“One man goes into the waters of baptism. A different man comes out, born again. But who is that man who lies submerged? Perhaps that swimmer is both sinner and saint, until he is revealed unto the eyes of man.”
– Zachary Hale Comstock, Bioshock Infinite

Kraber
August 8, 2022

A fake-PHL pony collapsing, forehooves grasping at a massive runnel through their throat. A machine-gun roaring. A human in face-concealing PHL gear and a batpony rushing through the hospital lobby, gun blazing. But the MG2021 blazed back, 7.62 rounds punching through the drywall and cheap hospital art, speckling all walls with bulletholes.

“Choke to death on MY DICK, all jou fokkin’ GATPROPS!”

Kraber squeezed the trigger so hard, he wondered if he was about to feel something clink inside the receiver and watch something fall out. Like a poorly-made Transformers toy. A Newfoal dove under the reception desk, trying to find cover.

“It’s BIG! It’s HARD! And it’s COMING to get you!”

The 7.62mm rounds Kraber fired did not give a damn about the cover. Three rounds ripped through the polished wooden surface like it wasn’t even there – and one bullet hit square through the dot of the ‘I’ for Information, which was very satisfying, especially when it shattered the glass panel. The barrage must have perforated the Newfoal, as it tumbled out of its alleged hiding spot, bouncing awkwardly, then flopped over, dead.

Blood pooled out around the desk, onto the tiled floor of the lobby.

“Run, FOKMAGGOTS!” Kraber yelled, spraying the MG2021 into the four or five survivors. “Run SCREAMING, like the little fokkin’ MOEGOES that jou are! Force me to blow jou so I don’t TAKE the drink and BITE it right off and SPIT it down jou fokkin’ THROAT so jou die DEEP-throating JOU SELF!! I’m IVAN BLISS and FOK every last ONE of jou!”

“HIDEBU!” a fake-PHL woman yelled, as Kraber’s LMG punched through her spine. She collapsed to the floor, but she lived. Lived, groaning, to crawl towards an open doorway. There were flowers on a stand just in front of it.

Well, she’d have what she needed for her funeral.

“FOK YOURSELF!” Kraber roared, stomping on her neck.

Repeatedly.

Beside him, Nebula bounced from wall to wall, SMGs spraying out at the remaining fake-PHL – two earthponies armed with homemade assault saddles.

But then a pegasus Newfoal shot out of the room marked by the flowers, wearing the most pathetic assault saddle Kraber had ever seen around their barrel. Not that he’d seen many. This, though, this was two Borz pistols held to the Newfoal by a belt. Spraying wildly, and its every shot missing him by meters.

Though deafened, Kraber seriously doubted the Newfoal could hit the broad side of a barn. Trouble was, he was pinned there, and it was too close for Nebula to attack with an SMG.

… In sharp contrast to Kraber, Nebula never said a word. No insults, no one-liners.

She simply closed the gap, corkscrewing to the point she looked to be galloping sideways along the very wall – which got awkward when she knocked against an alcove containing a flowerpot.

Alerted, the pegasus Newfoal turned away from Kraber, and saw Nebula.

“BETRA–”

Nebula raised a knife and chopped into her neck, cutting her short.

As the pegasus Newfoal lay dead, its glassy, unseeing eyes contemplating the woman whose neck and spine Kraber had broken, Nebula came down to earth. She, too, contemplated Kraber.

He met her gaze. In a minute, he knew, they’d be formulating an argument.

“You idiot! Why did you do this?!”

“Because they need to fokkin’ pay! And nobody will miss me!”

But before either could say anything–

“HELP!”

They both heard it, the female voice coming from inside the nearby hospital room. Putting aside their unspoken argument, Kraber strode forward. It was a small space filled with glass, Kraber could see it from here. His MG2021 would cause too much dangerous stuff to fly around. Silently, he swapped it for the Model 29 revolver.

Yet even as his subconscious dictated his weapon choice, his conscious mind was churning.

“Is that really the best argument I have? Really?”

Nebula didn’t follow him.

As Kraber stepped into the flower shop, weapon in hand, he saw the scene.

A PER member – a shaking, blond, bearded pale man. They were wearing cheap Kevlar, with a pistol on one hip and an empty holster on the other. The blond man carried a small pistol-sized crossbow that, instead of bolts, looked to be loaded with a vial of potion, which glowed lightly in the room.

Pushed against a wall under a flatscreen TV, he was holding an Asian woman by the throat with one hand, the crossbow in another.

“I’ll do it!” the blond man yelled, their hands shaking. “You let me go, or I potion her!” He looked to the .44 revolver. Kraber’s hand was steady. “You even think of firing that, I’ll potion her GOOD!”

“Do it,” the Asian woman said. “I’d rather die. There’s more people here, more than me.”

“Like him?” the blond man asked, snapping the crossbow towards Kraber.

That was the moment when Nebula smashed through the window, hindlegs first.

In the space of seconds, her hooves skidded over the tiled floor, and she drove both forelegs into the PER man’s scapula.

There was a crack. The blond man screamed, and released his grip from the Asian woman. And Kraber did the thing that had always come naturally to him.

He kicked the blond man in the face.

The crossbow dropped to the floor. So did the blond man, who tumbled into a bed lined with stuffed-animal plushies – rabbits, dogs, an owl and a penguin – labelled ‘The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital’, cracking the plastic, then falling to the floor in an awkward heap full of plushies.

Screeching, the man reached for the pistol at his hip.

“OO OKE I AW!”

(Translation; “YOU BROKE MY JAW!”)

Kraber stomped down on his hand, looking down at the pistol. Cheap .32 semiautomatic. He’d used something like it once. Hadn’t liked it.

He saw Nebula actually flinch as he reached down to grab the blond man by the arm and drag him upwards.

“You… you…” the blond man hissed, through shattered bone.

Behind Kraber, Nebula was helping the Asian woman back to her feet. A doctor, by the looks of her white coat, torn at the spot where her name-tag should be.

“Are you alright?” asked Nebula. “Doctor…”

The Asian woman nodded, in shock. “Tanaka,” she whispered. “Julia Tanaka. Th… thank you.”

She said this to Nebula, not Kraber. He wasn’t sure he blamed her for it. The blond man was a true lightweight, Kraber had no trouble holding him up with one hand.

“Come on,” Kraber said, wrapping his prey by the neck. “CURSE LIKE A FOKKIN’ MAN!”

“He might be at this for a while,” Nebula sighed to Tanaka. “No finesse. Good distraction, though,” she said, glancing at the window she’d broken. “Gave me time to loop around.”

Inspired, Kraber choke-slammed the blond man right into a jutting shard of the broken window. It cut deep into his temple.

“What the hell is he doing?!” Tanaka yelled.

“It’ll be fine,” Nebula said casually, before touching an earpiece. “Yes. Sergeant Heliotrope, this is Petty Officer Nebula. PHL attached to Coast Guard.” Pause for reply. “Alright, we’re… Yes. Yes, it was stupid.”

Kraber whispered into the blond man’s ear. “You wanted to ponify Tanaka. Maybe make her a pegasus. Make her fly? We’re on the third floor, you know.”

He dragged the barely-struggling lightweight up to his feet by one arm, wondering if he was about to accidentally pull the thing out of its socket.

“Hey!” shouted Nebula. “Where are you taking him?!”

“What does that…” the man asked. “What does, what are you, no, no, n-”

Heliotrope

It was Bedlam out there. People streaming out of the hospital, and Heliotrope, along with all the Equestrians and humans who’d been with Bliss, they all stood at the foot of the hospital, ushering stampeding humans to relative safety.

Bliss had been unpredictable from the start. But…. going off on his own? Into a combat zone full of PER? Having a thestral follow him?

If Heliotrope knew who his commanding officer was, she’d–

‘Huh.’

Her train of thought abruptly crawled to a stop in the station.

‘Is that how PHL command saw us?’

She tapped her earpiece.

“Nebula,” Heliotrope said. “Please copy. Do you–” Static. “Nebula? Are you there?”

“Yes. Sergeant Heliotrope, this is Petty Officer Nebula. PHL attached to Coast Guard. Over.”

Heliotrope breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank Luna, they haven’t got you. That said, this was a really dumb thing for him to do.”

“Alright, we’re…” Nebula said. “Yes. Yes it was stupid.”

“Can you give me your position? Over.”

But instead of a response, this was what she heard. “Hey! Where are you taking him?”

“Nebula?” Heliotrope gasped, tapping the piece. “Nebula? What’s going on!”

For several agonizing minutes, stretched into eternity, the other end stayed silent. The Heliotrope got a response, of sorts. Up above, on the third or fourth floor, she saw machine-gun flashes in the windows.

‘What,’ Heliotrope asked herself, is that idiot doing now.’

And then Nebula came back on. “Uh, Heliotrope? You were requesting our position? Somehow, I don’t think that’s gonna be an issue…”

“STRAIGHT FOKKIN’ DOWN! YEET!”

There was a scream, then a crash.

… Or was it the other way around? A crash, then a scream?

Regardless, a man flew backwards out the window, screaming at the top of his lungs. He looked like he’d been thrown. In open-mouthed shock, Heliotrope watched him plummet to the ground.

Yael sprang into action almost immediately

“Melody! I need you to break his fall. Heliotrope, I need you to catch him!”

Heliotrope sprang into action almost immediately. She rocketed up, pavement disappearing below her hinds as she flew towards the falling, screaming man.

But the minute she was within a foot of him, she knew they’d be too late. At his speed, he’d probably crush her forelegs against the ground, or whatever they hit. Physics are a bitch.

As it happened, she was inches away when he hit the roof of a car – was it a Subaru? – which collapsed like papier-mache on impact.

‘No…’ Heliotrope thought, looking at the mangled wreck of both car and human.

“His jaw’s broken, his back, his arms… and his...” Heliotrope winced as she looked at the human’s twisted, mutilated neck. “Oh. Oh Ce…. oh Luna, they were not meant to bend that way.”

“Heliotrope. Come in, Heliotrope,” said Nebula. “If it helps, that guy was PER.” She paused. “Bliss, did you seriously yell ‘yeet!’ when you did it?”

Another pause.

“Wow. Really?”

Yet another pause.

“Okay, I don’t care how fun it is to yell. If you’re gonna be that way, here’s one: Stop it. Get some help.”

Heliotrope thought that over.

“...That makes me feel better than it should,” she admitted. “The PER part, not whatever you were saying to Bliss.”

“Nebula, what’s going on up there?” Yael asked, walking over. “Did that idiot find a survivor?”

Kraber

“Bliss found one, yeah. She was being held hostage, so he…”

Nebula’s voice trailed off. She looked to Kraber.

“Mind if I tune you into this?”

Kraber thought that over. On the one hand, being in contact with Yael and Heliotrope, those two ominous figures down there – who would without a doubt tear him a new gat – was a disturbing prospect. On the other, well…

… There were all kinds of ways that not being linked up to the PHL could go wrong.

“And what’s wrong with that?” Victory asked, suddenly standing next to him, with no explanation. “Didn’t you want to die a couple–”

Kraber’s train of thought derailed.

‘I wanted to die?! Goddammit, what is this? An American college?’

They seemed to be in a classroom of some kind. A classroom for younger children, but still, maybe that was why he’d thought of this.

Kraber had tried to kill himself twice while he was in college. The first time had been at a firing range, where Kraber was firing a FAL for the first time ever since he’d left South Africa. He’d been promptly distracted by soda.

‘OH WOW! CHERRY SODA?! I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THEY HAD THIS HERE!’

Finally, he said it. “Sure, why not.”

As Nebula fluttered up to his helmet, tapping a series of buttons, he looked over to the doctor.

“Are you alright?”

Tanaka, who’d followed him all the way upstairs – probably more for Nebula than he, really, – merely scowled, arms hanging at her sides.

“First of all,” she said, “what the hell.”

