now… but still something in his gut twists hideously, dishonorably, and for a moment he pauses in his beating of her, smoke burning in his eyes. Within that sliver of a second suddenly the mare is rising, an angel smeared with crimson and clay. Wings clip his charred face and a hoof knocks him in the muzzle as she rises on those blasphemous extra limbs of hers, and suddenly hooves are raining down on him. Whatever shred of mercy he had dissipates as his body automatically goes onto defense. It’s easier this way, to just fight, not to think or ponder or doubt.

Blood was raining down on him, splatters and drips of crimson.

“JUST LEAVE!” The Incendiary screams over the endless howling of Guns.
Why can’t she just leave? She still has wings, no matter how burnt they may be. Mostly, he doesn’t want her here; there are bruises and swellings still hidden beneath his buttermilk skin from his run-in with Shadow, still scabs where icy willow trees lashed at his chest and neck, where her flailing hooves caught him by sheer luck. For all his shortcomings, Ricochet has begun to realize, however slowly, sometimes it was better to let himself recuperate and let wrongs go by then leap into battle with every mutant to pass him by. Today in this hellish, hot world where he was dripping and lathered with sweat, he had been an idiot.

With a snarl of frustration as much derived from his stupidity as from her, Ricochet rears, snapping at her slender legs, ears pinned flat and teal eyes narrowed against the deluge of stone hooves flying at his skull. A foreleg hits him behind the ear, another above the eye, and his head throbs.

Fire burns at his hooves.
He was not going to repeat himself again. Either she would take to the blue sky like the coward she was, or she would fall beneath him and die.

It was her choice.