It was the privilege of Middenheim’s wealthier citizens to have an actual grave in the limited space of the plateau-city, an ordered, labeled tomb for family and friends to visit their dearly departed. The middle classes were buried outside the city, in the countryside where they were still afforded the dignity of an earthly rest. The deceased poor were simply tossed off the walls, into the Drakenwald Forest below, hopefully to be picked off by whatever hungry creatures happened to lurk by.

If Fluttershy had no hope in the good of men before, this was surely the final nail in the coffin, but by the looks of it, she’d be lying if she said they weren’t delicious.

Fluttershy went at the mound as if she’d been starved for days, dredging up clawfuls, six or eight at a time, and hardly spending a moment to chew before swallowing the lot. A thin fog of smoke and tongues of fire wisped from her maw as she feasted, like a dragon’s breath waiting to be unleashed.

Down on the ground, a teeth-chattering Applejack had paced back and forth in the same spot for so long that the grass had rotted into a long black stripe.

Rarity snickered, kicking her legs from the lofty perch of the forest canopy; watching, waiting. What if Fluttershy actually tried that again? Would it simply be a repeat of the first time, or would there be more dire consequences for them both? The humor quickly died at the thought of Applejack getting burned alive in Fluttershy’s belly, or Fluttershy herself vaporizing into a pile of rust powder. They’d both been lucky the first time, and they’d had help from powers both local and divine to smooth things over. Where they were going now, however, they were going to need a lot more than luck.

Rarity felt good about her plan’s progress. Spike was, no doubt, already breaking the news of his departure to Cadence.

She couldn’t make him stay, could she? Rarity thought. Of course she could, a princess could do that. But she’s too much of a sweet heart. And this… She doesn’t need to know.

Fluttershy was the next component in the plan. Rarity needed a muscle, and her former-pegasus friend had hundreds of tons of living steel to throw around. Still, such a poor thing; she’d also be the biggest target.

Rarity couldn’t help but frown the more she thought about it. Here she was, about to use her friend as a shield, in spite of everything she’d gone through already.

But she’s the most capable.

But she still feels pain.

But when she’s mad, she can take them better than anything.

It’s Fluttershy you’re talking about! Simple, innocent, cottage-in-the-prairie Fluttershy!

Innocent? No, she lost that a long time ago. She’s well, well blooded, now.

The juggernaut ate without pause for several minutes, disregarding the visceral, oily mess accumulating around her mouth. She poked the last cadaver, punching her finger clear through its chest, and bit it off her claw like a ripe cherry tomato.

Applejack muttered something up at Fluttershy, to which she simply chuckled. “Graves? They don’t deserve graves, Applejack.” Fluttershy’s grin was wide, bristling an uncountable number of teeth. She started digging, gouging out a sizable ditch in a few clawfuls of soil. “Shining told you to get rid of the bodies, right? What were you going to do, just dig a mass grave like this and roll them all in?”

Rarity heard something akin to a yes from Applejack, and Fluttershy’s awkward smile dropped.

“They don’t even care for their own dead, so why should you?!” Fluttershy pushed a bladed finger under Applejack's chin. “Don’t you dare go soft on them. You haven’t seen what they do.”

“We couldn’t fathom it,” Rarity said, loud enough for them to hear. She dissolved into dust, floated downward, and gathered back to her corporeal form on the ground.

Fluttershy didn’t even flinch at the surprise. She simply growled, “Were you watching us?”

“Mhm.” Rarity nodded, gingerly walking closer. “Long enough to see you completely annihilate hundreds of bodies, without even breaking a sweat. I’m curious; did you enjoy it?”

Applejack spoke up. “Rarity, what’re you sayin—”

The screeching grinding of Fluttershy wiping her mouth drowned her out. “I forgot how good they tasted. Mm, I can’t even begin to describe it!”

“Rarity,” Applejack repeated urgently. “I don’t wanna see her riled up again!”

“I’m... fine.” the juggernaut growled menacingly.

“I know!” Applejack blurted.

Rarity was still grinning and took a step closer to divert attention. “It’s alright, Fluttershy. We know you’re perfectly in control.”

“I am,” Fluttershy snorted and started away from them. “I still have my own work to do. You’re welcome, by the way, Applejack.”

“Y-yeah. Thanks.”

Before interrupting Applejack’s work, Fluttershy had made good progress in a deviation of her idling task. Rather than tearing out the forests around the mountain as Shining Armor had ordered to keep her busy, she had dug a trench, and used the displaced dirt to make a redoubt at the outside edge.

“I think Fluttershy is already there,” Rarity said cheerfully. “All she needs is somepony to point her in the right direction, and anything that stands before her is rubble.”

Applejack took a long step back from Rarity. “What’ve you been talkin’ about since you got here? ‘Did you enjoy it? Everything ‘fore her’s rubble’?!”

Rarity’s eyebrow shot up, and she looked at the putrid mare like she couldn’t tell where she was from. “I thought Braeburn had helped your transition to accept Nurgle? To be part of—”

“I just did that to make the pain stop!” Applejack insisted, pointing a phlegm-encrusted hoof at her unmoving heart. “Ah never wanted this! Braeburn forced me into it!”

The smile returned to Rarity’s lips. “He did it because he loves you. You’re his family, and he wants you and Apple Bloom to… not live, per se, but be together. It’s as simple as following your family, and sharing your… gifts with oth—”

“That is horseapples, Rarity and you know it!” Applejack shouted. “Look at me! Ah’m as bad every rotten apple that ever came out of mah orchard, all rolled up in one! Ah got bugs comin’ outta places ah don’t even recognize! All these ‘gifts’ are good for is— hack!”

She doubled over in a coughing fit, causing Rarity to backpedal a step in surprise. Applejack gagged out a wet purple-black ball into the grass. Mere seconds later, it ruptured, making Rarity scramble back as its fluids instantly dissolved the grass it touched into a puddle of congealed slime.

“There… you see?” Applejack gasped out. “Ah don’t wanna be stuck with that forever! Ah didn’t wanna die. And I don’t wanna be undead anymore! My whole family’s gone to Tartarus in a hoof basket, and you treat it like it’s a good thing?!”

Rarity felt a pang of guilt in her chest. “I meant to say—”

Applejack stomped a hoof and instantly the grass around her wilted in an expanding circle which quickly encompassed Rarity in its border. The stink of rapidly-sprouting fungi wreaked a dizzying nausea.

“Everything we touch dies.” Applejack raised the same hoof and lunged at Rarity. Rarity leapt back from the swipe and collapsed with a scream.

Rarity moved to scramble back, but Applejack didn’t move any further. Applejack chuckled dryly with a yellow tear gathering in her remaining eye.

“What are you doing to Rarity?” Fluttershy snarled, catching Applejack in a threatening loom over a fallen Rarity. She had a claw ready to climb out of the earthworks.

Rarity opened her mouth, but her voice was lost.

“You tripped,” Applejack hissed to Rarity through clenched teeth.

“Well?!” Fluttershy demanded.

“I just tripped, is all,” Rarity said quickly. She felt around the ground and picked up a pinecone. “Fell on a pinecone.”

Fluttershy snorted, and returned to her digging without another word.

“Even you can’t stand this. And you’re not even one of us,” Applejack muttered. She shook her head sadly in Rarity’s direction. “How… how can you smile at what we’ve got?”

Rarity folded her legs from the awkward sprawl she’d fallen into, speechless for a while as Applejack wept over the murdered ground. Rarity shuffled closer, sheathed a hand in a thin magic barrier, and rested it on Applejack’s shoulder. “I see I was too naive. Don’t, even for a second, think that I don’t think that you’re not torn apart by this.”

Rarity pointed up to the city of Middenheim on the plateau. “But this, this isn’t where we belong. We’ll be in for nothing but a life in exile and being outcasts. There are so many we know from Ponyville who went the other way, and if we want a chance, we have to go that way too. Right now, there is no way your family is getting out of there by the will of the Empire’s judges. And it isn’t like the Emperor is going to give them pardons.”

“And what?” Applejack asked impatiently. “You have a plan for gettin’ them out?”

Rarity’s mouth turned up in a conspiratorial smirk.

“Well, what? Spit it out!”

“It’s rather simple,” Rarity responded. “That’s where Fluttershy comes in.”

Applejack chuckled joylessly. “You’ve gone crazy.”

“Not yet, I don’t think. Not completely.”

Rarity stood at the edge of Fluttershy’s trench, and Applejack hung back, morbidly curious as to what Rarity might stir up. The earthwork was only haunch-high for the giant, but deep enough to be a perfectly serviceable fortification for humans.

“Fluttershy?”

The juggernaut didn’t take her eyes from her work. “What?”

“Fluttershy, I know you think you’re okay, and if you ask me, I think you’re quite sound of mind, but it’s just too apparent to Applejack and myself that you’re just a bit... disgruntled.”

Rarity took a wide step aside as hundreds of pounds of dirt buried her previous location. Unphased from Fluttershy’s sudden assault, she continued, “We can actually use that. You want to get back at the humans, don’t you?”

Fluttershy nodded once, snorting a plume of black smoke toward Rarity, which she deflected around herself with a wave of a hand. “Now that’s what I want to see,” she muttered with a smirk, and whipped the smoke clear. “What if I gave you the chance to punish them again?”