“In my defense,” Kraber said, “I’ve always wanted to use that line on someone.”

“Which one, ‘straight fokkin down!’ or ‘Yeet!’?”

“Yes,” Kraber said.

“I’m not complaining… This job, sometimes a little gallows humor goes a long way.”

Kraber nodded. “Amen to that.”

“You sound like you’ve been there, too,” Tanaka said, putting her hands in her pockets.

Probably because Kraber had. He remembered a lot of cases in emergency rooms, particularly for ski accidents, where he’d bonded at The Irish Pub – yes, that was really what it was called – with fellow doctors over some frankly fokkin’ siff jokes.

“So then when we take out the peanut butter jar out, I gotta ask: Was it crunchy?”

“Look, normally lightbulbs hang over the other end!”

“And then I say ‘that’s the secondworst place I ever found a spoon!’”

Kraber would usually win somehow.

“... So then we ask Howard... and this ou, he has a concussion, he can barely stand, he’s bleeding like Phineas Gage, he really should not be talking… who the Republican frontrunner is. And Howard, he just goes, ‘Now that I wish I could forget.’”

He nodded. “So, what happened here?”

Tanaka’s voice was most acidic. “Those PHL just stormed in, took things over, and started herding people in.”

Thirty minutes ago, Kraber would not have even noticed the subtle bristling, the narrowing of Nebula’s eyes.

“Excuse me?” the batbony asked.

“Right, right,” Tanaka sighed. “Sorry.”

Kraber couldn’t tell if Tanaka really was, in fact, sorry.

“They started taking over rooms we barely used,” she explained. “Clearing space in the basement, escorting people in by the dozen. Said they were taking over the hospital in an emergency.”

“And you let them?!” Kraber asked, incredulous.

“They had guns, they were PHL, and it was an emergency,” Tanaka said. “What else was I going to do?”

Sighing heavily, she sat down on a little chair, in front of a desk much too small for her, and placed her arms upon it, wringing her hands.

Kraber mulled it over. “That’s fair. Is anyone else hiding in here?”

Tanaka nodded. “Caduceus and Sylvia Bray are holed up somewhere in the Richards Building. Somewhere on the eighth floor. They managed to wall off some survivors, but they need help.”

“Then that’s where I’m going,” Kraber said.

His helmet’s speakers crackled.

“Not yet you’re not, Bliss,” said Heliotrope.

“You,” Ze’ev growled, “Have made a very stupid decision.”

… That bitch.

‘FOKKIN’ stranded with these FOKKIN’ GELDOS and this GODDAMN PERDNAAIER telling me what THE FOK I CAN FOKKIN’ DO–’

Red-hot anger flared up in Kraber, against the PHL, against Lovikov, against every fokkin’ thing that had led him to this moment, to being stuck in this hospital, hated by everyone around him.

“AND WHAT THE FOK ARE YOU GOIN–”

“Soldier,” Heliotrope said. “Shut up.”

And, inexplicably, Kraber did. What was he even going to say?

“Is this the part where one of you threatens to kill me?” he asked.

“What? We’re not going to kill you, you imbecile,” Heliotrope said. “Why would you think that?”

“My last commanding officer was like that.”

There was a pause.

“Your commanding officer seriously threatened to kill you,” Ze’ev said. “You have to be kidding.”

“I’m really not,” Kraber said. “Threw all my stuff out of my footlocker and threatened to throw it away, in front of my unit. It was my fault though, I–”

“Shut up,” Heliotrope said.

“Excuse me?”

Heliotrope heaved a sigh. “Whatever you did, Bliss, no way that could ever be acceptable behavior towards one’s soldiers.”

“He acted like everyone’s best friend as he did it, too,” Kraber admitted. “What a prick, right?”

She didn’t say a word.

“... Heliotrope, he can’t hear you nodding,” Yael said.

“Right...” Heliotrope said. “However, none of this changes the fact you yelled at superior officers. Us, not that prick you were talking about.”

… Shit.

So Kraber told part of the truth.

“It’s been a stressful day,” he said. “The rig, this attack, the PER… I just feel so angry at everything that I have to just go in here and rip everything to pieces till I feel like at least something went right.”

“Shouldn’t that be in past tense?” Heliotrope asked.

“No,” Kraber said bluntly.

“I understand,” Yael said, “It has been a stressful day. But you yelled at a superior officer. However, you can make up for it, soldier.”

“I can?” Kraber asked.

“Yes,” Yael said. “You can scout out the hospital, all to the very best of your ability, and I’ll forget that ever happened.”

Nebula, who’d been listening in with Tanaka for a while, coughed. “Lieutenant, is that blackmail, or the chain of command in action?”

“There’s really not much of a difference, when you think about it.”

Kraber grunted. “I was beginning to think it was more of a hostage situation.”

“Oh,” Heliotrope chuckled. “You would.”

‘I am relating better to two people I spent years thinking would literally try to kill me,’ Kraber thought, ‘as opposed to Lovikov. Excellent. Now this is hell. And here I thought I just wasn’t trying hard enough.’

“Anyway,” Kraber said, “I’ll… do what you said. Copy that.”

“Copy that,” Ze’ev said, flickering out.

Kraber turned to the woman and thestral, who each looked bemused.

“Alright,” said Kraber. “Tanaka. You talked about Caduceus and Sylvia Bray... can you guide us to the Richards Building?”

Tanaka nodded, getting up from her child-sized desk. “I will. And, Bliss... just call me Julia.”

“Fair call.” Kraber reached down to the floor, picking up the .32. “You’ll probably need this.”

“I don’t like guns very much,” Tanaka admitted, while Nebula inspected her own weapons.

“Coincidentally, PER don’t like being shot,” Kraber said, passing it to her with one hand around the slide. “It all balances out. I’ll pass you something new.”

Then Kraber’s earpiece crackled again.

Yael

A few minutes later, Yael again spoke into the earpiece.

“Bliss,” she began, then paused, realizing that she’d never thought too hard about his rank.

The insignia on his armor said Corporal, but… it wasn’t his armor. Still, it was good as anything.

“Corporal Bliss,” she said. “While you clear the hospital, Heliotrope and I will be securing a perimeter around Haddon.”

Nebula cut into the feed. “...Really? Just Haddon, sir?”

“Just him,” Heliotrope confirmed. “He was the only one who managed to survive getting shot and hit by an ambulance. PHL armor is tough, but it’s not that tough.”

Yael nodded. “We’re standing by, guarding the landing zone for our medvac. With Portland being what it is, driving him through the city would be… inadvisable.”

Bliss responded. “So, for the PHL, or basically any one of the alphabet soups?”

A pause from the other end.

“I’m going to go with ‘anyone,’” Heliotrope answered, nodding almost reflexively.

“Heliotrope’s right,” Yael said. “We haven’t accounted for all the PER in the area, I’ve gotten reports of looting, and that National Guardsman that nearly shot me–”

“Wait, what–” Bliss started.

“–whose name I still don’t know–”

That bothered her slightly. She’d never gone and asked. And yet, somehow, here he was, helping set up the perimeter.

“-–is probably not an isolated incident.”

“Could be worse, though,” Heliotrope added. “At least we’re not HLF.”

Bliss laughed nervously. “Thank God. But for real though, Lieutenant. What about the Ship?”

The Ship.

Yael only barely stopped herself from thinking ‘the shit.’ She preferred not to swear nearly as much as some of her colleagues. It had barely been an hour, and they were already thinking of it like some kind of boogeyman.

‘Can this f– can this city,’ Yael thought, ‘stay fixed. For just one. Solitary. Minute.’

“Radar, scanners, thaumic sensors aren’t reading anything,” Heliotrope informed her. “We’ve checked. Whatever that was doing, it’s long gone.”

“If you say so,” Bliss said. “Something was wrong with that thing. It… the moment it appeared, it was like… I could… I felt my skin crawling.”

Heliotrope nodded. Yael looked at her, arching an eyebrow.

“Right,” Heliotrope said. “There was just… this… something was wrong here. It was like looking into a portal from behind. It was like my mind refused to go along with my eyes.”

“Right!” Bliss chirped. “Anyway. Nebula says she might have a lead on some survivors, and I need to keep quiet. Bliss, over and out.”

“Ze’ev, over and out.”

In front of her, Yael saw Lorne and Quiette Shy carrying Garrett Haddon on a stretcher they’d looted from an ambulance. Lorne held it in two hands, and Quiette Shy was merrily trotting along, the stretcher held aloft in the red aura of her magic.

Haddon was barely conscious, on account of Quiette Shy having dosed him with something from her saddlebags. Probably morphine. They going to use a local diner – the kind that served pizza that was a little more grease, a little less food – to hold him.

As Quiette Shy walked ahead of Lorne, Oscar nodded to them. He held his usual HV Penetrator in both hands. About three stories up, Yael saw Eva and Smoky, the coal-black earthpony staring through a set of binoculars.

“All this for one crippled human?” Smoky asked, swivelling the binoculars back and forth.

“He’s not just any human,” Eva said. “Mostly because one? I barely call him human now. Two? He’s the one that knows.”

It should have reassured Yael. Should’ve made her feel more comforted to see all these humans and ponies working together. Off to one side, near a small alleyway, she saw Bowie working with a red and orange pegasus, who was towing a car tied around her waist.

‘Guess they couldn’t find a unicorn,’ she thought. There was something funny about that.

“Need any help?!” she called over, as Bowie and the pegasus pushed the car backwards toward the alleyway.

“We’re good!” the pegasus called over. Yael didn’t recognize them.

“You don’t sound good!”

“Oh, for the love of…” someone said from behind Yael. And there was the small blue unicorn who’d tried helping Heliotrope catch the falling man. Melody. She was trotting up, car enveloped in her horn TK. Before Yael’s eyes, the diminutive unicorn pushed

‘This is how it should be.’

She felt something that could have maybe charitably been satisfaction. But it was overshadowed by something. Something terrible.

Her mind kept flickering back to the first time she’d seen the thing.

Something bothered her. There was a feeling of almost palpable wrongness to it, something that gave Yael an ache behind one eye just thinking about it. There was a feeling that it, or Yael herself, Should Not Be There, and…

She’d checked with the PHL and National Guard’s analysts. Anyone with an ear to the city. One minute it had been there, and the next it hadn’t. And that? That was absolutely magic.

There was only one conclusion Yael could draw from that.

“Yael,” Heliotrope said, coming over. “You look… you look worried. Are you okay?”

“I’m not,” Yael said. “Because I just realized someone in the PHL wants Lovikov alive.”

Kraber

‘I’m a Corporal? Well ain’t this a son of a bitch...’

The journey to the Richards Building had been refreshingly uneventful. They’d encountered no resistance as they made their way up the fire stairs, to the eighth floor. Now the problem was finding where exactly the survivors mentioned by Tanaka – the ones named Sylvia and Caduceus – were holed up. This necessitated a to search room by room.

Kraber was still trying to process his new rank as, his .44 revolver held out cautiously before him, he opened the next door.

Nebula trotted in first.

The eighth floor had no bedrooms. It was cardiac administrative and labs solely. From what Kraber could distinguish, this was a hospital office like any other. It contained the obligatory vast bookshelf the occupant never read, and thin white curtains that made the world outside appear only as a void. Blank in daytime, dark at night, just as it was now.

“Hello?” Nebula asked. “We heard you were–”

There was Nebula, leading Kraber into the office. There was Julia Tanaka, holding out her pistol in a sloppy yet serviceable stance.

“YAAA-–”

Then there was the red crowbar. Swinging at Kraber’s face.

He staggered. “OKAY, WHAT THE FOK WAS THAT, GODDAMMIT?!”

Somewhere, Kraber heard the bark of Tanaka’s barroom .32.

A woman screamed. “DON’T SHOOT!”

“CADY, WHAT TH–” Tanaka yelled.

Kraber hadn’t really been concentrating on anything other than the glowing orange horn of the unicorn who’d tried to bludgeon him. All he knew was there he was, .44 in hand, ready to fire.

