Yukito, Sora, and Starbreaker ambled to the lounge and sat in a dust-free spot on the floor where the couch used to be. Yukito noticed, only now, the walls were stripped bare sometime while he was asleep. Only patches of dust lingered; not so much as one torn cornerstone of paper remained. The plaque, likewise, had been removed with enough force to dent the now-empty hole where it was once affixed.

The same was true of the sparse furniture; in fact, Sora had her bell convert the queen-sized bed into thaumic energy after getting up and trotting back into the bedroom. When that was done, she hastily returned to the other two and sat down again. Now, they were the only shred of evidence left that they had even inhabited the building; if they left here and now, it would only be a matter of time before more dust built up to erase those last few traces of them ever being here. Or, so it seemed to the tired, groggy, yet alarmed Yukito.

"Sora… we have to… start removing the…" Yukito paused to cough, finding that Sora was looking at him with concern marring her features.

Sora shook her head. "Not yet," she muttered. "You're still shaking." She turned to Starbreaker. "And I'm not as steady with my blades…"

Starbreaker's ears twitched, before the torn right rotated. Her lips pursed, and her prismic eyes narrowed a bit. She turned to the door that once had the plaque resting at its side haltingly, hooves trembling. Sora tensed, ears turning before she too turned to the door.

The emergency siren still went on, unrelenting in its demented song. Both mares strained, trying to catch—and evidently expecting—something else to trample through whatever lay beyond the door's other side. But nothing other than the droning came. Neither were sure of what was worse; that the Corps had been distracted at the most inopportune of circumstances, or that it was only a matter of time before the distraction was taken care of.

All they could do was play the waiting game. Oh, irony of ironies. Sora's wings rattled slightly, ringing in tandem with her bell. She did not like how fast everything went to hell in a hoofbasket, but acknowledged that the outcome was partly her and Yukito's fault. Okay, scratch that, about seven-eighths was her and Yukito's fault—the last eighth, she chalked up to circumstance and the universe deciding to join in on that fun. She considered that neither of them could have foreseen this particular outcome, but then again they flashbanged their way out of the base—and in hindsight, doing just that in a place filled to teeming with cameras and ponies watching through said cameras was the worst idea they could have come up with.

In such a situation, only one remark did such a nice job summarizing the whole thing. "Reap what you sow, indeed," Sora mentally snarked to herself. And great gods of old, was she doing just that… or would, once the Corps stopped flipping their lids in trying to avert another disaster without her helping their sorry hides. It took her seconds to process that, and when she did she reached up with her hooves and fumbled with her bell. "If I ever have any foals, with what the insanely high probability of my reproductive capabilities having been more than likely compromised in the last three-ish years, this is gonna be a hell of a bedtime story," she ruefully added in the depths of her consciousness.

She paused when Yukito's horn started to fitfully glow. "Wh-what are you…" Sora trailed off as the stack of envelopes they'd received from Tsukumi, the supplies from the medicinal dresser, and the books he took from Starbreaker's temporary cell materialized before them in two stacks.

Yukito lurched, his face almost coming into contact with the stack before he pulled himself back in time. He winced and groaned, eyes screwing shut as his headache worsened. "S-secure those…" he muttered.

Sora nodded and turned to the stacks and supplies, her hooves still on the bell. "Light, convert," she muttered, and the bell rang before seizing the entire pile of stuff in light and making them all vanish. They could look at the contents of the stacks later, as none of them knew how much time they had left before their door was metaphorically kicked down. Her mental gears ground for a moment, and then she unclasped her bell and hoofed it to Yukito.

"What the…" Yukito started, lifting a shaky hoof to take the bell. "Sora, what are…"

"They're going to come sooner or later… unless they're still distracted," Sora muttered darkly, closing her eyes. "I wish I didn't have to do this…"

Yukito's eyes widened. "S-Sora, this isn't like you… y-you're not suggesting…"

Sora glumly nodded. "I'll have to buy you time to recover…" she muttered. Turning to her husband to give him a look of genuine regret, she added, "They'll try to… extract the information of your whereabouts from me, more than likely. But they won't get it so easily…"

Yukito went white at the notion. "E-extract?! They… they wouldn't…"

Sora decided to come clean, "The Admiral… tried to get how I found Starbreaker out of me, when I was summoned to his office… he failed… he's probably going to try again." She turned away. "I'll… do my best to come back… fight hoof and blade to get out."