A thin smile was her only response.

Rarity slowly leaned closer, swallowing hesitantly. “Ultimately, we’re going far away from here, where you won’t have to deal with Imperial humans for a long time.”

“No!” Fluttershy hauled herself out of the trench, crouching low to meet Rarity eye-to-eye. “No, I want to make them hurt! Again, and again, and again!”

“And you can,” Rarity said, not yielding a step. “But you must be logical about it. We’re in the midst of a war without end, and in daemonhood, you have all the time in the world. I have a plan to make what you want possible. All you need to do, is trust your best friend. Okay?”

Fluttershy stared for a moment at her. She stood upright in an attempt to make use of her imposing height, but the tiny sorcerer still kept the same smile.

“I’m waiting,” Rarity said.

Fluttershy’s eyes widened slightly, and her scowl deepened. “Okay.”

Rarity looked through the canopy at the distant city’s walls which echoed out with the din of bells. She saw one of the towers shattered by a massive stone which seemed to fly at it from nowhere.

“What the…” Applejack muttered, her eye widening at the same spectacle.

Fluttershy’s larger ears turned toward the forest void and she started to growl.

Applejack sniffed in the same direction Fluttershy was looking. She started to her hooves and backed away from the forest’s darkness. “Beastmen,” she hissed.

Clear enough, a multitude of the ram-horned creatures were charging through the mists, bare-chested or in scrap metal armor and carrying wood slab shields, many of them with hooks and metallic claws grafted to their arms or forelegs. Creatures that used to be goats, boar, deer, men; it was a stampede of evolutionary rejects.

Coming straight at them.

Applejack and Rarity moved close to Fluttershy, who bared her teeth and claws, and let out a terrible roar. Rarity slapped her hands over her ears, but she could still feel the sound shaking her very bones. The wind rushing out of the giant bowed the grass low before the beasts, who didn’t even slow their charge. In fact, they actually seemed to be encouraged by the display.

Applejack nervously swallowed, contorting her leg into its molar-axe. She didn’t find reason to use it, however, as the flow of furry bodies parted around the three of them, but their teeming, jabbering masses stopped at the trench Fluttershy had dug.

They shouted unintelligible curses at the juggernaut for the disadvantage, and began trying to fill it in with the redoubt soil using their claws. Fluttershy raised a claw to swipe at the monsters.

One particular voice sounded off which silenced many, a guttural howl like a gargle-shouting cow. The multitude parted for one of them who was quite tall, robed in a tattered cloak of motley stitched-together hides and patches of cloth. Wound around one of its arms was a thick chain, dragging behind it a massive horned skull. Its exterior was plated in black iron, with seething white fire pouring from its eyes and wide open fanged jaws.

Fluttershy too paused at the call, slowly piecing together the identity of the skull. “Iron Will?”

“Your eye for detail borders on perfection,” the beast-mare grunted, hefting the skull to land between herself and the three. “But this trench stalls our offensive, a most terrible obstruction.”

Rarity quickly recognized the creature by the striped colors of her fur and the limping gait with which she had approached. Rarity couldn’t even hear herself talk through her ringing ears. “Zecora? H-how was I unable to predict this? Why are you here?”

“My herd-master has a stake here, seeking booty in a raid. I failed to inform him of my own reasons to come, for my friends, in escape, we give aid.”

“‘We?’” Applejack wondered. “Ain’t this whole mob under some ‘lord’, you said?”

Zecora raised the metal-sheathed skull, and its unblinking fire pits for eyes glared at Applejack. “I suppose there is a reason his name is Iron Will,” the shamaness said. “Even in death, his hate and power burns still.”

Zecora raised an open claw to Fluttershy. “There is much strength in you, Fluttershy. We need it well. My people need what the Empire has, but to get it, we must bring them hell.”

Fluttershy eagerly nodded, and Zecora howled again to her compatriots. The largest beastmen with the chain ladders passed them into Fluttershy's massive claw. Rarity got an idea and began levitating them to Fluttershy’s chain-link mane, hooking them together. The first wave of beastmen began climbing, until they were just below Fluttershy’s head.

Rarity, Applejack, and Zecora took a place among the iron jungle of Fluttershy’s mane, the beast-mare bellowing a wild war cry which the horde returned with a thunderous roar that rippled all the way through their ranks. Fluttershy couldn’t resist, and roared in anticipation as she began to scale the wall, with over a dozen iron chains snaking along behind her, full of snarling, snapping creatures eager for plunder and carnage.

So, this is it. I’m dead…

Vinyl felt waves tickling her fur, and a lukewarm wetness all around as she lay belly-up in some kind of fluid. She beheld a crystal blue sky completely unbroken by clouds and sunless, giving her the impression that she was floating on the surface of the ocean. The persistent smell of alcohol all around her put paid to that idea, however.

She began to tread upright, discovering a vast red lake all around her. The surface was strange; placid and mirror-like in some places, rippling and bubbling in others. She dipped her tongue in it, determining it was some kind of red wine. She was no connoisseur of such things, but it was fine, nonetheless.

How did Octavia use to test this stuff?

She sucked in a mouthful, and swished it around a bit to tease out the flavors, and spat it back out. The second time, it was… okay.

Something brushed over the top of her head, a moving wood and rope bridge which she immediately grabbed by its low floor and hauled herself up with dry hoofsteps. She didn’t question the sudden change. Who needs logic in the afterlife?

She checked for what was on either end of the bridge, and found both sides to be the same; each end held a lifeless humanoid giant, bobbing face down in the drink. On each of their backward-turned hands was a table, creaking under a lavish feast spread atop it, with candles, fine plates and silverware, and furniture to match. Vinyl took another scanning look around, finding no one as far as the eye could see.

Free food. Why not? she thought.

Was this the Warp? The beginning of a trick which would take her to Tartarus? She couldn’t tell. But as she took a seat and the apple she picked up didn’t burst into flames, she was leaning towards the former. How long until Octavia would die in that prison and join her?

“Well, you won’t be here for long, my dear.”

Vinyl started at the voice, looked up from the table and nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of the pink alicorn sitting across from her.

“Sorry,” they said with a laugh, telekinetically stopping Vinyl’s chair from flipping back in a purple-pink glow. “Should have announced myself a bit more subtly.”

He… she… it was an enigma of a creature. Its pronounced muscles and bone structure suggested it being male, but the way its mane was done in a hanging twin ponytail, fur color—

Those eyes! she gaped.

They looked eager to stare into one’s soul, their color a royal purple which reflected like polished jade. Vinyl settled on a he, and he was gorgeous, the physique beyond what she thought possible even for their immortal kind.

“Yeah, I’d have to agree,” she muttered dryly. “Nearly gave me a heart attack there.”

“You are having a heart attack, actually.”

Vinyl touched a beclawed hoof to her chest, and chuckled. “Oh, so that’s how I’m dying. Guess it’s about time, huh?”

“Yes,” the strange alicorn nodded. “You’ve gone into withdrawal from your stimulants twice, now. Too much for your heart to bear.”

“Yeah, the warlord I used to be a slave to got me hooked so that I’d never leave. Didn’t count on the spirit of this mare!”

They both shared a laugh. After a moment, Vinyl glanced into the beautiful blue sky.

“Mind telling me where I am?” she asked, gesturing to the red lake all around them.

The alicorn looked away from the table, where he had presumably been deciding which food to indulge in first. “The Lake of Gluttony, in the Warp.”

Vinyl’s heart skipped a beat, and her eyes widened. “Y… y-you’re kidding, right?”

“Hmm...” He glanced around at the other dead island giants in the wine lake, then swept his gaze over the sky as if appraising something only he could see. “No, I’m sure this is the place.”

Vinyl licked her lips and leaned forward, hoping to articulate something that would elicit a reassuring answer. “The ring of Slaanesh’s place, where if you eat or drink anything, you keep eating till you explode?”

“Mm-hm. None other,” he smiled.

“Heh, yeah, nice try,” Vinyl snickered, shakily running a hoof through her mane. “I just took a sip of that wine back there in the lake, and you don’t see me wigging out and trying to inhale the whole table here or anything.”

“True, but I do see…” he pointed with a forehoof, “That.”

Vinyl heard a splash. There was another giant floating by. A stallion was floating near it, the lake surface not yet settled again from his falling in. His belly was burst open, the pressure of the buildup of half-digested food pushed up from both his messy mouth and sagging stomach.

A bead of sweat ran down Vinyl’s cheek. She heard a light laugh come from behind her, prompting her to turn—and behold him raising a bunch of glistening purple grapes to his mouth.

“No!” she cried out. “Don’t eat it!”

Vinyl magically snatched the clutch away. Too late. The fragrant grape juice trickled down the being’s chin. He swallowed.

Several seconds passed, and Vinyl’s disbelieving look grew ever wider. The alicorn smacked his lips lightly, then leaned back with a smile. “Oh, that’s just funny. You’re funny.”

Vinyl finally managed to pull her jaw closed. She squeaked out, “Ba-ba-bababuh… You’re not… stuffing yourself?”

“Of course not,” he smirked. “I don’t have a soul to lose to the enchanted food.”

Vinyl blinked. “No soul? Who the heck are you?”