“STOP!” Nebula yelled, flying up under Kraber’s arm and pushing his aim up towards the ceiling. “Sweet Mother of Faust, STOP!”

“WHY JOU FOKKIN’-–” Kraber yelled, reaching for his other pistol.

“Bliss!” Nebula cried. “For the love of Luna, for Faust, JUST LOOK!”

‘Gonna fokkin’ kill her. She’s with them, she won’t let me shoot them, fokkin’ gluesticks, why do they fokkin’ have to stop us at every fokkin’ turn?!’

He was doing it. He was unholstering his 1911 ever so slightly…

“Vik.”

Kate’s voice. But it couldn’t be. It wasn’t… Kate was dead, ponified, dead, and that was… her.

He could hear the sound of her voice as clearly as he did whenever he scrolled through old messages on Facebook and opened the recordings they’d sent, trying to hear the sound of his wife’s voice again.

“That’s not how this should go, Vik. Don’t shoot. Act like I’m right here, right now, and think before you act.”

It was like there was a speaker held up to his ear.

‘I think I’m going crazy,’ Kraber thought, surprising himself with how matter of fact that was. ‘Oh, I’m going crazy! What a nice fokkin’ change of pace! Dear Die-ary, today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender. I'm wondering if, maybe, there really is something wrong with me!’

He slid the revolver back into its holster.

“That’s better,” the unicorn said, stepping into view, revealing a yellow-orange mare with a mane in various green shades. “Now we can all talk about this like adu–”

“Oh, boo-hoo, you’re feeling sad we’re not talking rationally,” Kraber interrupted. “You klapped me with a crowbar! You might’ve fokked up my face, YOU BOSSIES ORANGE VISWYF!”

“Cady,” said a blonde woman, walking out. “Please.”

She was a little under average height for a woman. Blonde, with hair that’d clearly been whacked shorter with scissors, blue-eyed, and overwhelmingly cute. And wearing pale blue-green scrubs.

‘Man, the medical field lost out on a lot when we got rid of nurse outfits,’ Kraber thought, his mind instantly changing track.

His eyes were also drawn to the assault rifle she had. A black M16 or something – Kraber had never been able to tell the difference – with a desert-beige 40mm grenade launcher mounted underneath, but with more inscrutable PHL tech mounted on it.

“They’re here to help,” the blonde woman said. “Look. They warned us, they said they were coming to help. Cady… just… please. Let them help.”

‘Cady’ nodded.

“So,” Kraber said, “I’m guessing that you two are Sylvia Bray–” he looked at the blonde woman. And, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice: “Caduceus.”

The orange unicorn glowered at him, then looked over to Tanaka and Nebula. The batpony just shrugged in the typical W-shape that ponies often managed.

“You did crowbar his face,” Julia said. “Don’t look at me.”

“Fine. I’m sorry,” Caduceus said, not making it sound like an apology, “that I’m skeptical of another human coming in, saying they’re here to help. I don’t need his permission to die. And if he thinks that would have fucked up his face, well–”

“Is there a part of–” Kraber started angrily.

It was Nebula to the rescue. “Let me handle this,” she said, surprisingly gentle. “Please.”

‘You know what? Fine. I’m on thin fokkin’ ice enough tonight. Sure. Why not. What even matters anymore.’

“I was the one saying we were here to help,” Nebula continued. “Unless you’re tired of–”

“Can we just stop?!” Sylvia suddenly yelled. “All of you! The city’s in danger, and personally? I’m tired of ponies and humans arguing!”

She shrank a little after saying that. Looking like she was trying to be anywhere but there.

“...She’s right,” Caduceus admitted. “I was under a lot of stress.”

Still, that didn’t exactly seem like an apology.

Kate’s voice again. “It won’t help. Sylvia’s right.”

‘Don’t need to tell me twice,’ Kraber thought. ‘Close as I’m likely to get.’

“Very well,” Nebula said. “Status report?”

“We were holding down the fort,” Sylvia said, “but those fake PHL just stormed in, flashed guns and badges, and started Purple Misting it up in here. What the hell can we do?!”

“Shoot ‘em?” Kraber suggested. “Quick, are there any patients at risk in this building?”

“At least two dozen who can walk,” Caduceus said. “They ponified the more able-bodied ones first. And moved on to the bedridden and incapacitated later. Once the ambulance hit, we started getting them out, but… the fake PHL took control of one of the outpatient wings, we were using it as a waiting area for the evacuation. Now, they’re all… they’re all...”

Something clattered to the ground in the near distance.

“They’re all…”

A child’s giggle echoed in the room.

Kraber frowned. “What was that?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like the sound of it,” Nebula said, glancing at a pale-looking Caduceus. “Bliss, check it out.”

“Right, chief,” Kraber said, unholstering his revolver.

He’d never seen himself as one for stealth, but Kraber knew enough to keep his back pressed to the wall as he crept down the corridor.

There they came again, the child’s giggles.

‘Peter…’ the thought rose in him. ‘Anka…’

A house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Kraber walking into it, finding it empty. The ceiling fan lazily drifting, the smell of chocolate cake.

No…

Potion spread across the floor.

NO…

It was a premonition.

He came to a spot where the corridor intersected. Carefully, Kraber peeked around the corner on his right, towards the window side of the building. And froze.

The Newfoals stood before the windows, wobbling as if gesuip with delight. A small mass of them, undulating slowly, like zombies from the third act of World War Z.

“We’re cured now!” one cried… no, chirped.

It looked like it should be an adult, judging by its height and facial stubble, but it sounded almost like a young foal. Or a child’s windup toy…

“Fok me,” Kraber said, creeping back. “Fok us all.”

When the returned to the room, the look on his face must have been unmistakeable – well, he had raised the visor on his helmet, all the better to berate Caduceus. She herself was staring at him with a guilt-stricken expression.

Nebula moved to ask him something, but Kraber raised a finger to his lips.

“Company,” he said quietly.

Caduceus nodded glumly. “I was gonna say… they’re all converted.”

“Now you tell us?” Nebula hissed. “For Lyra’s sake! You really are a fuck-up.”

“Don’t worry,” Kraber whispered. “I got this. I’m going to communicate with them the only way I know works.”

“... Have me talk them down?” Caduceus suggested.

“Actually, I was gonna fill them with more lead than my college roommate’s plumbing.”

“That works too...” Caduceus admitted. “Be careful, though. They’re not alone.”

“PER?” demanded Nebula.

“Not officially,” said Caduceus. “It’s the fake PHL. But if you see anyone, that’s gotta be who they are. Nobody left in here but us chickens.”

“Where’d you see ‘em last?” said Nebula.

“Spotted seven bogies, Cath Lab N°5,” whispered Caduceus. “I’m not sure what they’re doing… they may be running diagnostics on the Newfoals. They say a lot of anomalous Newfoals tend to have had heart conditions... If you wanna take out the Newfoals, take them out first.”

“On it,” said Kraber, heading out.

He heard Sylvia speak up. “Wait! If they’re wearing the PHL’s colors, how can you tell who–”

But he was well past listening to any more.

“Bliss!” called Nebula. “Hold on!”

Kraber ignored her. Once again, with rather more precipitation, he crept along the wall, until he once again reached the point where the intersection.

He stooped and, taking a deep breath, made a dash for it, hoping the Newfoals didn’t see him. Newfoals on their own were no great threat, unless they’d been ‘updated’ into Newcalves or whatever new crime against God, nature, and science the Empire had thought up this week. But he didn’t know how much heat the PER might be packing. It wouldn’t do to alert them.

As it turned out, the Man Upstairs seemed to be going easy on him today, as none of the mindless donkie konts noticed him blur by.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Kraber marched up to the cath lab, and kicked the door open, shouldering the MG2021 in fluid motion.

Inside, huddled around a Newfoal on the examination table, Kraber found a ragtag group of humans and ponies, wearing combat fatigues with the letters ‘PHL’ crudely sewn on. There were two pegasi, two earthponies wearing crude assault saddles, and two humans.

All looked up to see him enter.

His first instinct? He shot the Newfoal in the head, killing it instantly. There was surprisingly little blood spatter, but plenty of grey stuff.

“NO!” screamed one human. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

The human, a brown-haired man in what looked for all the world like bulletproof HLF armor, was holding a crossbow with a rifle stock. Except instead of a standard bolt, it looked like they’d nocked a long, thin glass vial. The space inside of it didn’t look wide enough to fit a pencil.

“IT WAS–”

Again, Kraber acted on instinct, and fired two rounds from the 2021. The first passed under the man’s right hand, cutting a runnel through their arm and vaporizing their pinky finger...

… Before nailing a pegasus in the leg. They collapsed, in shock.

The crossbowman, though? Time seemed to slow down, the bullet almost crawling towards him, Kraber distractedly tracking it… then watching as the .308 round punched through the crossbow, shattering his fingers, the vial exploding into shards and lacerating his body, one fragment cutting a runnel across his face, another landing dead center in his eye.

“YOU BAS–”

It was tempting – very tempting – to spray all 100 rounds in the box at them. But...

‘I only have about four more boxes.’

Kraber gave in to the temptation.

“FINE THEN! BUUULLLETS!” he yelled.

The MG2021 roared, punching holes through all but the crossbowman. Several bullets impacted on the lab equipment, shattering dormant machines and old Windows 98 computer monitors – who the fok even used those anymore?

‘And somehow, shooting people seems like less of an atrocity compared to that…’

Kraber strode forward and nailed the man in the balls with the MG2021. Serum from the shattered vial sank into the guy’s flesh, and fur began to erupt from the gashes the flying shards of glass had left….

The mutating mass of meat screamed, a high, piercingly absurd falsetto, and even as he clasped his ruined genitals with one hoof and something that still resembled a hand, Kraber had covered the distance between them.

“BLIKSEM!” he yelled, and kicked up, boot smashing into the man’s nose, knocking him down.

The man screamed again, and Kraber grabbed his skull – even as the PER member steadily morphed into something equine – and rammed him face-first through a viewing window.

‘Yeah, been there, done that. What do you want from me.’

And the place must have experienced some bad budget cuts, for a laboratory’s window to give in that easily. Blame the Recession.

‘What the shit do all those hospital bills go to if they’re this crap?!’

“MULLINS!” the surviving pegasus screamed

She shot up like a bullet, wings flying fast enough it looked as if she’d perform a Sonic Rainboom–

–then Kraber, holding the steadily ponifying PER man by what was probably still his head, threw him back at her. She caught him out of reflex and, suddenly burdened with his weight, tumbled backwards onto the wall, cracking her neck.

‘Good.’

“They got Mist Swirl, and Mullins!” cried out the other human, an unarmored woman, a rifle banging against her shoulder. “They got–”

Kraber fired the 2021 right through her sternum. Staring down at the bleeding hole, she fell, while Kraber kept walking forward.

Unfortunately – for them – very few PER were trained soldiers, human or equine. Under calm circumstances, the two earthponies with assault saddles might have very well realized that a confined space such as this laboratory made for a fatal funnel. They’d kept just enough sense not to try firing themselves...

But these were not calm circumstances, and the pair surged into the choke-points just like blood into a coronary.

Kraber fired the 2021 again, spraying the remaining bullets into his would-be assailants.

‘Huh, sure has been quiet behind me,’ Kraber thought. ‘Goddammit, do I have to do everythi–?’

There was an on ominous clicking sound. His belt was out of ammo.

‘If I don’t use it now, then when?’

Kraber bolted for the doorway he’d come through, then holstered the LMG on his back. Bizarrely, it just seemed to… sort of stick there.

‘Doesn’t even seem to weigh that much back there,’ Kraber thought. ‘Huh.’

With the PER out of the way, it was off to sort out the Newfoals for him. But he’d need a replacement quick-firing weapon. A .44 revolver wasn’t going to do against swarming Newfoals.

