They landed in a grove of trees, near where the road to Applejack’s farm met Ponyville’s main thoroughfare. The geography of the area was burned into Joker’s mind, after years of forced study in school as well as pilot training. For a mare who supposedly mourned the loss of Ponyville, Princess Twilight seemed almost obsessed with making sure nopony forgot exactly how the town was.

Of course, eighty-five years later, most of the former dirt roads were overgrown with trees and wild grass, with the occasional grove of flowers sprouting from the ground. It seemed almost peaceful, except for the Brute presence.

Shortly after hitting the ground, Joker activated her heat pattern gear, a little machine that passively monitored fluctuations of heat patterns to identify friendlies and enemies. The half-magic, half-tech Golems almost constantly showed up as white-hot, while the Brutes, more often than not, were colder than their surroundings. The gear had already picked up at least four Brute signatures by the time Joker managed to run Thief over to where the rest of Fireteam Philomena had dropped.

Up close, the Mark VIs were about a head shorter than Thief, but longer and meaner looking; so much that Joker wasn’t sure if there was much pony left in the design of the things. Pilot Jaeger’s Golem was easy to make out, with a red stripe painted down the right side of the Golem’s “face.” She turned to Joker.

“Pilot Joker is making up for Pilot Goose today in his rifle position; Joker, in the back. Ragtag, Arrow, flank me,” Jaeger said over the fireteam comm channel. “We’re going to hit Sugarcube Corner. Our orders are not to touch the building itself . . . but not all orders have to be obeyed, clear?”

“Clear, ma’am,” Ragtag and Arrow shouted, and Joker echoed. She wasn’t about to piss off Jaeger, at least not before the mission even got underway.

Joker moved to the rear of the fireteam and broke into what passed for a trot in the Golems. She kept Thief’s “eyes” on Jaeger’s Golem as much as possible, while checking her rear and side cameras every few seconds. Over the open channel, cries of alarm and shouts of victory came in from the Mark V teams, who had begun fighting their way through Brutes to Twilight’s castle.

The shells of houses around Ponyville loomed above Joker, most of them rotted away and only a few pieces left standing. Some were just piles of refuse, while others, oddly, looked like they had just been left for a day, with only the decaying paint an indicator of how long it had been. Being inside the Everfree Forest, even around Zecora’s Hut or Fluttershy’s Cottage, was one thing, but seeing the world so empty would have sent shivers up Joker’s spine if she had one. The houses were so familiar from the brightly-colored pictured books of her childhood, but then run through a wringer of pain and waste.

“Eyes on the prize, girls,” Jaeger said. “Brute activity is being drawn away by the Mark Vs. We should be able to make it to Sugarcube Corner before we can expect to run into—”

A burst of magic opened up in front of Jaeger’s Golem, forcing the behemoth to a stop. In front of her stood a Brute, a monstrosity just like the rest of its race. Like all Brutes, this one was different from the rest; it stood on three misshapen legs with too many joints while a fourth limb that was too long for its body ended in a bony hook. Its head, or what passed for it, had too-large eyes and a jaw that stretched forward like an alligator’s, but hung open limply.

By the time the monster’s scythe-arm was swung at Jaeger, she had already leapt out of the way and opened fire on the Brute. Her plasma rounds impacted its chest, and the Brute staggered, long enough for Ragtag and Arrow to open up with shrapnel grenades and chain guns, respectively. Joker selected her anti-material rifle by clicking her teeth together, and her vision filled with the familiar scope.

The Brute, for being so brittle-looking, was fairly agile and managed to dodge the brunt of Arrow and Ragtag’s rounds. It leapt away across the street toward a hollowed-out house, then disappeared in a flash of magic, only to reappear in another flash. Unfortunately for the Brute, their magic still gave off plenty of heat, and it reappeared right into Joker’s crosshairs.

She “pulled the trigger” by grinding her front teeth together, and a bullet the size of her pony head spat out of the massive rifle attached to her side. Coated in a field of magic, it impacted into the Brute’s eye socket in a hail of viscera. Joker didn’t spend anymore time looking, instead getting the Golem to automatically load another round into the chamber and lining up another shot.