“I’ll give you three guesses. And the first two don’t count.” He took the grape bundle back, as well as a napkin from a purple-skinned crab-woman who had inexplicably appeared beside him. He sent a mischievous look Vinyl’s way as he dabbed the juice off his chin.

Vinyl’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. “You’re S… You’re Slaaaaahh…”

The alicorn grinned, and cocked his head slowly to the side as he said, “Yeeees?”

“SLAANESH!” she shrieked in glee like a raving fanmare, jumping and prancing in place for good measure. “Oh my goshohmigoshohmigosh!”

The Dark Prince of Pleasure giggled at Vinyl’s outburst. “Oh, you’re just the most adorable little thing. Please, please, sit.”

Vinyl held back her enthusiasm long enough to sit down again, still shaking and with a blissful grin plastered over her face.

“So now you have your answer,” Slaanesh grinned wide. “You are a… special case. Special guest, I should say, rather.” He reached forward, patting Vinyl on the head like an obedient cat. “I couldn’t let someone like you go so easily, now could I? I have a special investment in you, my dear.”

The Prince motioned to the table before Vinyl. She looked down to a box of vinyl records which weren’t there before.

“Have a look,” he said, still smiling. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Vinyl obediently began filing through them, using a single talon from her hoof to flip through the sleek black disks one by one. She failed to suppress a gasp at even the first one.

They were all records that she’d made throughout her life, with each cover in pristine condition. Five Nights in Canterlot, Disco’s Twilight, and even a remix of one of those classical songs Octavia used to listen to. She wracked her brain to remember; something to do with the old Prancian military. Vinyl’s mouth dropped open when she saw the one on the end. Without a cover, dinged up and warped, she recognized it as the first song she’d ever recorded after making music her life. It wasn’t even released on the market, with only one copy in existence. She was speechless.

“I have to admit,” Slaanesh said, blushing ever-so-slightly. “I’m a fan.”

“RAAGH!”

Fluttershy’s claw smashed into the facade of a spire-laden complex like a two-ton boulder, tearing through it with ease and leaving only a pile of dust and rubble and a gaping hole as any reminder of the graceful wall that once stood.

Applejack leaped into action, shifting her leg into its molar-axe form as she scampered down Fluttershy’s tree trunk-like limbs, through the breach and into the prison building. She nearly stumbled over the prone form of a pair of incapacitated guards, no doubt knocked out along with the wall. Wasting no time, Applejack immediately began sniffing the air with the affinity of a bloodhound, searching for a single distinct smell amidst all the dust, decay and effluvium of the prison complex.

She didn’t need to search for long. The familiar slaughterhouse-stench of a fellow nurglite hung in the air, almost palpable to her enhanced senses. Curiously, she also picked up the sound of some kind of singing coming from the same direction down the hall.

“Now mankind will pay, on this very day. Every man on Earth will curse his birth…”

Descending a flight of spiralled stairs, a cell area was sloped toward the street. A large crack in the outside wall of one of the cells let in a sliver of light.

“Anypony down here?” Applejack called. “Come out and I’ll let ya go!”

She saw a knife slide along the floor from around the corner ahead, and a young man step out with his hands beside his head. Applejack tapped her axe on the floor as the distance closed. She stood aside, letting him pass while holding his breath among her spore cloud.

He was taking too long for her taste. She made a lunge at him, chattering four rows of plaque-encrusted fangs. She let him leg it.

“Applejack!” Apple Bloom ran for the bars, but snapped back on her chain. Behind her, pinned to the wall, was a bloated, dripping corpse.

Braeburn’s eyes could barely be seen, blotted out by folds of overstretched blubber and bile-dripping flesh, and purity seals pinned across his body. He looked like an overinflated pony-shaped balloon, ready to burst.

Applejack spat on the bars. Once out of that, she licked them, working quickly with acidic spittle. She got though after a couple snapped off, and started chewing through Apple Bloom’s chain.

“No, no!” the filly cried. “Get Braeburn! He’s gonna pop!”

The fat corpse shrieked in agreement.

Applejack tore the pins out of her cousin, casting their rapidly-rusting ribbons to the floor. After ripping out the rebar impaling him to the wall, Braeburn splashed to the ground. His swollen belly exploded, washing the floor in a gush of yellowed pus and bile. Applejack helped him back to his hooves. His own skin was a tattered, necrotic sheet laid over some beast of spongified bone and muscle.

His leg bulged, sprouting bony spikes as he roared, “Lemme at ‘em! I’ll kill every last one of you!”

He threw Applejack off and charged through the ruined bars like a mad phantom, tearing into the first man who was making his way down the stair. In a single bite, he was chewing on his larynx.

“Braeburn, we’ve gotta get outta here!” Applejack shouted while breaking Apple Bloom’s restraint.

Braeburn snapped to Applejack with a bloody rage in his eyes. “No! There’s no way we’re gettin’ out of here in one piece! We’re surrounded and outnumbered. Big Mac may not be here, but I’ll be damned if we don’t die together!”

“We’ve got a plan!” she yelled back. “Fluttershy and a whole herd ‘a Beastmen are out there, and they’re gonna help!”

Braeburn’s scowl eased up a little after hearing the scream of the creature in question. “Lower floors. Kivsin’s down there, too. Get those other three first. I’ll keep this way clear.”

In the time it took him to get that out, a soldier had thrust a sword into his side, to no effect. Braeburn snapped around, smashing his mace into his skull, pulping and tearing it off his shoulders.

Further down the hall, Applejack discovered the source of the droll singing which had given way to a harsh coughing.

Octavia cradled Vinyl, who was just beginning to support herself, gasping with a claw to her chest. Tears streamed from the grey mare as Vinyl looked at her with tired, bloodshot eyes. Octavia hugged her, only letting go when Applejack’s rotting stench began burning her nose.

Lyra got out of her meditative sleep the instant the cell door flew open. “About time. Applejack, we need you and Braeburn to cover our rear. Vinyl, Octavia and I are going for Kivsin.”

“‘Scuse me, but how do you already have a plan?” Applejack asked skeptically.

Lyra cast her a condescending smirk. “We always have to be ready. Always one step ahead. They destroyed all our stuff this time around, so we’re pretty bare.” She yanked Vinyl up to her gnarled feet, shaking her. “Vinyl, wakey-wakey, come on. You don’t have your chems, but we need you now.”

Vinyl slapped Lyra’s hands off. “I’m good… I’m good. I know what I gotta do.”

Octavia wiped away her tears, looking to Lyra and choking. “Is it time?”

Lyra nodded, and helped her up. “Come on.”

“You’re welcome!” Applejack shouted indignantly after Lyra, who ignored her. Vinyl, on the other hand, spun around and shot her two thumbs up.

“Thanks!”

“Spike, stop praying!” Twilight hissed.

The dragon quickly but reluctantly clenched his jaw shut. In this situation, his desire to ask the gods for protection was nothing short of overwhelming.

They were everywhere, beasts hideous and twisted, pouring over the damaged walls on chain-link ladders. The gauntest of them were busy cannibalizing their own fallen as much as the Imperials. Most were streaming past Spike, who kept very close to Twilight.

They both navigated the streets, Spike receiving the most threatening glares from the Beastmen, even after he’d followed Twilight’s suggestion to take off his armor and let his inhuman form be shown. He kept the silver-scaled lorica bound around his rectangular shield, making it all look like a simple metal slab he carried under-arm. With the creatures picking their own plunder, Spike could make the appearance that this was his. Spike’s uneasiness then struck him like a punch to the gut on seeing the monstrosity leaning against the walls.

It was a living avatar of death, damaged in numerous places, but crawling with mutated unicorns doing their best to repair it. Gone were the soft blue eyes which had held a kindness and, most recently, sadness like any other. Now, those sockets were hollow, a single floating cannonball-sized orb burning in each. Even Twilight hesitated before moving closer again.

“Wasting… time…” Fluttershy rumbled, shifting restlessly in place.

“Who’s she talking to?” Spike muttered.

“I don’t know— Wait.”

Twilight put a hoof back to Spike and they both stopped cold. Fluttershy was staring right at them, her eyes looking to be able to burn them alive on the spot if she so chose. Instead, her gaze grew a bit softer. “Guys?” She momentarily turned back the section she leaned against. “Yeah, here. Rarity’s been waiting for you guys.”

Spike began to notice an increasing multitude of hostile stares from the creatures, which certainly didn’t help his already-strong feeling of vulnerability from not even having his suit on. He nudged Twilight sharply. “Better not keep her waiting, then?”

Twilight nodded, and they both spread their wings at once and took to the air, flying above the streaming horde of beastmen in the streets. Once they reached Fluttershy, they caught Rarity just as the iron giant brought her head back to her.

“Who in Tartarus built your mane-line?” Rarity muttered distastefully. She ran a charged finger along a ruptured weld, melting the seam where the heavy plate met the rest of her scalp into a uniform surface. “The weld job here is absolutely dreadful. When we get out of here, dear, remind me to give you some professional treatment for a change. Maybe I could even braid in some eight-pointed stars with these chains...”

“Rarity?” Twilight spoke first. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?” She made a perfect four-point landing on the flagstones nearby, and folded her wings.