It was when he whipped around the corner that he whipped out the Fostech shotgun, and fired.

But as Kraber wasn’t used to the recoil, the first round went wild, one pellet digging a runnel through a Newfoal earthpony’s leg, the rest impacting the tile and cheap sheetrock harmlessly.

Over the startled, angry cries of the damned, he reached into his vest, pulling out a pipebomb, the Fostech held in one hand. And he tossed the pipebomb into the mass of Newfoals.

It exploded, deafeningly, the shock-wave breaking all the nearest windows. The floor shook, a noise of groaning metal suggesting much punishment to its structural integrity.

He didn’t wait. The bomb hadn’t taken them all out.

Kraber rushed forwards, Fostech in both hands. It sputtered out 12-gauge lead into the moving pile of blood and viscera in front of him. Aside from the crunch of broken glass, his boot stepped on something squishy. Kraber wasn’t entirely sure if they were still alive, but it didn’t matter.

The Fostech was like a cannon in the confined space, and blood poured out all around him as he wore through its 12-round mag, painting the walls, the floor, the ceiling red. At this height, wind howled through the broken windows.

‘This shotgun,’ Kraber thought, ‘may have been a mistake.’

The shotgun simply disassembled a Newfoal’s left half like they’d been hit with a dull axe. One leg tumbled down, split from its body, and everything else splattered all over the place.

‘BUT IT IS THE BEST FOKKIN’ MISTAKE EVER!’

“You idiots!” someone yelled, almost certainly a pony. “Do I have to do everything myself?!”

Unfazed, Kraber followed the voice. It had come from somewhere behind him, the doorway to a consultancy room. Trying not to look too hard the purplish stains on the bedding, he peeked past the door.

‘Fok! A unicorn, and horn all-a-glowy!’

Yes, a silver-armored red, angry-looking unicorn, raising himself the desk he’d been seated at. Kraber noticed something on the desk. A lodestone. This guy must be a superior officer, and he must have finished sending a distress beacon to any allies in the area.

They weren’t out of the woods yet.

Okay... unicorn magic was a nightmare at close range, unless you were trying to get yourself killed. They could do anything to you, even if it was something as simple as suspending you in their TK, helpless and defenceless.

First rule of fighting equines, take out the horn-heads. You never knew how they could fok you over. First rule of fighting unicorns... have backup.

He thought on the four women he’d left behind.

‘... Nebula will do all right. The rest? Not so much.’

So that led his thoughts to the second rule of fighting equines. Cheat.

“Here!” he yelled from behind the door’s cover, tossing last of the pipebombs he’d scavenged at the unicorn. “HOLD THIS!”

The unicorn was inches from the door. But any surprise of his lasted only a fraction of a second.

“Stupid trick, human!” the unicorn yelled, grabbing the pipebomb in his TK, ready to throw it back. Grinning, Kraber stepped out of cover and fanned the trigger of his 1911, dumping four rounds into the distracted stallion…

… Who caught all of them in his telekinetic field, all while rotating the pipebomb’s muzzle back at Viktor himself.

‘Oh, come on! That wasn’t fair!’

“Don’t worry!” the unicorn cried out, smile ragged. “You’ll stop your wailing soon enough…”

“FOK!”

As the pipebomb whistled for him, Kraber dove the way he’d came and clapped his hands over his ears, right before the blast and shockwave of detonation punched him in the everything.

This guy was good.

Wheezing, Kraber stumbled back through the mess of gore he’d created, his boots threatening to slip on the wet floor, his grip on the Fostech feeling weaker.

‘Too close…’ he thought desperately. ‘Too-close-too-close-too-close… must fall back…’

Then he did slip, the red puddle he’d made turning him into his next victim, and he crashed to the floor, painfully, his free palm barely breaking his fall. The stench of blood filled his senses.

He was completely, utterly dazed. It would only take another half a dozen heartbeats before the unicorn was on top of him.

‘And even if I evade him, he’s called for friends…’

But then Kraber looked up, and he saw he wasn’t on his own, either. Up the corridor, attracted by all the commotion, were the four deadweights he’d encountered.

“EISH!” he yelled, his voice hoarse. “Could use a LITTLE fokkin’ HELP here!”

Caduceus’ bewildered eyes were a sight to behold. No wonder. He must have looked like a total Stone Age savage, surrounded by the torn-open corpses and crimson tapestry, the winds from outside blowing his matted hair.

“What the… what the hell do we do?!”

“How would I fokkin’ know!” Kraber cried, trying to push himself back up. “How about something that keeps me from getting ponified!”

He heard the red unicorn canter up to him, and a hard weight pressed onto his back. He yelped.

“Found…” the unicorn hissed, unconcerned by the wind, digging his hoof deeper. “You…”

“Ah, fokking hell,” Kraber muttered, drawing his revolver.

Without looking behind him, he fired backwards blindly.

Light, fluorescent purple flashed in the air as the bullets spanged off a wall of that same purple hanging in midair, deforming into mushroomlike shapes.

‘Well. I’m screwed.’

“Something about you seems familiar...” the red unicorn said, his voice slightly distorted from behind the protective shield. “You must be quite the beast. A prime specimen...”

Kraber glanced at his illuminated flank. Natural-born, then. Meaning he’d probably ponified a few on the side, lied to people, managed to pass himself off as PHL to pull off this raid....

“Go on,” Kraber said. “DO IT!”

“No,” the red unicorn said. “Getting Kevlar off your bodies… it takes far too much time.”

His saddlebag glowed. A crystalline power drill floated out, buzzing lightly.

“You know,” the red unicorn commented casually. “Shiedwall says one alwayss learn so much... from a live dissection. It’s not standard procedure, true, but the boss’s always keen to think outside the box for Her Majesty…”

Held in his equally-red aura, the drill edged closer to Kraber’s nape...

“Huh, dissection? No, no no no, that sounds too equine. Thankfully, you’re not, yet...”

Kraber broke into cold sweat.

‘Ohhh, no. AH SHI–’

“Hey, asshole!” called a feminine voice. “You missed a spot check!”

A vicious ‘whoomph’ burst above Kraber’s head as Nebula slammed into the unicorn’s shield, hitting it shoulder-first – or whatever it was they had. It was hard enough to knock him back, and the buzzing drill fell point-first into the bloodied floor, its rotations sending a spurt of pooled blood splattering into Kraber’s face.

‘That… that could have been me! God…’

“You people talk,” Nebula hissed. “Too. Damn. Much.”

But she was panting. Throwing herself into the shield had obviously cost her a lot of strength.

The red unicorn quickly recovered. “Carnivore nightkin witch!” he yelled, throwing up that purple shield again. “Betrayer, spawn of Tartarus, monkey-fornicator!”

Kraber picked himself up, trying and failing not to breathe heavily.

The Fostech felt too weighty. He let it slide from his grasp. However, he still held the revolver in one hand. Five rounds left in the cylinder...

“Bliss, get the HELL back down!” Nebula yelled, shoving him. “Cady, GRENADE!”

No sooner was Kraber back on his feet that the batpony had pushed him down again, and this time, he wasn’t lucky enough for his face not to squish into some foul-smelling intestines.

The grenade whizzed in from the corridor.

But there was no bang. There was a buzz, a noise that reminded Kraber of cars on concrete on bridges, and a scream of pain. Then silence.

“Okay,” Nebula wheezed. “We got him… we got him. It’s safe now.”

Wiping the intestines off his face, and trying with all his might not to curse the batpony who’d got him covered in this shit, Kraber stood up once more.

Of the red unicorn, all that remained were rainbow-colored threads of alicornal tissue, sizzling in the viscera that had splattered against the wall along with the rest, and blue smoke wafting up from a neck-stump on a headless body.

“What the f… the fook did ya hit ‘em with?” Kraber asked, as Sylvia walked over to him, staring in what could have been either sadness or pity at the unicorn on the floor.

“Crowe Disruptor Grenade,” Caduceus answered, an assault rifle hovering next to her. “40 millimeter, combining the shredded wire with magically-charged crystal shards.” She looked at Nebula and at the broken windows. “Explain to me, why didn’t we just throw him out.”

Nebula shook her head. “Don’t want to be a copycat,” she said, scowling at Kraber. “Besides, this guy?” She pointed at the unicorn’s remains. “Dunno if he could teleport, but a unicorn with that skill could use their protective bubble to break falls from much higher... We’re lucky he was distracted. I wasn’t sure the grenade would work. But it’s strong stuff. We’re... working on making them smaller, add them as standard enchantments on PHL bullets.”

All Kraber could process was this small bit of wisdom. The PHL had reverse-engineered shields from equine magic, and then crowned that by devising a grenade that could, at their best, crack the enemy’s own barriers...

‘The PHL’s making shield disruptor grenades...’

With shield disruption bullets coming soon. While it took the HLF tons of pipebombs and a lot of bullets to break down magic shields.

‘Great. The Sentients have adapted. We’re right fokked.’

“You can miniaturize them?” Kraber asked, thumbing a pair of speedloader-less .44 rounds into the Model 29’s cylinder.

“Sure. It’s not machinery we’re trying to shrink, just a binding medium for the enchantment,” Caduceus explained.

“Wait. Could I make that work with HEIAP ammo? I have two belts of the stuff in my backpack.”

“What’s that?” Caduceus asked.

“Long story short,” Kraber said, “thaire’s a tungsten penetrator inside the boolit, if it hits armor, the main bullet explodes and sends fire everywhere, but also pushes thaee penetrator down intae the target. It’s like a Russian Doll: bullet innae’ bullet. Works good against the Imperial Guards’ armor, or zeps.”

He was slipping into his false Scottish accent harder than ever. He was still nervous.

“Maybe,” Caduceus said, eyes narrowed. “That’s hardly standard though. Only HLF–”

“Bullshit they do!” Kraber interrupted. “It’s special sniper ammo. Super expensive in an MG, but a man gets bored sometimes.”

“You get bored of killing?” Sylvia asked.

“No, I just enjoy shooting deer and coyotes with special ammo,” Kraber said. “Sidenote, dae nowt use armor-piercing rounds on wildlife. It just isnae a good idea.”

Sylvia nodded, looking confused and a little bit concerned. Perhaps it was because they still were talking about all this in the middle of a room full of dismembered corpses.

It was a health hazard, true.

“Oh,” Caduceus sniffed. “Anyway… for the record, I can’t do anything to your bullets. I’m a nurse, not a weaponsmith.”

She’d sure not sounded like a nurse a few seconds ago. As if to punctuate that:

“Suuuure,” Nebula said. “And where did you even get that disruptor?”

Caduceus pointedly ignored her.

“Awwww…” Kraber groaned, visibly disappointed. He decided to work it off through his usual method of self-medication. “So... there any more PER around?”

Caduceus looked confused at this, and a little disturbed by Kraber’s apparent need to kill PER.

“Downstairs, probably,” Sylvia said. “In the cafeteria.”

“Impressions Café, yep. Jimmy Garrett’s in there,” Caduceus explained. “holding down the fort. Sylvia and I worked with him, knocked out one of the PHL, he stole the suit, and hid them all. We ordered them to seal themselves in, while we went for help…”

“And you got me?” Kraber responded, struggling to hide his suspicion.

“Yes…” Caduceus answered back cooly, looking around the bloodied room. Disgusted, she tried wiping her hooves on a clean patch of floor. “What a bargain.”

“Julia and I are here too, you know,” Nebula pointed out.

“Guys,” pleaded Tanaka, joining in. “Let’s not fight. We’re meant to be helping each other, right? At least two of us are doc–”

“Three,” Kraber interrupted.

“You? Really?” Nebula asked.

“And here I was, thinking you needed professional help,” Caduceus said. “And here you are. The professional help.”

“Well, this war…” Kraber said. “Changes people.”

“That’d be a first,” Caduceus said drily. “Look, if we’re heading downstairs, I’ll try and cast a cloaking spell on us. If there’s anything I’ve learned about guns and stairways…”

“One makes easy fokking targets fir thae other,” Kraber finished for her.