A hoof from behind stopped her before she could even get up. Sora craned her neck to find Starbreaker glowering at her. "Extract, you say?" she growled, voice laced with a mechanical hum and no small amount of venom. Her eyes flickered blue for a moment, just before they shifted red.

"Extract," Sora confirmed with another nod. She saw Starbreaker's brow furrowing—more than likely, she knew what that word meant.

"If you don't come back…" Starbreaker leaned in close as she spoke, her glower turning into a grin, "can I burn your tail… when I find you? Because I will hunt you down if I have to."

Sora contemplated this for a moment. "Only after we get away from the Corps… alive," she confirmed. Her face hardened as she donned her mask of apathy once again, but regret still sparked in her augmented eyes. "I'm done holding back for those pricks." She stood up, and trotted to nuzzle Yukito consolingly. He nuzzled back, and opened his mouth to object to Sora's half-baked, very flawed idea, only to shut it as he realized he could not stop her with a bad case of mana drain currently crippling him.

Starbreaker rushed to the door, angling her body to keep Sora from leaving. "Oh no you don't!" she objected, tail swishing in annoyance. "You're not going anywhere until you tell me why you've gone weird in the damn head!"

Sora sighed and strode up to Starbreaker with a calm, calculated trot. "Should have foreseen this," she mentally groaned. She opened her mouth and answered in a flat voice, "Listen… I've always been considered weird in the head by the Corps. And the only reason I'm going to fight with them is because much more is at stake than our lives here."

"What?" Starbreaker asked, raising a brow as she studied Sora's impassive face. Half of her mortal enemy's tirade made no sense to her, and the other shed light on nothing whatsoever. She started to wonder what the hell was going through Sora's head.

"The Admiral himself said he may not be merciful enough to just kill us all the instant we're found," Sora replied, wings ruffling. "I don't know what's going through his head… but I'm going to find out. Chances are, it's probably worse than death, and far less than pleasant."

Starbreaker considered this for a moment, before her glower deepened. "But you hate him, right?" she asked.

Sora nodded. "Doesn't mean his behavior isn't fishy," she retorted. With that, she spread a wing and gently nudged Starbreaker aside, trotting out into a hall beyond that was lined with several doors on either side. She glanced around, finding it as dark as the quarters she'd just left, before her eyes caught sight of an elevator at the far end of the hall. She trotted to it, feeling gears and tumblers shifting in her legs with each movement. "Been a while since my leg augments did that…" she idly noted as she approached the elevator. "Last time they kicked in, Starbreaker was…"

She immediately shook that train of thought out of her head before it could finish forming. Now was not the time to be dwelling on the past, especially since everything was flying downhill much faster than she'd expected. With that she started to gallop, keeping her wings tucked in tight as she continued to register the sensation of her skin and flesh moving to accommodate her now-writhing augments.

Dread filled her as she neared those closed doors, fueled by her own recklessness and the still-rattling siren. Despite this, she reached the doors and planted her front hooves on them before slowly wrenching them open. The doors shuddered, groaned in protest as she pushed and strained to pry them, but within a mere minute they gave way to reveal a vertical corridor stretching several floors up and down. The corridor, like the hall, had no lights on. Carefully angling her wings into the shaft, she spread them as much as her current position would allow, and… damnit, the primaries touched both walls.

"Ugh, thank you augments and genetics for giving me a bigger pair of feathered limbs than was strictly necessary!" Sora muttered under her breath, before jumping into the shaft and immediately flapping her wings to launch herself up. Her wings skittered and scraped the walls with each beat, echoing sharply throughout the elevator shaft, leaving sizeable dents as she continued to ascend.

But despite that and the ringing in her ears she flew on, quickly reaching the end of the tunnel, marked by a door on one side and a vent with a grate on the other. She hovered in place, pausing for a moment. She frowned before turning to the grate, angling her hind legs, and kicking at it repeatedly. It dented a few times, groaning with each impact, before it caved in and was sent inward. She flew to the vent and wrenched out the now-busted grate before crawling in, angling her troublesome wings once more as the grate fell down the shaft.