“Oh, you two have no idea what it took to get her to pull back from the battle,” Rarity said. “I swear, she’d run over the edge of a cliff if she saw a human on the other side.”

Fluttershy chuckled grimly.

Rarity finally spared a look at Twilight and Spike, regarding their sour, waiting stares. She put her hands up in defense. “I’m just as surprised as you are. All these beastmen just came from nowhere, and, well, now we have our cover! This is an omen of destiny!”

“And this is good?” Spike muttered darkly, and motioned an arm to the monsters freely ripping through Middenheim. “Siccing this on the whole city? Haven’t they had enough?”

Fluttershy was about to speak, but instead grunted painfully as the deep dent at the base of her neck was popped back into shape by a couple of the teeming, bestial helpers.

Rarity sighed, holding up a hand to call for silence. “First of all, I didn’t bring them here. Second, I’m not happy about what they’re doing. I’m happy because of how we can use it, and what it means in the long run. I already had a plan, but this just means I have to revise it.”

“But—”

“Spike, please,” Rarity interrupted. “Time is of the essence. Applejack is still getting the others. Big Macintosh and Kivsin are deeper in the building they’re held in, and, well... they don’t exactly have it secure.”

“What do you mean, ‘not secure’?” asked Twilight.

Rarity hesitated, looking quite sheepish. “Follow us.”

Fluttershy rolled her shoulders, shaking off the beast-ponies like a scarecrow come to life. “Get off. I feel good enough,” she muttered.

Rarity jumped down onto Fluttershy’s back as she turned down the street, ushering Twilight and Spike to follow. “She knows where the place is.” Rarity looked at the both of them, surprised neither had further questions. Twilight looked lost in thought, and Spike was tinkering with his armor shirt between his folded legs.

“So, any particular reason you’re… shirtless?”

The last latch Spike had been working with was undone, and he rolled it out. A red pouch, a tear-shaped diamond, a sword in its sheath, all bound in the makeshift package.

“One,” he started with a smirk. “not looking like a lone Reiksguard knight in a group of these things is a good way to not get killed. Two, all of this. I had more, but this is all I can carry.” He looked to Rarity with solemnity, and showed her the diamond. “Cadence gave me this when I said I wanted to leave. She trusts me to make the right decisions to make my own way. But I need to know that I—”

“That you can trust me?” Rarity mumbled with a hurt curiosity. “Why don’t you think you can?”

“Because I see a city burning, and I see you, standing among the wreckage, smiling. It makes me question that choice.”

“But we’re not taking part in looting or slaughter,” Rarity pointed out.

“I am,” came a throaty rumble from the juggernaut behind them.

Rarity cringed, and whispered, “We might want to keep this in a tighter circle.” She and Spike shuffled closer, keeping their voice low.

“She just needs an outlet, Spike. I promise, we’re only staying as long as absolutely necessary.”

Spike looked at her with a deadpan expression, then glanced at the besieged city all around them. “Absolutely necessary. Right.”

“Um, Rarity…” Twilight raised a hoof, her gaze shifting between her and the direction of the Royal Palace, though she never lingered long on the latter. “What if we… you know, actually helped the Empire fight off the Beastmen, instead? Wouldn’t they be grateful and at least be more open to hearing our case, then?”

Rarity tried to suppress a laugh, which only made it come out as a rude snort. “I’m sorry, but you can’t really expect them to just change their minds. Applejack stopped Fluttershy, and how was she rewarded? Hung in a cage over the Drakenwald. She might have rotted the cage away and fallen and cracked her skull open!”

Twilight’s ears flattened.

Rarity sat back. “But I suppose a little credit is due on the part of Shining Armor. He didn’t want to put her there, but in order to keep them appeased, I think he had no choice.

“You remember how those ponies who had the audacity to call themselves the Cutie Mark Crusaders treated us, yes?” she pressed. “Absolute mockery of Sweetie and her friends. Weren’t they working on Celestia’s behalf? You saw the young ones, Vinyl, and myself on that forced march. And they didn’t even let you have anything to drink at the prison when we arrived here. And you know exactly what that led to.”

Twilight grimaced at the memory, and her eyes fell to the ground.

“Pinkie Pie might have even volunteered; she doesn’t say no to anything that will give her a light-headed rush,” Rarity continued. “That is what this Empire’s done to our own kind. They cared so little, they let you break when it could have been so easily remedied.”

“Really?” Spike asked, and turned to Twilight with a frown. “They let you go crazy and nearly bite my claw off?”

“Yeah,” Twilight said reluctantly, rolling her jaw in anger. “You’re right, Rarity.” She took a sweeping look at the beastmen and their plundering. “Alright… We’re going to need a lot of things if we’re going to make it out there again.”

Rarity slapped her forehead, and stood up. “Oh, of course! I can’t believe I almost forgot that in all the excitement. Okay, Fluttershy will take you to the others. I’ll look for what we might need.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Spike nodded.

“Great! Ta-ta!” Rarity dissolved again and her cloud flew through a nearby window, shattering it into a thousand pieces.

“You’re even crazier without your drugs,” Lyra deadpanned. She flipped a headless man’s body over, one of several that she, Vinyl, and Octavia had intercepted going down one of the halls. There had been more, but they had unfortunately escaped. From his stiff hand she took a long-bladed dagger and the leather sheath he stored it in.

Vinyl let the blood in her cupped claws splash to the floor, and wiped her mouth of the drink. “Hey, I kid you not. I met him in the… Wait, do gods have flesh?”

“It doesn’t matter. You were just having a coma-dream and—”

“What was he like?” Octavia asked Vinyl eagerly, lifting her blood-streaked face from the stringy mass of a heart she’d looted from one of the dozen or so men and stallions around them. “Was he handsome? What’s his favorite instrument?”

Lyra grabbed them both by the scruff of their coats, lifting them off the floor and bashed their heads together. “Would you two focus?! We don’t have time for this! The fate of the world is in the balance and you’re busy snacking?!”

Vinyl slowly raised a chunk of meat and sank her many teeth into it. “You,” she started, blood dribbling from the corners of her mouth. “are really stronger than you look. And also, need to calm down. We’re getting to it.” She gently took Lyra’s hand off her shoulder, one finger at a time and landed on all-fours. “We’ve all been in jail for a few days, so we’re all tired and need to let off some steam. But if it means that much to you, fine. Let’s go.”

Lyra shakily released Octavia, the stress stammering her breath. “Finally! Thank you!”

They continued through the building, Vinyl and Octavia still prattling on about the DJ meeting Slaanesh itself.

There’s no way she’s that important. She’s just a drugged-out DJ.

Advancing deeper in the complex, the halls were completely empty, messily strewn with paraphernalia from a likely rushed evacuation.

Vinyl’s right claw shot up in a tight fist. “Hold up.” She sniffed. “Against the wall.”

Octavia and Lyra followed her lead, advancing steadily against the cold stone. “Finally getting your head into it?” Lyra whispered. “What’s up ahead?”

Vinyl took a calm, long breath. “Some people and a pony, I think. Their smell isn't very strong, so there might not be a lot of them.”

Octavia looked back to Lyra with indignation. “And I’ll have you know that we’ve had to sneak around like this from the Wastes to Mordheim, non-stop.”

Lyra was in no mood to argue the Suffering Olympics, especially after Vinyl started… singing? She even made her horn glow, brightening and dimming the hall like a lightning bug.

“From the depths of Hell in silence, cast their spells, explosive violence—”

“What are you doing?” asked Lyra.

“Psyching them out. Shh.”

Vinyl continued, and Lyra had to admit that it resonated well, as if it were sung by a wandering ghost. She pointed to one of the heavy-bolted doors.

Octavia stepped up, jaw clenching as her foreleg cracked and bent in on itself. Sinews of muscle condensed, splitting into hair-thin fibres. Bone merged together into an arching, single mass that held the strings taut.

“Beneath the starlight of the Heavens, young men, their blood stains the ground...”

Octavia sawed her mutated appendage against the bolts, the fibres singing an instrumental sigh as the metal was sliced away.

“As the hordes appear on the horizon...”

Lyra shot Vinyl a glare, to which she shrugged. The sorcerer’s hands ignited, tongues of amber light soon engulfing her whole form. She waved a hand, giving a burning whip form in its grip in waiting and Octavia stepped aside with her work done.

“The wind will whisper when the Dark Gods do COME!”

Like a cannon of air, Vinyl recoiled back, blasting the door wide open. Lyra and Octavia charged through with VInyl righting herself to join. The chamber beyond was dark, but Lyra lit the way, swiping her whip across a man’s chest, searing in an instantly cauterized gash and throwing him against a bookshelf. She quickly drew her commandeered dagger, sticking it up into the hand of another assailant. As he shot back, holding his bloody hand, Lyra made another jab into his throat.

________________________________________

Vinyl grinned viciously on spotting and leaping at her first target. Throwing her mouth open wide and gripping him in a bear-hug, she found purchase over his whole face, and with a wet crunch, tore the front half of his skull clean off, sending a warm spray of blood splashing over her face. In less than a second, she jumped from him, sinking her claws into another’s chest and tearing it open, shredding bone and muscle.

And then she saw it as they both came down. The world slowed as she saw the red muscle, its chambers pulsing to a steady beat. She gently scooped it out from between the lungs. Its bloody smell and the feeling of the living, beating thing was intoxicating.