“Exactly.”

Yael

“What,” Heliotrope said, somehow managing to not make it a question.

“It makes too much sense,” Yael whispered. “Nobody else has super magic versions of human airships that can apparently teleport. Nobody else has those human airships in the first place.”

“Maybe the Chinese?” Heliotrope asked, not sounding like she believed it. “I mean, who knows what they’ve been working on out in Africa…”

“No,” Yael said. “No, that’s not possible.”

“It can’t be us,” Heliotrope said. “I… I mean. We’re the best, Yael. The best of humans, ponies, and anyone else that joined. We wouldn’t–”

It wasn’t that Yael wanted to disagree with that. It was just… easy.

‘We literally got sent here for burning people alive,’ she thought. ‘We’re not the best. And it’s the only thing that m–’

“Ma’am?” someone interrupted.

Yael looked down, to see Bro – a little battered, his PHL armor speckled with dirty and what Yael hoped wasn’t his blood – walking up to her. He had an FN FAL with a 50-round drum and what looked like a grenade launcher held to his chest.

“That’s not regulation,” Yael said, eyeing it.

“Well,” Heliotrope said. “As the markswoman, Ze’ev, you get an allowance of 7.62 for the Monster there.”

She pointed to Yael’s Galil.

‘Is she doing that to spite me?’ Yael wondered. ‘No. This is Heliotrope. I’ve known her for years. I’m not a high schooler. Come on.’

Yael sighed. “Very well, then.”

“Ah yes,” Bro said. And it was at this moment that Yael pegged him as an American who’d grown up with guns. “The Cadillac of Kalashnikovs. But… Anyway. I was coming up to ask, do you think this is a bit… overkill, Lieutenant?”

“The fact that you asked,” Heliotrope said, “makes me more certain it was.”

“I, ah... I meant no disrespect, it’s just…”

Yael nodded. “It’s fine. But absolutely everything that could go wrong has,” she said. “I’m not taking any chances.”

Yael’s earpiece crackled.

“Colonel Gardner?” she asked, immediately picking up.

The apprehension in her voice must have been palpable.

“I’m setting up a perimeter around the city limits to catch any HLF,” Gardner said. “It would seem that… you were… right.”

And he sounded like someone was dragging the words out his throat. Painfully. And slowly.

“We definitely have found PER operatives in the city,” he said. “None of them claim to know anything about the inner workings of the operation. Or just how high up this conspiracy goes.”

“...Conspiracy, sir?” Yael asked.

“You heard me,” Gardner snarled. “Conspiracy. The HLF knew way too much.”

‘That is literally what I said,’ Yael thought.

“And one more thing,” Gardner told her brusquely. “Someone absolutely had an in with us. Be careful who you trust.”

Kraber

Back in the fire staircase, the nurse, Sylvia, hung towards the back, while Nebula took point. They could’ve heard a pin drop as they made their way down to the cafeteria, on the first floor.

“Nobody?” Kraber whispered, as Nebula fluttered back up.

“Looks like they’re regrouping,” she said. “But… down there, on the way to the cafeteria… it’s just awful in there.”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad–” Caduceus started.

“You’ll just have to see for yourself,” Nebula said.

Caduceus visibly flinched at those last two words. “Cripes. Just how’d you miss them going up?”

“Not like we went out of our way to leave the fire staircase, you know?” Nebula hissed. “Now, c’mon, we’ve gotta take care of this.”

And as the five exited the staircase, Kraber looked on in disgust. Nebula was not kidding. It looked like he’d walked into a hospital-themed section of a haunted house. He suddenly felt very glad for his gas mask as they wandered down a hallway, Nebula scrunching up her nose in that strange way ponies did.

The PER seemed to be packing up, but from the looks of things, they hadn’t been able to get everything. There were signs the hospital had been used for something siff. There was a rack of something stretched that looked like leather, sitting out in the hall. Medical equipment on trolleys that had been wheeled out of rooms.

‘They must’ve been trying to cart it out,’ Kraber thought, walking by what looked like a tanning rack, with something unidentified stretched out in the corners.

Dacosta had one of those back in Defiance.

‘Am I ever gonna see Dacosta again? Fok. It’s been two days, but it feels so much longer.’

He’d never known where Dacosta got the material, but had known better than to ask. He stared at it through his mask’s lenses, reaching out, almost ready to touch it–

Before he did, he realized what it was, and jerked his hand back like he’d been bitten. And Kraber was suddenly glad he was wearing gloves.

“Skin,” he said, utterly failing to keep the revulsion out of his voice. “Fokkin’ siff.”

“I think it’s waste product from the ponification process,” Caduceus said, keeping her voice level. There was some emotion, Kraber couldn’t tell what, that she restrained.

‘What are you hiding, I wonder…’

“Well then, what the fok do they need with skin?” Kraber asked.

“Who knows?” Caduceus asked. Hadn’t she been walking on all fours, Kraber was certain she’d be shrugging. “Ponification bleeds off a lot of mass. Has to go somewhere.”

“I always wondered what they did with that,” Tanaka said.

“Did it help?” Nebula asked her.

“I could’ve lived a long, happy life without knowing.”

The doors all around them were thrown open. Kraber didn’t feel like looking inside.

They were coming in from the West. There was a ‘DO NOT BLOCK’ notice in front of an elevator, and a stretcher covered in a tarp – which was, conspicuously, blocking it. Because of course it was.

Something was under the tarp. Kraber saw what could have been an arm or a leg hanging out from under it, a stretched, warped thing that trailed off into the darkness. Kraber couldn’t see what the limb terminated in, but he didn’t–

Okay, he kind of did. Dissections of the half-ponified Grotesqueries were an endlessly bizarre task, a challenge Kraber wholeheartedly threw himself into. But it didn’t seem like a good idea.

“Cafeteria’s this way,” Sylvia said, pointing straight down the hall. She was trying not to look at the tarp-covered gurney.

There was a rustling sound. For a second, Kraber was sure he’d heard the tarp rustle.

He looked at Sylvia, who very pointedly looked straight down the hall, and away from him and the tarp-covered thing.

Then he looked at Nebula. Who just shook her head. Caduceus, meanwhile, had a strangely resigned look.

Tanaka, however, seemed…

‘Blasted’, was the first word that came to mind. She seemed utterly drained, barely registering anything around her.

crick

Kraber knew how Grotesqueries could beggar belief. How one day, after a battle in North Africa, he’d conducted a dissection of a woman who’d – unbeknownst to Kraber, or probably the unfortunate themselves – had a fetus in fetu. No, she hadn’t been pregnant, she’d just had a tumor of sorts that had an arm. And an eye.

He’d found that tumor shifted slightly, into the shape of something that wasn’t exactly a foal, but wasn’t not a foal either. And yet, somehow, it wasn’t as bad as the times he’d seen pregnant women being ponified, a truly fokkin’ disgusting crime against nature and all that was good and pure that made Kuato from Total Recall look like–

‘No-no-no, that’s fokkin’ terrible, why would you even want to remember this, Goddammit…’

Kraber could hear or imagine he heard dry tendons that ran over twisted bones and snapping. Slowly rising.

crick

He very intently did not look back.

“What the hell’s been going on in here?” Nebula asked, trying to make her words sound like a joke and failing miserably.

Sylvia answered. “They were probably doing… experiments of some kind.”

“Maybe also stealing medical equipment,” Caduceus said. “Shieldwall likes a steady supply of human tech to work from.”

‘And how,’ Kraber wondered, ‘in the fok do you know that?’

“Fokkin’ siff,” Kraber repeated. “How in God’s name does something my daughter said looked like her stuffed horse come to life, get mixed up in something so grotesque?”

“You have a daughter?” Nebula asked.

There were all kinds of things Kraber could have said in that moment.

Sarcastically, bitterly asking “Why not ask your friends what happened?” but that wasn’t what Nebula deserved here and now. The whole story, of being late to his birthday party and feeling worse than anything, walking into the house and–

‘No, God no, please God, in the name of all that is holy, stop, don’t make me remember, not now, not…’

“Oh,” Tanaka said, very quietly. “Oh. I see.”

In the end, his silence said more than he ever could.

“I lost my Dad to it,” Tanaka said. “He was a shell of his former self after the accident, but… I’d take it in a heartbeat over what he became. He’d ‘forget’ we hadn’t ponified, didn’t eat like him. When my friend had it applied too late and died just before the fur sprouted... all that little zombie said is he was glad Frank had even a fraction of his happiness. Like his death didn’t even matter.”

She clenched her fists, one finger tightening over the trigger guard of her barroom .32.

“Maybe… on some level, they thought it was right,” Caduceus said. “I mean, we kept saying we knew Harmony best. Maybe the seeds were always there.”

“I’m calling horseapples on that one, lady,” Nebula interjected. “The words coming out your mouth are insane! My niece loved dresses. She wanted to dance, or maybe just cared about playing dress-up. But then, in the span of a month during the Purple Winter, she wanted to ponify humans. And, before I said goodbye, I think she wanted to kill me too!”

She looked up at Kraber.

“From what I can tell, no special mark told her this was her purpose.”

“Is that… is that bad?” Kraber asked, not thinking about the obvious past tense in her voice.

“Of course it’s bad,” Caduceus said. “If a pony has earned their mark, that means they’re fulfilling their destiny. Being themselves. They’re not a–”

“Sssh!” Nebula hissed, a hoof under her mouth. She pointed down the hallway.

‘This would be so much easier if she had hands,’ Kraber thought as Nebula rapped her right foreleg against her left three times, then she held up a hoof under her mouth... like she was...

… was ...

DRINKING!

Kraber was about to mouth ‘three PER?’ to her, until the moment he remembered.

‘Oh. Right. Wearing a face-mask. This is both a blessing and a curse.’

He poked his head out from around a corner. Indeed, there were three PER standing there. A pegasus, an earthpony, a man in body armor. Standing between a counter full of trays and a wall with a dead flatscreen TV, above which hung a sign marked ‘Impressions Café’...

Sylvia let out a tight gasp, hands over her mouth. Kraber couldn’t see her face in the dark.

“No,” Caduceus said softly. “They’re here.”

The group was close enough to hear the three PER’s voices.

“Is it done in there yet?” the earthpony asked.

“I don’t know,” the pegasus said. “Why don’t you check?”

“Why don’t you?” the human asked. They sounded male.

Sylvia was whispering. “They… they weren’t supposed to. They ca–”

When asked later, Caduceus would say Kraber shot first. Nebula would say Sylvia screamed at the top of her lungs. And Kraber would say it was Caduceus yelling “NO, YOU BASTARDS!”. Meanwhile, all Tanaka would remember was that one moment she’d been behind Caduceus, next she’d been screaming bloody murder with a scalpel in hand, the little .32 bucking against the palm of her other hand.

Kraber just remembered the feeling of joy as he nailed one of them in the balls.

Whatever the case, there was a scream from one of those five, and then there was Tanaka, rushing the PER with murderous intent, something not just broken but shattering inside her. Bloodthirst all over her face, under her surgical mask. Scalpel held in a backwards grip, so she could stab downwards.

‘Well, shit,’ Kraber thought, ‘I feel so left out.’ Then, after a fraction of a second, ‘Automatic weapon won’t be a good idea. Could hit Julia. OF COURSE! AT TIMES LIKE THIS, THERE’S ONLY ONE THING TO DO!’

And so Viktor Kraber whipped out his revolver. In one fluid motion, he’d brought it up to eye level, stared through the iron sights, and fired the thing one-handed.

It went wild. A coffee machine exploded, and it could have been Kraber or Tanaka that did it. A cheap painting that was the visual equivalent of elevator music fell to the floor. And one round punched into a soft spot between helmet and vest of the fake PHL man. Everything between the chin and sternum simply exploded in red. The helmet spun lazily through the air. Blood splashed upon the wall.