Squeezing her way in—even with her smaller frame—was insanely awkward, as the crawlspace proved to be a bit of a tight fit. She had to angle her her wings a little more, letting most of their mass rest flat against her stomach, with her primaries jutting between her hinds. At the same time, Sora had to lift her tail just enough to avoid severing its bones on accident, spreading her hinds for the same reason. Sequestering all thoughts of utter indignance to a secluded corner of her mind, she started dragging herself through the rather uncomfortable crawlspace. She'd never hear the end of it if Yukito caught wind of this, but she figured she could hide this from him… for the time being.

It took her a few steps before she felt a familiar nicking at her left hind pastern. Gritting her teeth with a wince, she pressed forward and forced herself to ignore the pain, compacting her body a little more when she saw corners at the far end. She reached a bend and awkwardly rounded it, cutting into her gaskins and cannons in the process, and gasped sharply when one of her blades clanged loudly against the bottom of the vent, scraping a good chunk of her legs on its way down. "Stupid adamantite-electrum alloy blades! If this shit keeps up, I'm getting them removed one of these days!" she cursed under her breath.

Sora continued to wade through the vent, even though her legs stung from her fresh wounds. The space only seemed to grow more cramped to spite her, and she tightened up her posture a little more—much to her frustration, and health as the blades once more scrapped her legs with each stroke. If there was one bad thing she could say about vents, it would be that this one just wasn't big enough to accommodate a pony with bladed wings. A fact that kept reasserting itself with each inch she crawled in her ill-thought-out attempt to buy the other two time.

In a hellish ten minutes, though, she saw a light at the end of the vent and doubled her efforts to get to it. Rays shone through slats, bright orange yet fading—the sun was setting. "Perfect!" Sora muttered, smiling as she got closer to the slats. When she reached it, she took a moment to adjust her eyes since the light was now in her face, before carefully peering out to find a smog-filled alley beyond and that she was at least three whole stories above it.

It was empty; no moving shadows were even ambling about, and the smog was just thick enough to hide in. Even better. Looking up, she found clouds forming, crackling with lightning, all of them slowly but surely encroaching upon the city. That… didn't look promising, all things considered. She lifted a hoof and nudged the grate to see if it would budge, and winced as it popped out and dropped to the alleyway with a loud, echoing clatter. Cautiously, she poked her head out and looked around. The streets were empty, and the one camera in the alley was turned away from her and to the grate. She pulled herself back in when she saw the camera move, just enough so that it wouldn't see her. She waited for a few minutes, then poked her head out again to find the camera once again turned away.

Awkwardly, but silently so as to not alert whoever was monitoring the feed at this time of day, Sora pulled one wing out from under her and spread it out of the vent. She angled her blades and turned them to the camera, aiming for that critical joint between the camera itself and where it was anchored. The blades spread a little wide to fit the joint between them, halting for a moment. She channeled mana into her wing, feeling parts shift and twist in her joints, letting a soft green light seep into her blades before they started to glow and vibrate with a crackling power. Arcs of lightning, miniscule enough to be mistaken for a malfunctioning light, started dancing around and through the blades.

"May not control this when I absorb other ponies' magic, but I damn sure can control my own magic!" Sora thought with a bit of glee, feeling her blades become white-hot in seconds as yet more augments activated and their crackling increased tenfold. "It's been a long time since I activated this particular augment…"

The camera started to move as one stray arc of lightning bounced on its lens, but it wasn't fast enough. The blades slammed into both sides of its joint, with the channeled magic doing their work in helping the blades sever the camera's neck very neatly. It wobbled in place for a moment, the blades holding it up even as its most critical wires were snipped, and they unceremoniously slipped out to let it plummet. It fell into the smoke and broke on impact, audibly shattering into a gazillion pieces of scrap and glass with such a retort it almost sounded like it echoed for miles around.