By the time she brought up her scope, however, the rest of the fireteam was pouring their ammunition onto the stunned Brute in a hail of brass and magic. The thing dropped to the ground and attempted to cover itself with its three bony legs while slashing out with the scythe, but couldn’t hit any of them.

Finally, after another thirty seconds, the stop command—a short, high-pitched beep in their comm—sounded from Jaeger. “Don’t expend any more ammunition,” she said. “There’ll be plenty more around Sugarcube Corner. Keep moving.”

Joker took off in a trot after them, taking up the rear once more. She afforded herself a few moments of quiet before she put her weapons away and started to scan their position. Sugarcube Corner was just up ahead, but her gear showed no hostiles around the vicinity. Her eyes scanned the rest of the radar-like gear, and her heart dropped just in time for her to whirl around.

The Brute from before, missing half its flesh but still coming, leapt at them with its full weight behind it. Joker managed to get out of the way, but one of the other pilots—Joker couldn’t tell if it was Ragtag or Arrow—wasn’t so lucky. Whoever she was, she screamed loudly when the scythe went right through the middle of her Golem like it was made of recycled paper, and the Golem’s lights went dark. Joker hoped it was because they had cut the cable.

The Brute made for Joker next and threw itself at her as well. She tried to bring up her rifle, but the thing was too fast and sent her toppling to the ground, with its whole body on top of her. The only thing that saved her was its midsection landing on her, forcing the Brute to pull itself up and bring its jaws back down on Thief.

For a split second, the Brute’s head was just above the extended barrel of the anti-material rifle. No more than eighth of a second. Not even enough time for Joker’s own brain to process what was happening, but Thief had all the time it needed. The Golem’s robot brain was simple, but it worked: threat in front of gun means fire gun. The anti-material rifle ripped the Brute a new one right through its brain cavity.

The Brute’s body jerked for a moment, allowing Jaeger and whatever pilot remained to pour more fire on it until the monster lay still, its body leaking fluids from a hundred different holes and its eyes dark.

“Pilot Joker, status!” Jaeger barked.

“Pissed off,” Joker said, shoving the Brute away. She maneuvered her mouth to get the Golem to retract the anti-material rifle in favor of her twin grenade launchers. “What about . . . the other pilot?”

“Ragtag’s Golem is a goner, but her vitals are fine, if in the yellow.” Jaeger scanned their immediate vicinity. “Tough bastard, this one was. I don’t think I’ve seen anything this tough before, even in the sims. Joker?”

“I haven’t seen these kind around the Everfree,” she said. “Could be a new breed, or the ones defending Ponyville are meaner. Either way, let’s get to Sugarcube Corner. I’m taking grenade position. Fuck rifles in urban combat.”

Jaeger didn’t protest. Joker figured this was her first command—and, by extension, her first casualty. Even if Ragtag was safe back on the moon with a blanket around her, hearing the dying scream of a Golem mixed with a pony was disquieting even to a veteran, much less a newbie commander.

They made it to Sugarcube Corner, or what was left of it. The overall structure still stood, but all the windows were long gone and one of the walls was completely missing. The rest looked like it had been hit by a hurricane, but miraculously still stood.

“Form a perimeter around the door, tight pattern,” Jaeger said. “Keep your weapons toward Twilight’s castle, that’s where that last one came from, and probably the rest too. Anything moves that’s colder than my heart, kill it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Arrow answered, her voice audibly shaking, though Jaeger’s crack about her heart seemed to calm her down a little. The poor mare had probably never even seen real combat before, and all the fancy gadgets on her Mark VI couldn’t make up for a lack of experience. She had even managed to turn on her maximum load out of weapons; enough that anything directly in front of her would be shredded to bits, but that her Golem would temporarily lose power for a few seconds afterward.

“Alright, everypony,” Jaeger said, “hostile at our one o’clock! Get ready, girls!”

Arrow whirled around, while Joker took her time to train her grenade launchers on the inbound target. She had them loaded with magical explosives—toxic mixtures of various potions that tended to have very random and very deadly side effects. Anything that could survive a barrage practically deserved to bring her down.