The fake PHL man screamed, and their head clonked against cheap wall paneling.

He aimed away from Tanaka, tracking the running earthpony with the .44 revolver’s sight-blade. In the very same instant where Nebula was biting down her assault-yoke’s trigger so hard, part of him was seriously wondering if she’d break the thing, he fired. Anywhere from two to three to four to five bullets shattered the earthpony’s hindleg. They tumbled, skidding against the linoleum and trailing blood.

Meanwhile, Tanaka fell upon the startled pegasus, and brought the scalpel down.

And down. And down.

And down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down...

By the time Kraber had reached her, the pegasus looked like raw hamburger.

“... My God,” Caduceus said, staring at the gruesome scene.

There was the dead human, beheaded by one shot, their headless corpse slumped with its ribcage against the wall. The remains of the pegasus. And a bleeding earthpony crawling uselessly, trailing blood.

“My… m… MY LEGS!” the earthpony yelled. “CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS!”

Tanaka, standing over the formerly-living being she’d just butchered, looked his way. Something that had possessed her, called up from the depths, slowly retreated from behind her eyes again.

“I… I need to treat him,” Tanaka said, the scalpel dropping from her hand. “I. Need. I just…”

Kraber placed a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be okay...” He reached into one his numerous pockets, pulling out a small medkit and some morphine. “It will be okay,” he repeated, sighing. Not sure why he did what he did. “Someone, help Julia. Caduceus... ”

Caduceus groaned. “Fine.”

“And the rest of the PER?” Kraber asked, while handing Tanaka the medkit and morphine. “Where’d you think they are?”

But Caduceus didn’t look at him as she marched to Tanaka and the wounded earthpony.

“Kitchen, I shouldn’t wonder,” she muttered. “Where the meat is kept.”

From her tone, Kraber sensed she was one of those ponies who still hadn’t really accepted humans as meat-eaters.

“They can’t not have heard this commotion,” said Nebula, flying to the kitchen’s double doors. Gingerly, she pushed them. “Stuck. They must’ve lowered the latch. I don’t think they’re coming out for us.”

“Then we go to them,” snarled Kraber.

He kicked the door, just as Nebula bodyslammed against it.

It took them three tries for it to fly open, one door hanging on its hinges. It was at that moment that Kraber and Nebula saw it.

At least two dozen shapes stood in silence within, barely lit by dim emergency lighting. Shell-casings littered the floor from sub-machineguns, shotguns, and rifles made of bits of pipe. The white, once-sterile floor was bright crimson, traced with the prints of boots…. Only for the bootprints to just stop, the boots in the middle of the floor as if something had vanished right out of them. And, at the end of the prints from there, Kraber saw the distinctive shapes of Newfoals.

The sickly-sweet lavender scent of potion was on them, and they were swathed like mummies in the torn fragments of hospital gowns and uniforms.

“Ohhhhhh, Luna no,” Nebula breathed.

“Oh, fook this,” Kraber said, realizing what was coming next. “GET BACK!”

The nearest Newfoal looked up at Kraber, drew back its lips, and giggled.

“It’s you! So glad to see you again!”

“That’s ridiculous!” Nebula yelled, a slight quaver in her voice. “None of us-”

“Oh, but I can see the one that helped us! I just want to nuzzle them and thank them for making us so happy!”

Later on, Kraber did not remember pulling the trigger, or yanking the pins on three of the frag-grenades, or slamming the door shut as he tossed them in. In turn, Nebula did not remember screaming and opening fire with her assault yoke.

The doors bent like overloaded bridges. Thick red blood oozed out from under, and there was this awful smell like burnt hair...

‘Thank them for making us so happy…’

Kraber couldn’t get it out of his mind.

They’d been looking at him. Kraber hadn’t done it. Nebula couldn’t have done it, she’d been with him just about the whole time. Tanaka had been a hostage.

Which meant…!

In an instant, Kraber remembered everything Caduceus had said to him.

Almost before he knew what was happening, his booted foot connected with Caduceus’s body, hurtling the unicorn nurse away from Tanaka and to the floor.

“YOU PONY BITCH!” he screamed, unholstering the revolver and placing it to her eye. “Should’ve guessed when jou fokkin’ crowbarred me! I’m going to…”

“Ivan, what the hell are you doing?!” Nebula asked, horrified.

“It’s fokkin’ HER!” Kraber yelled. “They said one of us did it, and it has to be her! Who’s been acting like I’m the worst thing ever to happen in this hospital? Who tried to crowbar me? IT! WAS! HER!”

During all of this, Tanaka might as well have been in her own little world. She was dressing the earthpony’s wounded leg, wrapping gauze and bandages around the bleeding stump.

“Tell me where they’re going,” Tanaka said, “And I’ll dose you with morphine.”

“Get… stuffed…”

Nebula locked her forelegs around Kraber, under his arms. “Ivan, just… Just calm down, I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for thi–”

A blast of acid green slammed into Kraber’s shoulder, knocking him to the floor like he’d been hit by a train. Nebula was dragged with him across the tiles.

“CADY, WHAT THE HELL!” Nebula screamed.

“You killed them…” said a quiet voice. “You just… killed them…”

He turned, slowly, and saw Sylvia was pointing her rifle at his face.

“You were meant to HELP RESCUE THEM!” she whispered. “They weren’t like the others, they weren’t violent, or attacking. They were pure, new-born…white as snow. And you KILLED THEM…”

“You monster,” Nebula hissed.

Kraber saw the light of madness dancing in her eyes, as she pointed to one side with a quick flick of the gun, indicating for him to step away from Caduceus.

“Get away from my friend. She might be Fallen, but she’s still a pony. She has more right to live than any of us…”

“And me?” Nebula asked, an indescribable look in her eyes. Betrayal, resignation, defense, flinching, all at once.

“You were traitors,” Sylvia said, her gun shaking. “I… I’m sorry, but you….”

“I’m everyone’s acceptable loss,” Nebula sighed. “As usual.”

All this had finally got Tanaka to look up from the semi-conscious earthpony.

“Sylvia, what the hell is…”

“... You?” Caduceus asked, aghast and prostrate on the floor. “What did you do…”

“Three flasks of serum, wired up to the sprinkler system…” Sylvia stammered. “And a smoke grenade on a timer… b-but it wasn’t supposed to be Jimmy! It wasn’t supposed to be them! Why’d you think I was so insistent they hole up here? They were supposed to be okay!”

“What!” Nebula yelled. “Do you… Do you honestly think Cady would be proud of you for this?! Or Rime Ice?! He loves you, he loves Earth, he loves the coast, and you do this!”

“I know neither of you would understand… but you’re still ponies… and when this is over, She’ll make you well again, make you both pure again…”

“Oh, shut up,” Caduceus snapped. “Look at you! Rime Ice and I, we were raised in Equestria! We came over on the same plane to the same airport after the Barrier ate up Britain, we share the same apartment… Dammit, we saw Equestria’s downfall. We know what it really is.”

“Who do you think you are, talking like you’re more pony than us?!” Nebula yelled.

“I take no pleasure in what I’m doing,” Sylvia said. “I can’t stand this world anymore. The HLF could have joined up with the PHL, but no, they made all the most terrible decisions. We’ve committed far too much evil in our lives to–”

For once, it wasn’t Kraber that kicked someone in the face.

“NUTS!” Nebula yelled, flying upwards and swinging both hindlegs into the woman’s face, before Sylvia even had the slightest impulse to pull the trigger.

Faster than anyone could process, even himself, Kraber raised his revolver and fired one round into Sylvia’s knee.

She screamed, leaving herself wide open.

Kraber didn’t pick himself up, not exactly. He leapt, practically pounced, and tackled Sylvia into the wall like a professional rugby player.

The wall dented under her.

Kraber found his feet, and, as Sylvia sunk down, sliding against the wall-

“GET THE FOK BACK UP!” Kraber roared, drawing back his foot and driving it up into her face.

There was a wet, splintering crack, a spray of red, something giving under the sole of his steel-toed boot, and she flopped back against a wall, smearing her blood and tears over the floor, screeching.

Struggling, she reached into her jacket, pulled a serum vial into view, and–

Model 29 revolver still in hand, Kraber shot her through the arm. The vial dropped to the ground harmlessly, not even breaking, and Kraber went in for the kill.

He grabbed her with both hands to hurl her against a wall, pinning her upright. Bones cracked like twigs. She was dying. Already dead, but her brain had not caught up with her body yet. Kraber head-butted her, then half-punched, half-grabbed her, ramming her into the floor by the face, eliciting a splutter that was too full of fluid to be a scream anymore.

A pistol fell out of her jacket, a small 10mm Steiner-Bisley. He saw her remaining hand weakly fumble for it, and dragged her away, spinning her in a half-circle, legs flopping behind her. Then, holding her left arm, he stepped on her shoulderblade, on the left scapula.

Gripping her left shoulder with both hands, he pushed forward against her back with his free leg, then pulled…

There was a pop, and Sylvia screamed. He let her drop onto the floor and she writhed in agony, her shattered arm and leg flailing as she tried to crawl away.

For a moment, he thought about letting it be.

“Fok it.”

He kicked her in the face again. Blood, spit, vomit pooled out of the shattered ruin of her mouth. He left her to bleed out on her own.

He picked up the unbroken vial as he went, examining it somberly.

“Sweet Lyra...” Nebula said. It was impossible to tell if she was angry or scared.

“That...” Caduceus gasped, sobbed. “That was…”

“Brutal… disgusting… overboard?” Kraber said idly, wiping bits of Sylvia off of his legs.

“By the Golden Lyre, what the fuck is wrong with you!?”

“I don’t fight to win,” Kraber said, sticking the woman’s Steiner-Brisley pistol in his backpack – you never knew when you needed a new gun nowadays – and placing her vial atop the nearest vending machine. “My old Dad always told me, ‘Ivan, dinnae fight tae win, fight so you don’t have tae again’.”

“She was like a third your weight and no threat once disarmed!” Caduceus yelled. “You could’ve SHOT HER IN THE FACE AND BE DONE! Admit it, you enjoyed that you depraved shit!”

“Yes,” Kraber said. “And?”

“You’re… horrible.”

Kraber looked over to Nebula, who was shaking slightly. He knew that look. That was the ‘Get out of my blast-radius’ look Kate had gotten now and then.

He felt him stepping back.

“Sorry, Caduceus,” Nebula said, “But do all the people she ponified mean NOTHING to you?!”

“She was my friend!” Caduceus shouted. “And this bastard just ripped her apart with a… a smile on his face!”

The implications in her emphasis did not go over Kraber’s head.

“Horrible?!” Kraber yelled. “HORRIBLE?! More disgusting than the fokkin’ kontgesigs out there ponifying KIDS? Turning them into fokkin’ ZOMBIES?! FOK that KAK in the POES, you want to know WHY the fok I’m like THIS?! ”

Rhetorical question. Kraber was going to say so anyway.

“PINKIE, the goddamn fokkin’ VARKPOES, ponified! My! FAMILY!” Kraber yelled. “She came there and RAPED my children’s minds so there’s not a fokkin’ THING left of them, and my wife’s probably some pony’s FOKTOY, or a fokkin’ MEATSHIELD I’ll have to fill with BULLETS! And then she’ll have to tell me I’d be so much HAPPIER as a fokkin’ zombie, and call me BLIKSEM!”

Caduceus quivered under this tirade, but managed to not cower.

“So, YES! I’m horrible! But I hope you’re not saying I’m as fokkin’ BAD as them!”

“No,” Caduceus replied simply, looking sadly at the gaping Tanaka and the barely-there earthpony she was tending to. “You’re just living nicely up to the standard Celestia holds the whole of your race in.”

“Just like you, huh?” Nebula asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Nebula said. “What does that make you? Super-duper special awesome Flash Magnus for the pony way? Your friend–”

She said “friend” like a curse word so vile even Kraber wouldn’t touch it.