"Sayonara, camera! Oh how you will not be missed," Sora muttered, slipping her other wing out from beneath her and angling it forward before dropping out of the vent—a suicidal leap for anypony who wasn't augmented or knew what they were doing. She landed awkwardly on her hooves, clumsily between the walls of the alley, almost faceplanting into razor-sharp shards of metal and glass as she caught herself by thrusting her blades onto the ground. With one set of primaries still glowing, she righted herself and craned her neck to look at her hinds, wincing as she found sizable scrapes and cuts that would take hours at the least to heal.

Worse, blood was trickling down them, enough to stain much of her hinds crimson. However, given how badly they stung with each movement, they were certainly better than she had been expecting—the muscles did not suffer any injuries that would have impaired them, and bone and augments weren't poking out in the slightest. She lifted her wings and carefully scanned the alley, brow furrowing as she caught a rising cloud of smoke in the distance.

That mass of smog was illuminated by the light of the setting sun, which tinted it a hideous orange. Around it, though they were distant, several small forms she assumed were ponies hovered in tight circles. Worse, the smoke that flooded the alley did more than blur their features; they faded in and out at such a rate she couldn't tell just how many were on the scene. She could even barely make out the orange of the setting sun itself in this smog; it seemed to absorb so much color the sky itself looked to be grey from ground level.

Fortunately for her, the Corps' attention was still elsewhere, collectively speaking. Before she could take one step forward, however, her stomach gave a cramp of pain that made her wince. She let it pass before carefully trotting out into the street beyond, thinking it was only aching now that she was out of that stuffy vent. The smog, however, was more than happy to remind her that it was a hazard; just one whiff of the stuff caused the scents of sulfur, gunpowder, and a myriad of other unpleasant chemicals to register in Sora's sinuses. On instinct, she lifted a hoof to cover her mouth again, coughing into it to clear her lungs as her blades ceased glowing.

"At least the Admiral wasn't exaggerating about this…" Sora muttered, eyes already watering as she looked up to see if the smoke would rise or fall. It didn't budge, instead staying at a constant two stories tall. Good; it wouldn't reach the vent she'd smashed open, and in the meantime it gave her plenty of cover. All the better to hide the breadcrumb trail the Corps had picked up. She took a moment to get used to the putrid air; it wasn't long after that as a sense of familiarity sank in and her body more or less stopped having its conniption. She dropped her hoof and turned to a deserted side-street and trotted to it, an itchy feeling taking root in her hind legs as her augments went to work.

Ocular augments whirring to life once more, without activating their glow, she carefully scanned the artificial fog, looking to the left and right of the road. But apart from the siren that somepony neglected to turn off, which was understandable given the situation, the road was as still and quiet as a cemetery. Adding to that the fact that light barely penetrated through this chemical hazard, and the overall state of the buildings surrounding the off-duty quarters, and the lonely stretch of road being empty…

Sora shuddered at this, a sense of dread clawing in her gut once again. Some part of her was tempted to run blindly to one of the other buildings and barge into it, but she dismissed the notion as she saw the windows start glowing. She turned left and made a harried trot, trying her best to look inconspicuous to any boarded-up souls who caught her from within. The road seemed to go on for miles; the further she trotted, the darker and darker the sky became, and the more the smog refused to lift.

'Eerie' didn't come close to describing it. A distant, echoing retort spread throughout the city, shaking the ground in its wake. Lights flashed overhead, and Sora looked up to find bright arcs of white light darting across the sky. One by one, the lights of the buildings flickered on and off until only total darkness reigned. The ponies within panicked; the city erupted into mass hysteria so loud Sora found herself wincing at the sheer volume of it all.

"Attention everypony!" the Admiral yelled with a retort of static flooding the city once again. "Imminent thunders—" Lightning flashed again, and thunder drowned out his voice entirely as an unearthly frigid chill swept through the streets. Again and again the skies cried loudly, growing louder and louder in volumes that made the ground itself heave with an unrestrained power. Sora flapped her wings just to keep from staggering, even as each pulse through the ground tried to make her slip and collapse.

It kept shaking, and the skies kept wailing, even after entire buildings warbled threateningly. The air itself reverberated, yet oddly the smog held tightly onto the city. Sora resorted to flying a few inches above the ground to keep herself steady as she heard metal groaning all around her. A retort filled the city, distorting the air as well as deafening her then and there, and she covered her ears with her forehooves as everything above and below continued to shudder and quake. It did not occur to her that, amidst all of this pandemonium, the siren stopped.