The Brute that emerged through the side of a crumbling house was a more typical monster, like those Joker had fought in the Everfree. A shambling mass of limbs and tentacle-like appendages, the only sign it was even alive was a bloated head in the middle of it all with the signature wide eyes of the Brutes. Underneath, drooling fangs were already snapping at them.

Arrow shrieked and unleashed her barrage of chain gun rounds, plasma gun charges, and other assorted weaponry in one massive burst. Joker sighed and added a few of her grenades to it, but it was pointless by then. The Brute may have stayed up longer than one of the forest ones might have, but it was down in seconds, and by the end of the barrage, had been reduced to glowing cinders and scattered bits of flesh and bone.

Arrow’s Golem sagged as it began to recharge its power, but the pilot’s ragged breathing could be heard through her mike.

While she took her break, Jaeger keyed a private channel for herself and Joker. “Arrow’s out of it,” she said. “If the other teams are ahead of us, I’m going to tell them to pull the plug and get her out of here. Poor girl . . . hell of a way to start her career, huh?”

“Better do it now, before her sync gets too high,” Joker said.

“Right.”

The private comm cut off, and soon Arrow’s Golem fell to the ground, its power gone. Joker let out a sigh of relief. They had lost two members of Fireteam Philomena already, but Golems could be replaced, and both pilots were safe. Still, two Mark VIs gone within the first hour probably would land as her own fault for dragging along her Mark V . . .

While Jaeger paced their little perimeter, Joker switched over to the open channel. Golems technically couldn’t hear their surroundings like a normal pony could, so Joker had no way to tell whether the city was deathly quiet or alight with the noise of battle.

When she switched to the open channel, Joker hadn’t been expecting to be greeted by screams. Her entire head filled with them until she turned the volume down long enough to focus on the voices, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“Fireteam Manehattan is gone, I repeat, just gone!”

“This is Fireteam Poison Joke, falling back to Carousel Boutique perimeter, lost the rest, just me, I’ll be there—”

“No, no, Luna, please . . . help me, Luna, please—”

The cries grew more distressed and filled with static the longer Joker listened. The feeling in her gut had gone from ice cold with fear to fiery with rage. How the hell were just some Brutes destroying the most disciplined force in Equestrian history?

Finally, a calm voice broke through the rest, shutting them up with a protocol only command possessed. “This is Marshal Roughshod. All active Golems, fall back to the Carousel Boutique perimeter. Wounded near the perimeter, move back to Everfree station; the rest of you wounded, cut the plug if you can; activate your beacons if not. We’ll come for you, I repeat we will come for—”

The transmission cut out entirely, replaced only by static. The entire mission was . . . lost? Joker reeled. There’d been more Golems than she had ever seen, more fireteams on one mission than ever before; they had to win, they had to! No, it must have been the Marshal losing it, had to be . . .

While she was trying to figure things out in her head, Joker had neglected to switch back to her fireteam channel, or notice that her gear was picking up a new signature. She only had time to look up as a winged Brute dove for her, its “feet” resembling tooth-filled gaping maws that snatched and snarled at her.

At the last moment, she was shoved aside and landed hard on the ground while Jaeger took up the spot she had just occupied. With a cry of, “Pull the plug you idiot!” over the fireteam comm, she was gone, carried off by the Brute over Sugarcube Corner and out of sight.

Joker’s breath was ragged. With Jaeger gone, she was the only friendly showing up on her gear so far into town. Everypony else had gone dark or fled. Though she couldn’t actually hear them, other tech on her Golem could pick up the sonic vibrations of Brutes howling all around her. There was no way she’d make it back to the perimeter alive.

“Fuck this,” Joker muttered and slammed her head upwards, the bodily signal to pull the plug. She waited a moment, but opened her eyes and only saw the burnt-out remains of war-torn Ponyville. She did it again, harder this time, and was given the same result.

A screen popped up on her HUD that sent every organ she had to the pit of her stomach. It read: De-Synchronization Error—Synchronization Rate Too High.

The howls of the Brutes grew louder.