She swallowed the bone-meat mixture still sloshing in her mouth. She brought the heart closer, her jaws slowly widening again, but paused when Octavia swooped by.

Her lover fought with great finesse, the blood spattering her ash-grey coat in single drops and slick lines, compared to Vinyl’s own messy smears. Her razor-sharp bow sliced through her victims with a scalpel’s precision. She was no butcher, but a sculptor. The heart was rightfully hers, Vinyl thought.

A large fist impacting Octavia’s face ruined the moment. Spit mixed with blood spurted from the Earth mare’s mouth as her cheek smushed inward like deforming clay. It happened so fast that Octavia didn’t even seem to notice until she was in mid-flight, sailing straight into Vinyl.

In a hard catch, Vinyl managed to stop Octavia’s sudden flight. Her half-lidded, unconscious stare made Vinyl’s teeth grind together.

She dropped her and leapt at the first living thing she saw, a man already grappling hand-to-hand with Lyra. Vinyl tackled his legs out from under him before he could free his sword arm from Lyra’s grip. Vinyl poised herself to take a bite out of his ankle, but her head was smashed against a bookshelf by a furious kick.

Her vision blurred in and out, with unfocused images of Lyra and her combatant having at each other flying across her eyes, blood trickling down the green-haired woman’s forehead. Lyra managed to push him back, and began levitating various pieces of furniture from about the room, and setting them alight.

Vinyl staggered upright as the man dodged or took the impacts of the blazing articles. Marks and minor burns appeared to be the least of his problems. Once the sorcerer was exhausted of ammunition, the man unfastened a black-bodied revolver from his belt, swung it up, and fired. Lyra’s leg buckled, and she fell to one knee with a startled cry. She threw up a shield as quick as an arm could be raised which took the second round, and shattered on the third.

Vinyl opened her mouth, wobbling on her claws, and took a deep breath. “Fuck this guy, man… Fuck YOU!!”

Her sonic blast struck true, hurling the man back into the pile of burning furniture behind him. He rolled off screaming, every part of his clothes caught alight. Lyra grimmaced as he watched his flesh melt and blacken, fusing to his clothes. His struggles gradually slowed, until there was a half-charred body on the ground. The flesh of his hand had charred into the handle of the pistol, still gripping it with a dead looseness.

“You couldn’t have kept your focus for five minutes?!” Lyra shouted, clutching her bloody ankle.

“Hey, I stepped in and finished it!”

“After gawking at some guy’s heart and wondering, ‘Hmm, should I or shouldn't I give this to my sweet, little ‘Tavia?’ in the middle of a blood bath!”

“I don’t sound like that!” Vinyl snapped back. “And it’s not ‘Tavia, it’s Tavi! TAH-VEE!”

“Both of you!” Octavia shouted. “Come here! I found Kivsin!”

Putting their spat on hold, they discovered Octavia cutting away at the bat pony’s restraints, occasionally spitting blood and a loose tooth to the floor. Hidden in a corner of the expansive chamber, he was rested on a raised wooden slab under thick leather straps. A dozen or so half-consumed candles put a good stink in the air, and several books were turned to sections with various titles of‘Redemption of the Sinners’ and ‘Dangers of Daemonancy’.

Kivsin himself was in ragged shape, wet with sweat and needing Octavia’s support just to stand. The skin where his limbs had been restrained were hairless and raw pink.

“Jeez, you look like hell,” Vinyl muttered.

“Heh…” the noctral grunted a laugh. “Trust me… I’ve been there and back.”

Octavia wrapped her tentacles around Kivsin’s head, and lovingly nuzzled his cheek. “Oh, you brave, brave stallion… you took all they had and still didn’t break, didn’t you?”

Despite the pain, Kivsin managed a toothy grin. “I’ve had worse. These men are amateurs compared to the Druchii.” He weakly lifted a foreleg, and returned Octavia’s embrace. “Thank you. So much.”

“Oh no, what is this?!” Octavia parted Kivsin’s mane, exposing a ring of burnt skin at the nape of his neck.

“That?” Kivsin shook his head, his face a dark grimace. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“So!” Vinyl ground her teeth through the biggest forced grin she could manage. “We still need to find Big Mac, and I’m not sure only two of us at a time can manage that. Wanna take this somewhere else?”

“Yeah, clock’s ticking,” Lyra nodded.

“Are you okay to walk?” Octavia asked.

He managed to sit up on the table, grunting with the effort. “Not fast enough to keep up. Give me a minute and I’ll catch up.”

“Are you sure?”

“He said he needs a minute, Tavi!” Vinyl tugged her hoof almost forcefully, separating her from Kivsin. “Take your sweet-ass time, Kivsin! As much as you need!”

“We’re right down this way!” Octavia shouted as Vinyl practically dragged her through the door.

Lyra started after them, but cursed and nearly tripped forward as her wounded leg faltered. She gingerly wrapped her ankle in magic, offsetting the weight and shock of her steps with a simple, constant telekinetic push upward. She muttered aloud, “Not the time, or the place…”

________________________________________

Kivsin took his time alone to recuperate, working up his stiff muscles with a walk around the chamber. Some of the dismembered corpses he recognized from the myriad men who had been trying to ‘cleanse’ him. But there was nothing to cleanse.

Stupid fools, he thought with a smirk. Couldn’t even tell when somepony is legitimately unpossessed by a daemon.

It wasn’t long before he felt ready to go, and began making his way over to the door, passing by an odd pile of burning furniture. He glanced over, noticing a smeared outline where a body looked to have been.

Kivsin blinked.

Where a body looked to have been.

OH, SHI—

BANG!

A hellishly burning sting erupted square in his fetlock. He cried out in shock, falling face first to the floor. Before he could even begin to recover, something yanked him up by the mane, hard and rough. Kivsin looked up as far as his eyes could roll, and saw the grim, half-burned face of the witch-hunter, twisted into a vicious sneer. Kivsin suddenly felt something cold and hard press against his back.

“An diesem Tag, mit Sigmar als mein zeuge ...” the man intoned.

Kivsin snapped a wing up, swatting the hand away from his spine. Another shot rang out, merely grazing his side and flying off to ricochet off the stone wall with a loud crack. He twisted around as hard as he could against the grip on his mane, but the man recovered immediately, and drove his metal-tipped boot against his injured leg with a sickening crunch of bone.

Kivsin had barely reacted this time beyond a grunt; the original wound on his leg had taken him more by surprise than anything, and he was accustomed enough to pain to learn how to steel himself against multiple hits in the same place. Still, he was in a very bad position. He prepared to throw his weight forward for another attempt—

The drum of the revolver at his back clicked another round into place, sending a fresh chill down his spine. He expected the sting any moment, but for some reason, the witch hunter paused.

It was then that he heard the brisk clip-clop of hooves coming from the doorway.

Twilight’s ears picked up the telltale sound of a gun hammer cocking back. She flinched, but only briefly, and rounded the corner with her horn already channeling a telekinetic shield against any bullets.

She froze upon seeing Kivsin on his knees, and more importantly, a badly-scarred man holding him up by the mane, staring at her with nothing less than an infernal hatred.

“Der Daemon wird fallen!” he spat out. “Dein Wille geschehe!”

Twilight didn’t understand the language, and assumed that the man was trying to tell her to stop by using Kivsin as a hostage. Her immediate reaction was to quickly prepare a precision teleport spell while trying to talk him down.

That hesitation cost her dearly.

BANG!

The burst of light and blood made Twilight jump. It was like watching the visage of death itself claiming him. Without even thinking, she lit her horn and fired a magic shot that didn’t reach the assailant until his pistol fired a second time into Kivsin’s back.

The hunter spun back with a patch of his coat’s shoulder smoldering, managing to keep his footing with a grin of triumph at Twilight, who was advancing on him furiously. “Your vessel is gone, monster, and he won’t be the last. You and your ‘friends’ are no more than the daemonkind now, and only deserve to be destroyed!”

He aimed the pistol at Twilight and fired. The pill-sized bullet spun, not getting any closer than an inch or so from her nose before it came to a screeching halt, wrapped in the lavender glow of a unicorn’s magic. It dropped to the blood-soaked bricks with a plink.

Twilight telekinetically forced the man to the ground, and tore the coat and shirt fabric from his shoulder. Growing ferally, she put a hoof over his mouth, and sank her fangs into the exposed flesh of his neck, going right down to the bone. The rich, coppery tang of blood flooded her senses, and she drank greedily, gulping down the sweet nectar until his skin was white as a sheet. All the while, the man didn’t even scream, but actually seemed to laugh for all of the seconds he was still alive.

Twilight threw the desiccated body across the chamber, and her focus only returned to take in the rest of the world by the sound of a particularly harsh gasp of pain.

“KIVSIN!!”

Twilight bolted for him, flipping him over on his back. On seeing the two pulped holes, one in his chest, the other weeping in his middle, Twilight was struck by the realization that she didn’t know how to treat bullet wounds.

“S-Spike! Spike!” she cried out.

“If you could stop teleporting through the floors, I’d be able to keep up better!” a voice slightly outside the room rang out.

Upon clearing the doorway, Spike forgot his annoyance on seeing the bloody body Twilight was holding. He rushed to kneel down beside her, immediately examining the twin injuries.