Tremors shook the ground again, as Sora regained her hearing only to notice the distant and distinct sound of a building or two finally giving way, only further intensifying the horrible orchestra. Thunder cried to drown it out, once more to deafening notes, and at this Sora felt a tinge of helplessness as each new note—each fresh, distant scream—registered in her mind with another wave of dread. When she tried to move to where she guessed the crashes came from, however, the thunder boomed with enough force to vibrate the very air around her, and a white glow materialized around her without warning, keeping her trapped on that one street.

A feminine, echoing voice that was cold and scathing hissed in her mind, "You can't help those ponies now. It's too late for them..."

Minutes passed, but Sora was still deafened, idly wondering where that voice had come from. She closed her eyes tight, hooves on head, as the air only grew more putrid around her thanks to the tremors running their course. She hovered in place, trying to keep her aerial balance even with the white glow working against her, as slowly the thunder waned and relented with its terrible power. In fact, it was only after the ground ceased shaking with enough force to rattle the buildings, plunging the city into a void of silence did she remove her hooves to register that fact. Distantly, she heard ponies all around continue screaming as the white glow faded and released her from its grip, before the silence and darkness swallowed up their voices in one mere second.

That one second, where everything fell quiet, was almost like a backlash to Sora, who could do nothing but alight, freeze and tense at it all. The darkness, the quiet, the cold… it was so familiar, but a distant memory as well—one she did not wish to repeat. She had to force herself to keep her wings from rattling as the intense ringing in her ears gave out, and she felt the silence already sinking in. This could only mean one thing, if a silent and freezing darkness had crept in all around her…

"Did the smog kill me? Am I in the realms of purgatory?" Sora wondered, eyes widening as she realized her back legs still itched. If she were dead, she shouldn't have felt that… would she? She carefully angled a blade to carve a thin line just beneath her gaskin—then winced at the fresh pain. Alright, she was still alive, but that reassurance did nothing to abate her skyrocketing concerns.

That initial chill became a hellish coldness which settled in that lonely stretch of road, one that stole all warmth from everything except Sora, whose feathers puffed up to help keep warm. Frost started clouding the nearby windows, signs, and lightposts, creeping up in little tendrils that reminded Sora of the reaper's icy hooves. The frost thickened in seconds, turning into veritable sheets of ice that would take at least a small blade to remove. It spread from there to the buildings, trapping their unlucky inhabitants within.

The city suddenly felt abandoned, in the blink of an eye. Sora's wings rattled as she realized how utterly alone and outnumbered she was, but she forced herself to swallow her fear and trot on. The only other sign of life to be had… there were none, really, now that the city was freezing far faster than should have been even remotely possible. A few times, she passed by street signs and paused to scan them, if only to confirm where she was. Time once more lost all meaning; the smog held such a steely grip she couldn't tell whether or not night started making way for day. When she found an intersection, she paused upon finding one restaurant on the corner, run-down and rusted. She took a moment to peer into a window, but found nopony in sight—just a darkness that felt corporeal.

Veering right from that restaurant onto a larger main street, she paused when she heard the sound of hoofsteps that weren't her own. Had somepony else gotten caught in the smog? Or was it a trap? Her gut twisted again, and as she took another look at the buildings, she flinched when she realized that ice didn't just grow this fast over every vertical structure it touched… unless some external force was at work. But even that would have required technological intervention, wouldn't it, just for something on this scale to be possible?

Her ears rotated, trying to catch the exact direction from which the trotting came, shuddering at the lack of forthcoming answers. Yet the sound echoed from everywhere at once, faintly at that, as if trying to mock her. She looked around, frowning as she saw a tiny mote of white dance past her peripheral vision in a fraction of a second. Right away, her breath started to cloud, too. Another white blot descended, and another, each tinted a horrible gray thanks to the smog.