“– just ponified a whole room of people. Your friend betrayed the Hippocratic Oath in every way. Your friend’s responsible for a bunch of people turning into those half-things. Your friend decided that all humanity was so broken, destroying their minds, their culture, their everything, could only be an improvement.”

Nebula strode up to Caduceus, half a meter above the unicorn mare.

“Unless you’re okay with that,” Nebula said. “Do you feel like the hero yet? Because far as I’m concerned, Ivan’s more qualified than you.”

‘Ouch.’

Nebula wouldn’t know it for awhile, but from Kraber’s perspective, that was a burn that could practically be seen from orbit. One that even Kraber felt, because somehow, knowing he was not the hero didn’t help at all. Being treated like it made things even worse.

Because he had enjoyed it, hadn’t he?

Fuming, he turned away, landing a furious blow on an innocent coffee-dispenser. Something cracked, and the machine began to drip fluid onto the floor.

Sighing, he looked over to Tanaka. “Fok. Okay, how’s your patient doing?”

“... Morphine’s pretty good,” the earthpony on the floor slurred.

“I’ll keep the dosage,” Tanaka told them, “If you tell me where the PER are. They’re surrounded by PHL, and HLF. They have to have an escape plan.”

“Won’t tell,” the earthpony said. “I swear to Celestia, I won’t–”

Kraber tapped their leg-stump with one boot. They flinched.

“I’m sure that you hoped you wouldn’t get ‘human poison’ in you,” Kraber said, moving his foot ever so closer. “But at the moment, that stuff’s all that’s keeping you from pain so intense it’ll make you beg the sweet release of death.”

The earthpony stared up at Kraber.

“Don’t threaten me,” he said. “Don’t you dare threaten me.”

“Threatening’s when you tell people you’ll carve out their eyes or testicles with an ice-pick, then mix them up. Or, I don’t know, when you say you’ll kill someone by farting on them. Now this, on the other hand, is telling you what’ll happen.”

Nebula stared up at him, goggling. “Didn’t you tell me you actually did that last one?”

“It was Taco Day, Botkoveli had a lighter, and there were Newfoals slated for disposal duty,” Kraber said off-handedly. “See? That wasn’t a threat. I don’t like threats. I like promises. I like the truth of what’ll happen. And the truth is, you’re going to be in a world of hurt if you don’t let us take you prisoner.”

Nebula shook her head. “Creepers. I thought that was just a Minotaur thing…”

“You’ll kill me by farting on me?” the earthpony asked, confused.

“No. Well. Probably not,” Kraber said, hands on his hips. “You tell me if loyalty to the Queen Bitch matters that much here and now.”

“Ginger Snaps told me tha…” the earthpony said, through gritted teeth, “that if you get taken prisoner, then recaptured, you get… you get taken to a mnemosurgeon.”

Kraber stared at him, horrified. “Holy shit, bru! Why in God’s name are you even following them?!”

The pony stared at him, goggle-eyed.

“My commanding officer threatened to shoot me. You know what I did?!” His voice rose in pitch. “I TRANSFERRED, consequences be DAMNED, and if he EVER tries to get me BACK under his command, I will cut him to PIECES as he SCREAMS for a MERCY that I will not give, and feed the TINY rotting remains of his body to the NEIGHBORHOOD HONDS!”

He took a breath.

“So if your so-called friends and officers think that little of you, they deserve even less respect than they fokkin’ give!”

“I...” the earthpony’s eye twitched. “I...” They shook like a leaf, one eye contracting and dilating. “The boss said they were … that he had pickup arranged on the roof.”

Upon which the earthpony simply lost consciousness, eyes rolling back in his head. His tongue lolled out onto the hospital’s tiled floor.

“... Did you just truth him so hard he died?” asked Tanaka.

Kraber reached down and placed two fingers to the earthpony’s neck.

“That would have been even more bizarre than Taco Day,” he said. “But for real, he’s not dead. Yet. Just unconscious.”

“You mean that was real?!” Tanaka asked.

“Do I look like the kind of man who would lie about farting someone to death?!” Kraber asked.

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” Nebula said.

“What is with you?” Caduceus demanded.

“If this is more of why it’s wrong to shoot PER,” Nebula said, “Then I’ll–”

“It’s not that,” Caduceus said “It’s… I can’t read you for the life of me. One minute, you’re killing my friend with pretty obvious glee. The next… this.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure either,” Kraber said. “‘Bout five years ago, I’d never have dreamt of this sorta thing. And here I am.”

‘We’re not so different, are we?’

There was silence between the three of them.

“I get that she was your friend,” Kraber said, quietly. “I get that she’s what you have left. We’ve all lost someone, haven’t we? Nebula, you lost your friends. Julia, you said you lost… your Dad. And a friend.”

Tanaka nodded. Kraber sat down, on the floor, by the now-unconscious earthpony. He let his head hang and slump, limp arms resting on his knees.

“I lost my family,” he said. “My wife, my son, my daughter, even a cousin. And you know what that means? That means I don’t give a fok about hurting PER. There’s a human movie, Schindler’s List. Ever watch it?”

“Yes,” Caduceus admitted. “Ambassador Heartstrings… called it essential viewing.”

Kraber hadn’t known that. The list of things he didn’t know about the little green unicorn, it just kept growing. Enough to make him rethink why so many of the HLF grudgingly respected her.

“Moral’s that war reveals the truth in people,” Kraber said. “So… we had war. And it turns out, this is what I am. A mass-murdering terrorist that likes what he does. Sure, I’m proud of some of the deaths I’ve caused, of killing PER. But I just got a good look at who I used to be, and… I don’t think I’d like who I am now. Twenty-eight years of people calling me a sociopath, even in fokking grade school, and here I am.”

He was silent.

“You might be pissed off that I enjoyed it,” Kraber said, “But I don’t exactly like enjoying it. If that makes any sense.” He sighed, looking down at the ground. “Don’t know who I am anymore. I just… I wanted to be a husband. A father. I wanted to help. But I also wanted to kill everything. I wish someone would turn me off and just… fix me. So when I come back, I’d… I’d know!”

Caduceus stared at him gloomily.

“Bliss, you’re not going to like what I say,” she said. “But–”

“Don’t bother,” Kraber said, raising a hand. Less in warning than in resignation. “I’m not stupid. I was a doctor, remember? Not that you can’t be a doctor and… ach, you know what I mean. What I’m saying is, I’ve heard why some people choose the PER and ponification.”

And all Caduceus could do was sigh.

“Welp. I don’t know either,” she said, turning away from him and throwing up a forehoof. “Julia? No, wait. Nebula? Help me. How do I tell him the obvious, without being a sanctimonious bitch?”

“Short answer? Like he said, don’t bother.” But Nebula sounded somewhat sympathetic to her. “Sounds like he gets it himself. He just doesn’t want to hear it.”

Caduceus glanced at Tanaka, who merely nodded. She turned back.

“Fair enough, Bliss. Yes, I get it,” she sighed again. “They never gave your family any choice. Why would you feel sympathy for them? They want fixing, you want fixing… maybe I am just a big hypocrite for still calling Sylvia my friend, while giving you shit for what you’ve done.”

Imperceptibly, Tanaka seemed to let out a breath of relief.

“Here’s the thing, though,” Caduceus added, staring daggers at Kraber. “If there’s one thing I know for sure about Sylvia, it’s that she’d never have mentioned Schindler’s List almost in the same breath as ‘Taco Day’. That’s all you. Your special brand of fucked-up.”

Dancing Day

“Jesus, Kraber...” Verity starts.

“No, that’s my friend over in... Brazil,” Kraber says, stammering a little. “Actually it’s pronounced with an H, but.... when we visited, back before the war... heh, we’d always say ‘Hey, soos!’, so we just call him Soos now. Wonder where he is now…”

“Are.. are you crying?” you ask.

“No, no…” Kraber says, then looks over at all of you. “Yes.”

He looks the way he did that one night in August, the one where he’d let Dancing live. This man is drained, the filly realizes. There is… There is barely anything left in him. Whatever’s left of him from before the war, there’s barely anything.

“Ahweh,” Aegis says. “I… what were you doing out there in the HLF?”

“You don’t want to know,” Kraber says immediately. His eyes are welling up with tears, and this man is a shadow of his usual self. “Ever.” And, from somewhere under his pillow, he produces a bottle of bourbon, drinking it down.

And so, looking almost unsure of what to do, a little confused, Aegis rises up, hooves outstretched, and hugs his friend.

Kraber looks at his bottle, then up into the white-furred snout of his friend. “Ah, the hell with it,” he says, and puts it on the table to the side of him. “Vinyl, if anyone comes in, tell em that’s medicinal.”

With one of those ever-so-rare smiles on his face, he hugs Aegis back. And even Vinyl joins in with him.

“You’re better chommies than an old sociopath like me deserves,” Kraber mutters, but he doesn’t believe it. You can tell... he looks almost happy, for once.

“Actually,” says Lunar Phase. “You’re not a sociopath.”

“I’m not?”

“No… Aren’t you a doctor?”

“Not that kinda doctor! Besides, all the psychology I did was bullshitting on the Internet. I don’t know kak about it.”

“You’re not antisocial. You’re doing this, after all,” Lunar Phase says. “And you said you wanted to get a stiff drink with me, and a bunch of others... and you feel bad for what you’ve done. I mean, hell, why are you even in this hospital room? Didn’t you care about your children?”

“Because I felt bad for…” Kraber starts, looking over at Verity, and a smile spreads over his face. “Well, fok. How about that.”

And in response to that, Kraber hugs Aegis even harder.

“Can’t… breathe…” Aegis chokes, half-jokingly.

Kraber’s beaming like a child who’s been told he can eat all the cake in a bakery. It’s like a weight’s been taken off of him, and he leans back against a pillow.

“How about that…”

It’s right about then that Aegis’ foals and Dancing Day dogpile him.

“HUG ATTACK!” Amber Maple screeches.

“No! My only weakness! HUGS!” Kraber yells, struggling not to laugh, and nobody can stop themselves from cracking a smile. “How did you know?!”

“Aegis was hugging you earlier,” Dancing Day says, confused.

“Yes, well, my continuity is terrible!” Kraber laughs. “I blame all the rewrites. I had to rewrite this whole thing. You know, it’s a funny st–”

“What do you mean?” Astral Nectar asks.

“We’re all fictional,” Aegis says, “just characters made for the amusement of others. The previous story about us wasn’t very good, and it was caught in a dying universe. And so, we exist only as an attempt to fix a terrible, terrible mistake. An attempt to do better, no matter what. I think about that a lot. The idea that my continued existence comes from a mistake, and so I must always strive to improve... It’s kind of like learning that I was an unplanned pregnancy, but on a cosmic scale.”

Dead silence. Any activity in the room had not merely screeched to a grinding halt, but had its brakes fail and come to a crash against the wall, causing massive casualties and turning into an unrecognizable mess

Dancing Day stares in horror at the twisted, broken ruins of the conversation.

“That was a joke,” Aegis says.

“...Kay,” Vinyl says, uneasily.

“He’s just kidding, I had to fire the publisher on account of them being a doss fokkin’ kontgesig,” Kraber says, maybe a little too quickly.

“Wait, how did you fire the publisher?” Vinyl asks. “You don’t even work at a publishing house.”

“What happened,” Yael said, “Is that the publisher wanted the book to be this big triumph of the PHL over insuperable odds where we never did anything wrong. What happened was that they wanted to write the most despicable thing I have ever done like an unambiguously heroic act. What happened was that they laughed me off when I said ‘what about Angelo?’ What happened was that they wanted me to say I regret breaking that bastard’s jaw.”

“And the thing with the captive bolt pistol!” Heliotrope adds, angrily.

“And the captive bolt pistol,” Yael says, nodding. “And Kraber did not like that. He-”

“Told him to, let me guess, go fok himself if his mother hadn’t beaten him to it already?” Lunar Phase asks, briefly imitating Kraber’s accent.

