Rather unerringly, Fleetfire's hoofsteps echoed. Her eyes swivelled from left to right and back again in caution, her breathing came in quick and shallow gasps. The corridor ahead was damp and dark, moss crept down from the ceiling and hugged the grey walls. The moss looked enticing, but Fleetfire knew it was anything but edible, she had learned that the hard way. A cool breeze rattled its way down the corridor, through a small gap in the door at the end. That must be the way out, Fleetfire thought. Her steps quickened in eagerness to reach the outside world once more, but something made her heart lurch in fear. Even though the sound of her own hoofsteps had quickened, the dissonant "echo" did not. Instantly Fleetfire knew that she was being followed. In preparation for what was to come, she pulled her crossbow from its holster and silently clicked a bolt into the shaft, her speed quickening all the while. From behind, there came the sound of metallic feet on tiles. Whatever it was, it was chasing her! Fleetfire burst through the door at the end of the corridor and found herself bathed in rays of sunlight.
For a moment, she stood at the doorway, slightly dazed by the sudden change of environment. But then she remembered, just as the clash of metal grew uncomfortably close. She twisted her body out of the way just in time; a pegasus barrelled through the space where she had just been standing and crashed into the building across the street. Swallowing nervously, Fleetfire walked over to the unmoving creature with growing dread. It appeared to be unconscious. Fleetfire laughed nervously, in a pathetic attempt to soothe her fluttering heart. Unconscious? If such a thing was even possible with these monsters. Her own thoughts kept her suspicions fresh as she poked the unmoving cybernaut with the end of her crossbow. The only organic part of the pony that still existed was the head itself, though not much of that had been spared either. Fleetfire gazed into the red lights that were the pegasus' eyes, sickened by what she saw. As she looked on, she began to realize something, and as that realization came to be, she slowly started to back away from the cybernautic pegasus. Its eyes still burned a fierce red, and that to Fleetfire suggested it was alive enough to still tear her to pieces if it so chose to. Breaking her lapse in concentration, Fleetfire raised the crossbow to align the shot with the cybernaut's head and placed her hoof on the trigger in readiness to fire. It was at that moment that the cybernaut moved, pulling itself to its feet and turning to face Fleetfire who at this point was firing her first shot. Disappointingly enough, her first shot bounced off the protective frame encapsulating the pony's head, the bolt hitting the ground some twenty hooves away.
With a snarl, Fleetfire reloaded in haste, cantering in a circle around the cybernaut as she did. The cybernaut chittered an unintelligible string of gibberish and proceeded to fire an explosive rocket from a hatch on its shoulder. At the same time, it swung one huge metal foreleg around and released a hail of small metal shotgun bearings in its wake. Fleetfire gasped as several of the small metal bearings got a bit too close for comfort, one actually grazed her back as she galloped for safety. An explosion rattled her skull as the small rocket took apart the front of a shop behind her, and she was showered with hot shards of broken glass and even hotter clumps of smashed rubble. She yelled in pain and shook the debris from herself and, in a moment of anger, stood up and fired another bolt at the cybernaut. The bolt lodged itself into the cybernauts' left knee-cap, causing a hot shower of sparks to shower out from the stretched circuitry. It roared in anger and as it did, a rocket sped out of its mouth and hit the ground in front of Fleetfire. The resulting force of the explosion pushed her back from the cybernaut and into a half-blasted wall where she stopped and spat out a string of blood. Her ears rang and she could not hear a sound besides that. Tentatively, she lifted a hoof to her left ear and felt something warm and wet; the explosion had popped her eardrums, temporarily deafening her. Not only that, but at this point she felt a dozen or so cuts or scratches all over her body. She gritted her teeth in annoyance, now this had gone too far. But even as she loaded her bow with one particularly large bolt designed to explode on impact, Fleetfire saw the cybernaut approach through the cloud of dust. She looked at her crossbow in silent prayer, slid the bolt back till it clicked, and lined up her sight with the cybernauts' head.
As the cybernaut came to stand before Fleetfire, she smiled innocently at the creature and loosed the bolt into its head. The cybernaut was blown to smithereens. The resulting mess was, to Fleetfire's finding, overly satisfying. With a frown, she wiped a bit of what appeared to be grey matter from her cheek and flicked it onto the ground. "In this day and age, you can't go about losing your head," she muttered, knowing full well that what she had just said was a terrible pun. With a breath of relief that her fight was over, she attempted to move away from the wall where she had been thrown. At that moment, a sharp pain emanated from her shoulder, and she saw the long metal wall bracket that was... going straight through it. At that moment, Fleetfire was filled with dread. The wall bracket not only was far extended from the concrete walling that it was attached to, but it was also twisted upwards. She had no hope of escaping this situation, unless she amputated her foreleg, which she did not fancy. Besides, she had not the tools nor the time judging by the pool of blood that was rapidly collecting around her hind-hooves. She realized that the pain was not at all that bad, and then she clenched her shoulder muscle in the self-consciousness she had brought upon herself. She screamed in agony as blood squirted from her shoulder, showering her face as she stared on in pain and horror. The street echoed with her screams. A thought occurred to her amidst the haze of pain and blood, someone or something must surely have heard her screams. She was trapped, dying and now she had probably alerted all the cybernautic hunters in the city to her presence, if not the actual machines themselves.
This day had turned out to be some funeral, she mused in a form self-deprecating humour. Her eyes closed against the pain.
((Now one of you guys get to save me and patch me up. My hero/heroine!)