Sora's heart sank as one speck landed on her snout, sending a chill down her spine. She felt it melt against her fur, and started trotting again to keep her legs warm. It should not have been snowing, nor should ice have started forming as quick as it did. Something in her gut screamed at her that this wasn't natural, and her still-intact equine instinct only further pouted in agreement. She went left, wings rattling every other second just to generate heat. Thunder rumbled again, but now it was almost hushed and distant, fading out without so much as an echo coming after it. Lightning flashed, but now it was unnaturally dim. What in the world was happening? Things were more or less dandy for everypony else in the city not moments, or even hours, ago, and suddenly all this madness just…

A shadow darted past Sora as she came upon another intersection, lost in her musings. She shook her head to clear her thoughts; something was going wrong, and she intended to find out what. She turned to the specter, seeing a barely-equine form trundling along in a brisk trot through the smog. She wheeled after it, steps steady and firm, but not fast enough to startle or catch up to the thing.

Her ears twitched. The steps… echoed in a metallic series of clangs. In a rhythm, too. One, two, three-four… one, two three-four… whoever this was, the pony was either augmented, or simply wearing horseshoes. The rhythm, however, she couldn't brush aside as habit; the hooffalls were a little too harried, the tune itself far too refined in spite of it. She trotted after it still, picking up her pace to determine its posture as it lead her down another intersection without turning. Before long, ice began to spread across the sidewalks, but oddly left the roads untouched.

"Hey! What's going on here?" Sora asked, frowning as the snow started to pick up. The shady figure didn't stop, instead opting to wheel into an alleyway between two shops with just enough hesitance in the motion for her to see something jutting from its forehead, in addition to a light of some sort coming from someplace below that something. Sora followed, ocular augments beginning to glow, which gave her all the more reason to keep herself from galloping. It was better to not give the quarry a reason to flee, especially now that she started to suspect that said quarry was a possibly-armed unicorn and could very likely see her by the light of her augments.

When she reached the alley, she found the figure turning left down another street fast enough an unusually-stiff tail was all she caught. Sora followed, intent on finding out just who this pony was and what the hell was going on. She idly considered it was a lost local who had no better idea than she did, but that pony's movement was too… choreographed to have been from a local. The tail shouldn't have been stiff, either, unless… the pony was already freezing out here? It was a sound possibility that only made Sora continue to chase it.

As the figure went down between rows of buildings—various businesses with signs Sora couldn't care to look at, as frost and ice was fast overtaking them—it went faster. Sora herself decided to pick up her pace, but still resisted the urge to gallop; the ice growing everywhere was a serious hazard, and even she needed to be careful. At this rate, it wouldn't take long for it to grow on the roads. That, and with its own glow only making itself known whenever the figure turned, this pony very likely either seeked shelter, or was here for something else—there was nopony else out in the open that she could ask to confirm either theory.

A flash of a very pale yellow light that in the smog looked white, just bright enough to make out, burst from the figure's head for the barest of instants, drowning out its first light. Yep, definitely a unicorn—aware they were being tailed, too. Sora frowned, wondering what this pony wanted and why they'd stay out here in this blistering cold. Then again, she reflected as the shade wheeled down to a main intersection sporting the Red Barrel Suite, she didn't have much room to complain herself. She looked ahead as she followed, and even through the smog, she could barely make out the imposing fortress that was the Umbralium Corps' base.

The figure trotted up to it, and though Sora was hesitant to take her chances, she still swallowed her trepidation to pursue the mysterious figure in an attempt to demand answers. However, some part of her acknowledged there was a very good chance she would not get answers from the specter, who wheeled once again into an alley between the Suite and a small building adorned with a swath of decorated windows whose colors and features were blotted by the frost. After the figure she went, sucking in lungfuls of cold air so she could shout at the pony to halt right where they were.

But the figure stopped before she could even articulate that command. Sora did, too, upon seeing a building as run-down as the off-duty quarters sporting an open door, just up ahead on another street. Ice had already formed to keep that door open in a way snow started to pile up at the entrance. The pony up ahead stepped aside before it lifted a leg—so stiff it shuddered, cracked, groaned with a distinctly metallic noise as it was moved—to point at the open door with a single, shaky nod. Sora's blades started to glow and crackle with more warmth and light, and hesitantly she trotted to that open door.