“What happened to him?” Spike asked in a low voice.

Twilight stammered as the words found their way out. “A gun… w-witch hunter. H- Kiv… the leg was cut through, too.”

Spike bit his lip and nodded. They made quick progress. Spike’s claws were too large to treat the wounds directly, so Twilight fished out the bullet that didn’t make an exit. Compresses were made from shreds of clothes.

“Okay, okay,” Spike assured himself with confidence. “Gently turn him back and he might ma—aaaagh!”

“Get away from him, you murderer!”

Spike wrestled against the tentacles which were trying to get well acquainted with his throat, and a set of white jaws trying to bite his shoulder. He threw his leathery wings open wide, and Octavia and Vinyl were launched to opposite ends of the chamber.

“Girls, stop!” Twilight pleaded. “Spike’s trying to help Kivsin!”

Neither seemed to hear her, but they halted any attempt to have at the dragon again at the bestial roar which echoed from the doorway. Macintosh forced his way through, making the doorway five inches wider in the process. Vinyl stood from her pouncing stance and sniggered, expecting a bloodbath any second.

Spike kept his shield and sword at more relaxed positions, but kept his grip on them tight. “Big Mac, you recognize me, right?” Spike took his helmet off, taking a glance at Octavia, who appeared to be looking elsewhere.

“Guys’ nights in Ponyville? Camping trip with AJ and Fluttershy?”

Macintosh began to laugh, loud and hoarse.

“Whats so funny?” Spike asked, bringing his shield to the front.

“You screamed like a baby when the roof of the tent was covered in Daddy Long Legs.”

“Both of you, please!” Twilight shouted.

Kivsin’s bandages were soaked through. His breath was steady, but he still forced them to work as needed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was trying to help,” Octavia sputtered.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Kivsin muttered with a weak smile.

Macintosh loomed over the grey and purple mares, and said with a mere glance at the noctral, “He’s gonna die.”

Twilight glanced to him judgmentally. “H-how can you tell?”

“He’s lost too much blood,” Octavia sniffled. “He feels cold.”

Macintosh nodded. “Cut off his head ‘fore then. He’ll get safe passage.”

Kivsin gave a huff. “I’d been clinging to life for so long. Heh… But now that it’s happening, I’m not afraid.” He leaned upright and started untying his bandages. “Take it off! Take them off! Let the blood out.”

Without protest, they let the rags fall, let the leak of ichor run free. Kivsin pulled Twilight and Octavia closer with a hoof around each neck.

“You both. Thank you, so much. Twilight, you were only postponing the inevitable, but I couldn’t have had a better friend, making life after Tartarus seem possible.

“Friendship,” he chuckled, spattering blood with the last letter in the alien word. “Never knew what it felt like until you arrived at the docks back in Mordheim...”

Twilight choked on the air, hardly able to believe his willingness to let his injuries have their way. She lifted her head out of his weak grip. “Kivsin, I’m so sorry… I wasn’t fast enough...”

“All things happen for a reason,” Octavia mumbled with a hollow stare into the noctral’s wounds. “This has to have been pre-planned.”

Twilight shook her head. “It was an Imperial with a gun, Octavia—”

“It was planned!” the beclawed mare screamed. A crazed grin evicted her gloom, and she ran a hoof through Kivsin’s mane as if it would bring her some comfort. “He’s going to where he belongs, a special place in the Warp, saved for him!”

Twilight let Octavia have her episode, opting not to argue with the broken mare. Octavia was in a giggling fit for a whole minute before whispering into Kivsin’s ear. He responded with a wheezing laugh.

“I’m not going to be needing it anymore. Take it.”

Kivsin’s eyelids drooped as he found it more and more difficult to breathe. “I think it’s time.”

Macintosh pushed Twilight and Octavia aside and craned Kivsin’s head back. “Last words, anypony?”

“I can’t pretend to have known or appreciated you more than Twilight or Octavia do,” Spike spoke up. “But I wish we could have been friends, too.”

Vinyl hesitated, but soon enough threw her claws to the air. “And I’m sorry for... being such a plot-hole.”

Kivsin grinned at her admission. “Apology accepted.”

Macintosh waited for the silence to be interrupted again, glancing to Twilight who looked away, and Octavia, who was still possessed by her hopeful smile and giggle-sobbing.

The air was otherwise silent.

Shining Armor had taken up a new strategy since his encounter with WAAAGH! Grimgor; always lead from the front. Morale was the heart of an army. To know the leadership was on the ground with them, sharing the burden and danger, could make the difference between a conscript and a trooper.

Rifle chatter was ubiquitous. On the street, on rooftops, in windows, the fruits of industrialization were brought to bear in support of the close combat troops. Hellstorm rocketeers, the front of their uniforms sheathed in iron, fired their dumb-munitions to devastating effect, eviscerating minotaurs and erupting in geysers of fire and shrapnel, throwing shredded meat and limbs skyward.

Progress toward the walls was going at a good pace. The Beastmen were unable to effectively cope under the combined arms counter attack in the confined spaces of Middenheim’s streets.

A forest of polearms ground forward toward the city’s main prison, thousands of boots crunching over a street of mangled flesh. Shining’s Reiksguard formed the central spear tip of the formation, the formerly gleaming silver of their armor smeared red and brown in the onslaught.

A particularly fat, boil-pocked gor swung a wide-faced axe through the ranks, claiming four stallions in its arc. Its grotesque form ignored the splashes of bullets into its blubber.

Shining drew his pistol, getting a good opportunity on the slow-moving creature, and fired several rounds into its burlap sack-covered head. Blood spattered out the back of its skull, some rounds piercing its forehead. Shining grinned with satisfaction when it started to loll in place and paused its attack.

It turned a faceless look to Shining and trudge-charged his way.

Putting up a shimmering magical shield, the axe deflected into the ground from its overhead arc. Shining sucked in a breath, enflaming his horn and shot a precise magic beam through the Nurgle-fiend’s shoulder. Its axe-bearing arm sank, but still ripped the weapon free from the cobblestone.

A screaming rocket burst at its back, bringing out a gurgling roar. Shining leapt at its distraction, drawing his sword and plunging it into the beast’s stomach. The throbbing pulp of its entrails spilled out as the precarious sack of its belly was sliced open left to right. It desperately tried piling them back in, taking intermediate swipes at the imperial troops which began to surround it as its kin were beaten back.

Shining enveloped its head in a shield bubble and steadily shrank it. Blood started leaking through the threads of the potato sack, bone beginning to crack and poke through its threads. The creature’s claws stopped foraging for its guts. Shining released its shrunken head, and let the wet pile of flesh slop the the ground.

“Unicorns with me!” Shining bellowed. “Spike wall!”

In unison, they lowered their weapons and fifty horns lit up, streams of witchlight bricking together into a wide barrier, bristling with the ordered impalers.

The Chaos beasts, seemingly oblivious, continued to throw themselves at the wall. It wasn’t long until enough of them were stacked on the spikes that they couldn’t reach for more, but they were stuck. Their contorted faces squished against the shimmering barrier like glass.

“All else behind it, push!”

Hundreds of hands and hooves braced against the shield, and with a rumble of grunting, ground it forward, pushing down the street.

Shining knew once they passed the complex, the shield wouldn’t hold when exposed on another flank, but he had his plan set for it. Joachim's 20th regiment was supposed to be butchering their way to meet Shining at the intersection.

Just as the shield passed the corner of the Offices, it met resistance where a massive iron leg stepped into its path. The advance halted instantly. With the crackle of rifles nigh-silenced, the leg’s twin swung around the corner, gripping the building’s edge and cracking its facade.

Shining’s eyes widened.

“No…”

Fluttershy peered around the corner, ember-eyed and scanning the ranks which had immediately halted. Her jaw hung slightly ajar, then wrenched wide open as she bounded around and arced a spike-laden hoof down upon them.

Shining nearly screamed, “Up! Up! Up!”

The unicorns raised the shield just in time to intercept the titanic strike of the metal monster. Simultaneously as the beasts renewed their onslaught into the Imperial line, Fluttershy battered the shield with reckless abandon, each strike weaving a web of cracks and splinters.

Shining had dropped his support the shield, having drawn his sword to take the beasts’ renewed assault into the unprepared line. Putting a decade and a half of service to use, he took on the spawns as they came, taking the occasional second of respite to glance in dread at Fluttershy who, by the look of the shield, was just a couple of strikes from being able to lay into his forces.

Fluttershy clasped her claws together, raising them high over her head. Shining could only lament his inability, the impossibility of keeping something like her hidden or safe and away from this.

But Fluttershy paused. Her burning eyes locked on Shining. It only lasted a moment, and Shining swore he saw her claws starting to separate and relax before a white light momentarily blinded him.

In mid-roar, half of Fluttershy’s head was obscured in smoke as a streaking form shot into her, impacting her cheek with the sound of a massive church bell and throwing her into the neighboring building.

Luna was always a mare of Old, in more ways than one. She’d taken countless weeks relearning the laws of the land and changes that Equestria had undergone in her millennia of absence. Things had gotten so complicated. Universal health care, blackpowder firearms, whole new nations and their leaders to deal with.

Then there was all the manure she’d had to put up with in this world. Men and their xenophobia, Elves and their arrogance, Chaos for stealing them from home, Sylvanians trying to use her to resurrect Nightmare Moon.

It felt good to get back to basics for a change.

She launched back as Fluttershy’s claw slapped the side of her face. Globs of molten metal slopped off the giant’s jaw after Luna’s alpha-strike as she started righting herself. Not giving her the time, Luna got behind Fluttershy’s head and threw a furious buck, forcing Fluttershy’s head through the building’s side amidst a rain of rubble.

Is this it? Luna thought. Fluttershy was supporting herself against the building, hunched over, the dent in the back of her head visible through the mane. The princess hovered closer, quite disappointed. The hydras and quarry-eels that used to plague ancient Equestria could actually put up a fight.

Fluttershy swiped her claw in a great arc, and Luna felt the very blade tip lightly brush her neck as she jolted back.

“Ah, there’s the fight in you.”

The princess took higher, easily escaping Fluttershy’s reach. Such didn’t stop her. Fluttershy tore out a chunk of the nearest structure, grinding up the rubble in her claw before hurling it at Luna. Bits scattered in ramshackle buckshot. In a flash, Luna teleported to the end of the cloud and bolted for the beast, interrupting her preparation of another shot.

Fluttershy dropped the wad, raising a leg to block little effect. Luna’s hooves struck dead center in her palm, recoiling back into Fluttershy’s face.

Luna grinned. Fluttershy didn’t know how to fight an equal or greater, only use her own body as a weapon, throwing itself around like some barbarian with a club. Luna managed to turn her own body against her, something out of a filly’s imagination, making the monster punch itself in the face. For a split second, Luna felt the chill of a shadow pass over her. Glancing back, she snapped up a shield, blocking Fluttershy’s other claw. Both great palms curled around the bubble.

Fluttershy tried to pop the orb between her palms. Luna’s head felt compressed in a vise to maintaining the shield, between two iron walls. She raised her head up, expecting to look into some baleful snarl, but only found a maw of teeth biting down on her shield, and a thick, blood-slick tongue pulling her back into darkness.

With an echoing slam, there was pitch blackness. Fluttershy’s lip had shut, but her jaws had yet to crush the shield. But they were trying, hard as all hell. Luna could feel some rough surface grinding against the barrier, peeling away its layered magic.

It was getting weaker, and the strain in her head only growing worse. Every muscle in her legs burned. The taste of blood trickled along her tongue.

The shield shattered like glass, instantly drowned out when Fluttershy screamed. Luna made her break, catching sight of the very sky smiting Fluttershy. Snapping, furious ribbons of lightning locked the giant in place, twitching and chattering at the air.

Luna raised her forelegs over her head, collecting all the magic she could muster into a black sun easily matching her for size. In a shout of strength, she hurled the ball at Fluttershy.

Fluttershy caught it dead center in her chest, and was swallowed up in a blooming fireball. The very structures around her had their exposed facades crushed in, and blasting wind whipped everything not nailed down through the streets.

At last, there was a relative silence. Fluttershy was not to be seen through the wall-dense dust and smoke. Luna made out the sound of a single breath from the smoke which heralded no further. She finally could breathe, ease her racing heart, and take stock of her surroundings. The streets were free of bloodshed, at least for here. A few soldiers were catering to the dead, others were trying to achieve some catharsis, spitting and jeering at the slumping giant.

A large group of pegasi flew down from where the clouds had enacted their judgment. Their leader addressed the princes with a salute. “Your highness, it would seem the monster is silenced. Do you have any orders?”

“Disassemble it.” Luna said with a grimace. “Legs, talons, every rivet, nut, bolt; I want it limbless.”

“It’d be my pleasure, princess. And yourself?”

“If my ears don’t betray me, there’s still a battle to win. I will need a moment to myself, and will join Shining Armor’s forces. To your duties now.”

“Aye, princess.”

Luna began heading for the continued din of arms. That Fluttershy, she had to be dealt with one way or another. Luna grinned.

Let us see how she becomes a threat again without legs.

Just then, she heard a gust of wind coming from behind. She turned quickly enough to catch a glimpse of a huge slab of drywall flying straight at her.

Rainbow Dash ignored the calls for her alias. Rainbow Spring... she was already getting tired of that name. Casting a short glance to her flank, she internally damned the day the star was cut into her, and the daemon that Tzeentch put her at the mercy of.

She changed her mane and fur colors, and peeked over a pile of rubble. She had to have another look, unable to believe what she’d seen the first time.

Fluttershy had torn out a chunk of the building before her and hurled it at something. Rainbow couldn’t see the target. Fluttershy swiped at the pegasi around her, exposing the burned-out rim of a large hole in her chest. Ropes of muscle-cabling were melted through, sagging like wax and wetted by gushes of fire, pouring out from shattered piping.

It didn’t take long for Fluttershy’s struggle to slow. Her forelegs started going slack, to the point where she could barely lift them. She slumped against the Commission Office, futilely twisting and trying to bite at the pegasi who began packing drums of gunpowder in her joints.

Rainbow’s heart leapt and she altered her form to that of a hound, sniffing out the possibility of a fuse, a fire. She picked it up at the sound of a match being struck, and thought of what might scare them all off best.

She quickly climbed over the pile in mid-transformation with a star-bearing shield and an enormous broadsword glowing lambent with red, eldritch power, like a living flame. Immediately cries of ‘The Traitor!’, ‘It’s him!’, and ‘Sigmar, preserve us!’ filled the space between her ears and brass helmet. She gave her form another member, throwing open a pair of great black wings. Already, the pegasi were opening a panicked, screaming path for Rainbow’s bullet-ascent. She managed to tackle a pegasus with a matchbook and spent stick in their hoof. The force knocked the matches from him, and Rainbow hurled him into the sky.

Rainbow set down on Fluttershy’s shoulder and started bashing the sword and shield together, while shouting in a dark and booming voice: “I am Archaon! Slayer of the pretender, Valten! Scourge of the World! Middenheim will burn! Your souls will be a feast for the Gods!”

The air and streets cleared quickly, the screaming humans and ponies bolting for cover and crying out in fear and panic. Rainbow’s enhanced voice certainly carried far, if her burning throat was any indicator.

Taking advantage of the lull, Rainbow climbed down Fluttershy’s body, through a hole her giant friend had broken in the structure. A disconnected pipe nearly doused her in flame. It had already started a conflagration inside.

How do you even fix this?! she thought, changing into a metallic version of her pony form to better take the heat. She forced the burst pipe back to meet its severed twin. Immediately after the heavy clunk of its reconnection, something hit Rainbow’s shoulder, spun her around, and in a flash of purple, she was looking at the world behind herself, upside down.

“Spike, no! It’s Rainbow Dash!” Twilight cried.

Rainbow put her forced her head upright with little more than a sore nose while Spike was painfully flexing his claw like he’d punched a wall.

Twilight took Rainbow by the reverting hoof, taking her to the hole Fluttershy had taken herself from. Rainbow pulled back, stopping her. “Twilight, do you have any idea what’s going on?!”

“We’re leaving, Rainbow. There’s nothing for us here.”

“Woah, woah. You got to talk to Celestia, right? We need to get to safety and Fluttershy’s gotta get out of here!”

“We are gettin’ out,” Applejack said. She brought Apple Bloom in tow. “Rainbow, there just ain’t time to explain. I swear we will, once we’re long gone.”

There wasn’t time to argue, not with Twilight having called Fluttershy. Fluttershy took Applejack and Apple Bloom in her claws, letting them climb onto her back.

“You might want to get Scootaloo now,” Spike said. “Once Fluttershy jumps the walls, she’s going to leg it.”

“Pssssst! Sweetie, They’re gone!” Pinkie called. “Aaaand this might be our way out!”

Sweetie Belle ran across the street, where Pinkie Pie was crouched inside a wide-mouthed storm drain set in at the bottom of a wall section. The alley-thin space where it wallowed offered them both the cover of darkness.

“Smells like that’s been used for a lot more than rainwater,” Sweetie grumbled.

“Won’t have to put up with it for long!” Pinkie sat herself at the edge. “You wanna follow or sit in my lap?”

“What? I’m not going down there!”

“Seriously?” Pinkie snickered. “You’ve been in worse places. Besides, picture it as an extra-long waterslide!”

“It’s a sewer pipe,” Sweetie deadpanned.

Pinkie’s smile faltered. “Sweetie, Rarity is trusting me a lot with getting the both of us down the mountain, and wouldn’t ya know it, there’s a chute right here!”

“We couldn’t climb over the wall?”

“Somepony’ll see us!” Pinkie picked up the beat of boots on stone. It was getting closer. “We don’t have time! You wanna sit in my stomach instead so you don’t have to smell it?”

“No!” Sweetie nearly screamed. She started shivering, as if struck by a cold wind. “I-I’ll just… lap…”

Sweetie sat herself square between Pinkie’s thighs, and the larger mare held her securely. “Eyes and mouth shut during the ride,” Pinkie grinned toothily. “Keep hooves close at all times!”