Sora trotted past the figure, for as she tried to ascertain what it looked like, it simply melted into the smog, leaving behind only four hoofprints in a forming pile of snow. As she exited the alley and continued to the door, she chanced a glance over her shoulder; now, the figure was following her, with only its silhouette and a pair of glowing… orbs? Eyes? Whatever the case, two unnatural brown-tinted lights shined from its head, trained on her as she turned back to the building—a building that was suspiciously rusted and adorned with fraying metal plates crudely nailed together.

She almost ran face-first into its rusted plates as her head turned, but changed course in time to enter the door. What she found inside gave her lengthy pause.

Four ponies, one old stallion and three young colts, stood huddled around an out-of-place, old-fashioned iron furnace; they and the furnace were frozen in a rime of frost so thick that icicles grew on their manes and tails and the furnace's bottom. But the ice was clear, and the eyes of the ponies were trained on her, faces frozen in gaping horror. Sora trotted to them, idly noting how well they were… preserved, for lack of a better word. It was as if whoever, or whatever, did this had the intent to avoid harming them, at least directly. She didn't even see so much as one trace of frostbite on the quartet—highly unusual, given their current state.

She turned to the furnace; amazingly enough, it was still lit with a fire that burned fiercely, further fueled by what seemed to be vegetation—an earthy smell wafted from the flames instead of the sulfur and oil she'd expected. What's more, some sort of message had been scrawled on the ice encasing it, deep enough to let the flames lick at them with its warmth.

"Don't worry, the ponies won't be frozen for long… they're still conscious. The fire'll keep them warm for the night."

Sora huffed at that; such a scrawling didn't sound particularly reassuring. She turned and left, trotting into the street to find more buildings sporting open doors before turning down to head for another building with holes punched in its walls. The walls themselves looked to be caving slightly inwards; hopefully, any locals with sense would vacate that building before it decided to collapse. She found where a door would have been, had the construction been decent; it was just an empty, peeling frame with a black abyss that bade her to come. Her brow furrowed upon trotting into that abyss and finding more frozen ponies, though they had chipper smiles on their faces and were sitting on a couch, mouths slightly open. Were they amicably chatting when the frost struck? Sora peered a little closer; these ponies were dingy, with unwashed coats and unkempt manes.

"Probably homeless ponies…" she thought with a sympathetic wince. "And now I'm in their side of the fence." She turned to the couch they sat on, a worn thing littered with holes and cotton spilling out, adorned with thick but ragged quilts that were splitting at the seams. At least these homeless ponies had sufficient bedding and cover, or at least as sufficient as this building gave them, and at this she gave a small sigh of relief. So she started to circle the pair, careful to keep her wings tucked in, wondering if perhaps the frost was truly harmless. She found another carved message just barely grazing the ice on the back of the couch.

"They'll be fine. It's you and yours, or them and theirs."

Sora shuddered, sensing the pure condescension of whoever wrote this message drilling into her senses with a numbing cold. She trotted out once more, wings quivering and blades still glowing as she was making a beeline for a third door attached to a half-collapsed structure just to confirm she wasn't having an intense hallucination right now. In that room laid a corpse; shaved bare, frozen stiff, and a crystal jutting from its shoulder. Sora chanced a glance around, but found nothing more except a tent of steel forming around the pony and collapsed ceilings and support beams that would take weeks to clear out. She trotted delicately around the pony and circled the tent slowly, partly to avoid slipping and partly to look at anything else other than the laying cadaver. On one beam at the far end stood another message, but she had to peer closely at it to make out its indentations.

"There's nothing more you can do for this pony. We windigos can't do anything, either."

"Well, ain't that the truth," Sora scoffed, turning out to head into the alley again, and paused upon mentally catching that second bit. "Windigos…" A switch flicked in her mind; panic took hold. "As in… the hate-eating spirits of ice and snow…" she muttered to nopony in particular. "But isn't that a foal's tale from one thousand years ago…?"

As if to answer her question, a flake of snow landed delicately upon the tear in her left ear, sending yet more chills down her spine. "Oh no… if windigos are real, and attacked the city, then…" At once, the first two messages made sense; her legs shook with adrenaline, augments writhing once again, begging that she leave at the earliest possible convenience. She burst out of the tent, deftly jumping over the dead pony and skidding to a halt in the street to collect herself. She turned to the alley, tail twitching, instinct screaming as she found the shadowy figure once more looking at her with an air of expectancy.