Pushing off, Sweetie kept airtight, and Pinkie Pie squealed like a filly. The stink burned Sweetie’s nose, but thankfully it was over before too long. A face full of mud at the edge of the runoff pool greeted her. Pinkie sprang out of the pool with an apple core tangled in her mane, which one of her tongues yanked out and pulled down her throat.

“Woo! I wanna do that again! Wait, no. Gotta find the others!” Pinkie plucked Sweetie Belle, who was still spitting mud, from the murk and took off running. “You should’a loved it! If only the D—”

Pinkie stopped on a dime, leaving Sweetie to bounce with Pinkie’s tongue wrapped around her middle like a bungee cord.

“The D... The D-Do...”

Sweetie wiggled out of the slimy lasso and regarded Pinkie’s horrified expression and broken-record ticks.

Sweetie put a hoof against the mare’s leg. “Pinkie?”

Pinkie started, smearing a smile back onto her face. “I j-... Sorry. Let’s g-... go!”

Sweetie followed Pinkie at a trot, the mare seeming to have instantly lost all her energy, and listened to the forest for the sound of an escape being made. It should be unmistakable, the sound of Fluttershy stomping around, but it was difficult to focus on that over Pinkie’s loud eating. It sickened Sweetie to hear Pinkie’s open-mouth gnashing and lip smacking as she broke up and scarfed down fallen tree branches and other detritus.

“Don’t you think finding the others is a little more important than lunch?” Sweetie asked.

Pinkie finished swallowing a mouthful of leaves. “Right. You’re right,” she sniffed. “I just needed a little comfort food, but yeah, it’s a little soon.”

“Comfort food? For what?”

Pinkie craned her head back, revealing a teary eye. “It’s nothing,” she squeaked. “Adult stuff…”

“Umm…”

“I’m okay… I’m okay…” Pinkie slowed down, her head sinking closer to the ground. “It’s okay. He wants to come back. But who made him go?”

She felt an odd sensation in her tail, peered back, finding it was twitching as if it alone was on a sugar rush. She heard a distant crumbling of rock, and a heavy, metallic grinding.

Sweeping up Sweetie Belle, Pinkie darted from the cliff. A cloud of dust and litter engulfed them both following a spectacular crash.

“Everyone in one piece?” Spike said.

“Aargh! My leg hurts like Tartarus!” Rainbow hissed through gritted teeth.

Applejack yanked several arrows out of her back. “Two, maybe three, actually.”

“Pinkie!” Rarity jumped off Fluttershy’s back and helped Pinkie off the ground, wrapping her in a hug. “Thank goodness, you got out alright! Is Sweetie Belle okay?”

Pinkie nodded fervently. “Yeah! She’s riiiii-” Reeling her tongues in, the three she kept exposed terminated, bundled in a well-tied knot with nothing between them. Pinkie stared at this oddity, her smile growing a bit wider with a glance at an unamused Rarity. “iiiiii-’ll sniff her out!”

Face to the ground, Pinkie could only pick up Sweetie’s scent within mere meters of where they were had Fluttershy touched down.

“Where’s my sister, Pinkie Pie?” Rarity asked flatly.

“I know I was holding her when you showed up! I yanked her out of the way before Fluttershy could smashed her-!”

Pinkie gagged on those words with a gout of multi-hued flame bursting from her lips in a long-winded belch. She looked to Rarity, who had one hand tightly holding the other’s wrist, which was growing into a gauntlet-shaped spiked fist.

Pinkie immediately sat up, prodding different spots of her engorged gut in search of unintended morsels. “I swear this was an accident!” she claimed, hastily opening her abdomen and rolling the shaking, smoke-spitting filly from its confines. “You told me to keep it under control, and I did! I did! Maybe I fell on her when Fluttershy landed, maybe it was an instinct because I’m soft on the inside and it would cushion the fall—”

“Just… flipping… stop.” Rarity’s fist slowly shrank, and she started wiping Sweetie’s face off. She wordlessly led Sweetie to Fluttershy, muttering something about cleaning her up.

Pinkie followed close behind. “You know I’m really sorry about that, right—”

Rarity put a finger against Pinkie’s lips, looking to, with all her strength, keep her head from exploding. She seemed to be wearing two different faces on top of each other. “Shhhh... I’m sure you are. I’m just flustered,“ A buzz of warp lightning danced across her mane, “because this is, what, the third, fourth time you’ve eaten her? I’m not sure where this came from,” She ran a finger along Pinkie’s body-wide mouth. “But do you really need it? You can eat just fine with the mouth you talk with. Sew yourself up, and try to keep yourself full on anything else but us.”

“Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye!” Pinkie sang, with the motions to authenticate the ritual.

Helping Pinkie climb to Fluttershy’s back, Rarity smiled. “As good a promise as any.”

Fluttershy hastily treated her claw, glancing at the parallel gashes in the cliff face she'd scraped out to control her fall. Rarity had directed her to the north end of the city before the jump, so after taking stock of her passengers, she got to her claws and took off in an untargeted stampede.

Applejack and Apple Bloom held securely to links of the giant’s mane, the elder looking to her weeping sister, then back at the increasingly distant cliff. She hoped with all her heart Braeburn and Big Macintosh were alright.

Braeburn heard the distant roll of thunder. Two of his cousins were gone.

“I swear, Scratch…”

"I told you it needed to grow on them. You’ve been smothering them!”

Macintosh successfully clawed his way through the tree Vinyl was perched in the branches of. As it started to fall, she merely teleported into the foliage of the next tree over, and Macintosh started his relentless lumberjacking again.

“Smothering?!” Braeburn scoffed. “I was tryin’ to help her, dammit! Our family was finally gonna be together again!”

Vinyl blinked. And then she snorted loudly, pointing an accusing hoof in his direction. “Hey, did your parents ever tell you, ‘don’t pick the scab, or you’ll make it worse’?”

Braeburn rolled his eyes. “What in sam hill does that have to do with anything? And it’s supposed to get worse!”

“Well, don’t you think that Applejackie-Bloom should figure that out on their own instead of being brow-beaten into scratching it?” she pressed. “In case you forgot, you had ten years to get used to this, while they only got here, like, in the last few months! Ever try playing a two-hour set on Friday night at a club you know warp-all about, with instruments you didn’t even know existed until the night before? It ain’t fun, Burnie.”

“We still didn’t have to separate. I could’a just given ‘em space!”

“Well, now there’ll be miles of space between you guys!” Vinyl cheered. “Everyone wins!”

Braeburn projectile-vomited at Vinyl, who simply leaned back and let the blob of slime pass overhead. “Which also gives you two more time,” she grinned, motioning to Macintosh who wasn’t listening in the slightest. “Two cousins out in the woods, on a road trip! Fun, right?”

“If they don’t make it ‘cause ‘a you, I’ll have your hide!”

“Oh! If you do, make sure you do what Tavi did with Kivsin’s! It looks sooo cute!”

“Thank you,” Octavia smiled, huddled in her noctral-skin coat with the hide of the head acting as a hood. Trails of blood were still caked into her fur.

Lyra was withdrawn, leaning against a boulder and just watching the four. She made motions with her hand, pretending to put a pistol to her head, cock it, and pull the trigger. With the next cycle, she aimed at Braeburn. A burst of flame shot from her pointer finger, putting a good sear into the side of his face.

“Oh, sorry, Braeburn! Finger slipped! But hey, listen. If it were up to me, you’d be with Applejack right now, but hearing Vinyl describe her vision more…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s starting to sound legitimate.”

Vinyl’s tree began to lean, and she teleported again with Macintosh angrily following suit. Braeburn rubbed the burned area, making sure the damage wasn’t too severe. He angrily muttered something sounding like ‘damn tzeen’. “What, you’re taking her side?”

“No, I’m not on her ‘side’. I’m looking at what the situation is now, which she may have very well screwed up for worse. There’s no point in crying about what could have been. Learn from what happened and use it in the future.” She pinched her brows. “If Vinyl’s right, we have to move. The Brass Keep might be the safest bet—”

“No!” Macintosh roared, tearing out the last splinters of support the tree he’d assaulted had. Amidst it’s fall, he lumbered toward Lyra. “You go to the Keep. We’re gonna find my sisters!”

“Blessed be to that!” Braeburn shouted.

“What? No!” Vinyl protested from the next standing tree. “We’ve gotta raise alarms, put together a warband. We have to tell the guys at the Keep that Archaon’s gonna get back in the game!”

“Shut up! You’re the one who started this! Macintosh ‘n I are gonna find them. You three, scram!” Braeburn trotted right past Lyra with Macintosh in tow.

“Braeburn, come on!” Lyra pleaded.

“Come with us or go with them, but we ain’t stoppin’.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing!” Vinyl shouted in exasperation. “We’re making history!”

“Worm fodder’s more like it!” Braeburn nudged Macintosh with a grin. “Poor things’ll die ‘a food poisoning...”

Vinyl jumped down from her perch, muttering, “Thick as a brick wall, those two, but hey!” She reared on her hind legs and put a claw over Lyra’s shoulder. “Can’t stop the will of Gods, can you? ... Uh, Lyra?”

Lyra ran a hand through her oily, matted hair, and sighed. “Let’s just go before I change my mind. Go scrape Octavia off the ground.”

Author's Notes:

Yeah, took quite a while to get this one out. Recently took up an addiction with Reddit... That place is an abyss of curiosity.