The figure turned and started to trot back the way it came. Sora followed, blades still humming with an urge to slice and dice—if it were a windigo, it posed a danger she couldn't ignore any longer, and would need to be addressed as soon as possible. However, some small inner skeptic within her conscious was still holding onto the notion that windigos didn't exist. Which left two equally-unsavory options, if windigos were just a foal's tale. If it were a local as she hoped it was… they were in grave danger, yet trotting as though they weren't even aware of it, and she'd need to escort them to a shelter.

A machine, however… she'd let go, if such turned out to be the case; those things probably had the means to keep themselves warm and operational, so there'd be little point. She inhaled to shout at the figure again, and once again it went dying in her throat before it could even form as she saw that the smog was still thick enough to obscure the more intimate details of her quarry. The pony, maybe-windigo, or possibly machine, given the way its hooves clanked, stopped again—assuming, of course, they wouldn't just meld back into the smog at her approach.

The shadow was turning to a wall attached to the Suite, rearing on its rather stiff hinds and using its front hooves to scrape at the ice. Metal shrieked terribly as the ice was assaulted, which was odd as the hooves were so swift they didn't appear to even move, and the head from which the glow came bobbed disconcertingly all the while. And now that she thought of it, when it reared, the air warmed a little… But that mattered not. In seconds, the pony reverted to all fours and galloped off into another street, wheeling right so fast Sora had to blink to confirm what she saw.

"What the…" Dumbfounded, and at a loss for words, she trotted over to the section of ice that found itself on the receiving end of repeated blunt trauma. Her eyes widened when she saw a string of words carved into what she could only assume was a message—a message that oddly sparked and crackled with white lightning the moment she looked at it.

"Are you truly ready to accept this burden, Sora? Are you prepared to accept a terrible truth? If you are… then head to the base—you'll find something there, a mere fragment of that truth. Look for the marked door with the warning labels. And as soon as you can leave, take Yukito, the Herald, and Omega if you're able to fetch him, and run. Never look back. Good luck—you're on your own from here. If you're ready, we'll buy you time."

Sora gawked. The pony not only knew her name, but Yukito, Omega and Starbreaker's moniker, and even went so far as to address her and urge her to run? Her mind cartwheeled, her gut shrieked, her wings rattling as she struggled to make sense of it. That last request, to never look back, sent unsavory chills down her spine.

She shoved that aside for the moment, to focus on the 'burden' part. She considered it carefully… was she truly ready? And just what was this burden in question? 'Something' was as broad a term as could be possible; vague as it was, it just further sent Sora's mind into a tizzy. 'A door marked with the warning labels…' huh, that was…

Sora's eyes widened as she recalled the door Starbreaker tried pounding to bits in the base, the one none of them could access. The power was out, her augments kicked in, the Corps distracted… On autopilot, her wings spread and flapped, scattering motes of snow everywhere as she ascended to the skies. The smog did not climb with her, but she did not need it to—night had fallen, the moon obscured by thick black clouds which roared with an ominous thunder.

Her mind was made up in that moment, steeling itself further as she ascended over the buildings with the wall coming in sight, though she made a mental note to see if she could get Omega out as well, if he were still alive and in the city at this point. Her face hardened as she searched for the launch pad that was part of a looming, shadowy behemoth which towered over all else here. She idly considered the Admiral was still hunkered up inside, waiting for the slightest hints of foul play… and so would other soldiers and professors, more than likely.

Her wings hummed with restrained power. She'd take her ex-coworkers on, if need be. Below her, the ice lifted from the city to crawl upon the base itself, almost like a beacon without light that implored her to enter. Snow piled up on its roofs, further distinguishing itself from the shadows that seemed to have a solid hold here. As she neared the launch pad, though, she could've sworn she saw another form ambling towards the elevator.

She soared down to investigate when the figure burst in a flash of tealish light and vanished off the platform as soon as she neared it. She dared not ask questions; she had a feeling that sooner or later, she was going to find out the identity of what had just been there mere moments ago.