“I resent these scurrilous accusations!” Kraber answers. “That is incredibly offensive for you say I told him that.”

“Wait, what?” Lunar Phase asks.

“Did you just say ‘scurrilous’?” Aegis starts.

“I mean it’s not that far off from anything he’d normally say,” Grayson points out. “You kind of-”

“No! I mean, what kind of fokkin’ jackass would say I was nearly that polite?!” Kraber asks. “Thats fokkin’ insulting. You should be ashamed of misrepresenting me like that.”

“...You’re lucky you’re being sarcastic, or that would sound really weird being directed at me,” Lunar Phase replies.

“Huh. I guess it would,” Kraber says, stroking his beard. He doesn’t exactly sound apologetic there, more confused than anything.

“Lieutenant,” Vinyl says, “Back me up on this. Was he really that mad?”

“He threw a chair out a window while screaming ‘ASS SANDALS!’ at the top of his lungs,” Yael says bluntly. “I assume that’s a yes.”

“And not like some lightweight piece of crap that breaks if you look at it funny,” Heliotrope adds. “It was an armchair.”

Kraber

There came a sound so dim Kraber couldn’t say he’d noticed. Less a sound than suggestion that there had been a sound. The .44 was immediately in his hand. Kraber reached into the coat he wore under his armor, pulling out a few spare rounds, thumbing them into the cylinder.

“Bliss, wha–” Caduceus said.

“Shut the fok up,” Kraber said, almost absent-mindedly.

‘Now where was–’ He squinted. Craning his head slightly. ‘What even was that sound? Or did I imagine that?’

It sounded like a quick, shallow breath. Kraber traced it to somewhere in the kitchen, and tried to keep his footsteps quiet. He was heading back into the slaughterhouse, now. Back to the recently shrapnel-laced corpses of Newfoals.

Nebula and Caduceus followed him, uneasily weaving around the corpses. Even though Nebula could fly, she seemed to be avoiding flying over them wherever possible.

There it was again! Coming from…

The fridge?

Kraber stepped over to the doorway, carefully avoiding the corpse of a man who was simply missing most of his upper body. An Ithaca 37 lay on what’d once been his stomach.

“...Shit,” Nebula said. “I think that’s Jimmy.”

The fridge’s door looked… off. Like it hadn’t quite been closed properly. Like it’d been closed in a hurry.

Kraber looked to Nebula.

“Hello?” Nebula asked, knocking lightly on the door with her foreleg. Dead silence.

“We killed most of the PER,” Kraber said. “It’s safe now.”

A slight murmur from inside, that vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“It’s me, Nebula!” Nebula pleaded. “Ca–”

Kraber stared at her. Cocked his head slightly, at least as much as he could under the helmet.

“Me and this PHL soldier are here to help,” she said, correcting herself.

Someone called from inside the fridge. “Like you did earlier? Like you helped Jimmy? Like you helped my Dad?!”

Nebula tapped her own earpiece. “Nebula here. We’ve found survivors…”

Heliotrope

“... And they don’t sound like they’re doing good. I’m seeing… I’m seeing dehydration, poorly-treated amputations, and, uh… This guy, this guy’s not breathing very well.”

‘... Damn,’ Heliotrope thought. ‘At least… at least someone survived.’

“They’re pretty pissed at us, though.”

“Why?” Heliotrope asked.

“Well,” Nebula said, “Seeing this bunch come in, and ponify you, then we come in and say ‘No, we’re the good ones!’... It doesn’t go well over with some people. Anyway… Bliss got the PER’s escape plan out of a captive. Or thinks he did. Airlift by roof, pretty standard.”

Heliotrope just nodded slowly. “Right. I’ll leave you to that. Heliotrope out.”

She looked over to Yael, worried. Was everything going to be okay? Were things going to get worse? Was–

No.

Ambassador Heartstrings had told her to hope for the best. Even when you had nothing else. Maybe even because you had nothing else.

“Yael,” Heliotrope asked, “Did you call in that medevac?”

Yael nodded. “Of course I did. I’m going to call in more, too.”

She sounded snippy. But would that be wrong? It had, after all, been a stressful night.

“I… It might be a good idea to order more reinforcements with that,” Heliotrope said. “I think tonight’s going to be difficult.”

“Whats With The Future Tense Here?” Quiette Shy asked, volume turned up on her voicebox.

It wasn’t quite yelling, just someone talking more loudly. Like, well… like someone had turned up the volume on a speaker. Heliotrope had never quite gotten used to that.

“I... just have a bad feeling… ” Heliotrope said, feeling all her fur standing up on end. She fluttered around nervously, looking into every window for an unfriendly gun barrel. “The PER must be pretty confident if they were planning aerial escape… no Equestria sky-chariot would be let this far in…”

“Well,” Yael said, “I set up this whole perimeter just to be safe. We’re going to be fine.”

It wasn’t as if that worried Heliotrope more. That would be silly. It was more that she was worried it wouldn’t be enough.

And, as it happened, it wasn’t going to be.

Dancing Day

“So, how did you get them out?” Vinyl asks, curious.

“Honestly, I barely remember,” Kraber said. “And most of it wasn’t that interesting…. Jou know. It’d be pages and pages of people fokkin’ para, the…. It’d be morne. ‘You’re bad people! No we’re not!’ Anyway. We managed to get them out, when it happened…”

Kraber

Kraber was treating the hastily made Purple Stump on one woman with gauze and antiseptic when they heard it.

‘Purple Stump’ was a slang term Kraber had learned back when he was in Libya, from some of the Reavers he’d run into. It had come from a heavily accented man, who’d used it to describe the stumps of serum amputees. Kind of like Gage, from back in Defiance.

It felt like years since Kraber had been in Defiance.

“I hate tonight,” said the young woman with the Purple Stump, legs dangling over the table.

“You and me both, chommie,” Kraber sighed.

“I just…. It’s…. First the HLF come in, say they’re good guys, and then they shit on us. Then the PHL come, except they’re not good guys either, then they ponify us. Then there’s the ship. And now this.”

“I’ve been wondering what was with that for a while now,” Nebula said, who was helping Caduceus to bandage a man at the next table.

“Jamie said it had to be PHL,” the woman said. “The ship, I mean. Not the hospital.”

“Do you actually believe that?” Nebula asked.

“I don’t know, but who else would have it?” the woman asked. “You hear stuff sometimes, y’know? PHL black ops, leaders of countries that won’t help out during the war effort getting, um, removed…”

“That sounds more like it’s just the American government in action.”

“This one good?” Kraber asked, tapping a vein in the woman’s left arm.

“Hey, I don’t want to think the PHL would just let this sort of thing happen,” the woman said, nodding and pointedly looking away from Kraber as he injected her with morphine. “But, wha–”

That, there, was exactly when they heard it.

A wet meaty ‘crack’, and the sound of something shattering.

“Wha–”

Everyone’s eyes snapped towards the ruins of Sylvia’s body. Past Tanaka, who was tending to the earthpony prisoner.

Somehow, Sylvia Bray was still alive – and one hand was clasped around a vial. One that had broken, purple serum running along the floor by the coffeemaker, where Kraber had so carelessly placed it.

“I... “ she cried. “Did not… come this far… to die!”

“Sylvia?” Caduceus whispered. “What are… what’s she running on…”

Kraber reacted first, firing the remaining few rounds in the cylinder. But it was too late. Sylvia was already changing, already crawling or running or sloshing away on appendages that might or might not have been arms or legs.

One round tore through the Sylvia-thing’s ear. Blood dripped to the ground. She didn’t even pretend to slow down, scuttling or galloping out of the Smith-and-Wesson’s sights.

“Well,” Nebula said, staring down the hall where she’d vanished. “Shit.”

“That can’t be good,” Kraber agreed.

Everyone stared at the space where Sylvia had once been.

Tanaka was holding a gun, unfired. “What was…”

“Why didn’t you do something?!” yelled the man Caduceus and Nebula had bandaged.

“I-I’m sorry, I panicked, and I just… I couldn’t…” Tanaka stammered.

“It’s alright,” Caduceus said. “It’s alright, Julia. We all crack under pressure…”

“I told Heliotrope,” Nebula said, “the prisoner mentioned they were going to the roof. If Sylvia was with them all along…”

“Then that’s where I’m going,” Kraber said, thumbing open the cylinder.

“What for, Bliss?” Caduceus demanded. “A single Newfoal? That’s all Sylvia’s gonna be by the time you catch up to her. If. Lieutenant Ze’ev knows now, let the outside team handle it.”

“Sylvia might inform them, and they might decide they’re not done with us.”

“In which case, you’re much more use to us here, holding the fort.”

Kramber harrumphed. “Okay, then. Have it your way.”

Heliotrope

“Richards Building, movement near the top floor!” Eva yelled.

Beside Heliotrope, Yael snapped her Galil up to what Heliotrope thought was a window. Sometimes Heliotrope envied that. It was like… Heliotrope struggled to find an appropriate metaphor before just giving up and deciding on “not having hands.” So much of Earth was made for humans with hands. And fingers.

‘If I lose a leg, I’m getting something like one,’ Heliotrope thought. ‘Well, it can’t be any creepier than Pineapple Nectar’s prosthetic.’

So instead she just turned, aiming her SMGs up towards the top floor. She wasn’t certain how effective they’d be at this range, or how accurate the assault yoke’s reticle was.

The one thing that Heliotrope had confidence in, at this moment, was her eyes. Switching the tint of her goggles to night-vision, she could see humans and ponies rushing to and fro, as far up as the eleventh floor of the Richards Building.

“What are they doing?” Bro asked, staring through his definitely not regulation FAL. “They’re holing up at the top? There’s no way transport…”

His voice trailed off, and he realized it a second after Yael, who was on the cusp of admitting it right as Heliotrope said it.

“... They’re trying to teleport out.”

Yael looked over to Quiette Shy. “Is there anything you can do to–?!”

“I Don’t Know,” Quiette Shy said. “I’m Too Far Away.”

“It’s... “ Heliotrope said, one hoof to her head. “I mean, it’s magic, yeah, but it has rules! We can’t just–”

“I know!” Yael snapped. “I just… Let me think. We’re not letting them get away.”

There was an intensity to Yael in those last few words.

And Heliotrope didn’t welcome it. She was scared.

Scared of what it meant that she was ready to start yet another murder spree. After all, if she was that willing to be excited, she’d be willing to kill again, willing to be standing again in a tent with a...

Dancing Day

“Wait,” Aegis interrupts. “Heliotrope, you okay?”

“I…” Heliotrope says. “I’m fine. I just...”

But Heliotrope is absolutely not fine. She’s breathing in and out her mouth, raggedly.

“I just… I don’t. Like to think about the pony I was going to turn into,” she says. “But, what the hell. We need it, right? For your story. For all the characterization.”

She glares at Kraber.

“... It’s your story too if you want,” Kraber says hesitantly. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to here.”

Heliotrope shakes her head. “Where do you get off being so damn emotionally stable?”

“You know who,” Kraber says, raising an eyebrow and looking over to Aegis. Who just sighs and puts a hoof to his face. “Look. Heliotrope. You know I’m telling this story as much for me as anyone else, right?”

“You don’t say,” Yael comments sarcastically.

“I just…. It all feels a bit fokked sideways. That I’m here. That we’re here. Jou know what I mean?” Kraber asks. “I need… I need to come to terms with the fact I’m really here and not dying in the-”

He stops.

“Viktor?” Aegis asks. “Are you alright?”

“I just realized I can’t narrow it down to a single time I could’ve been dying,” Kraber says. “It just keeps fokkin’ happening!”

“I seem to be quite terrible at killing you,” Yael says, a wry smile on her face.

“It’s weird, right?” Kraber asks, nodding.

Yael, Aegis, Heliotrope, Grayson, and even Vinyl just look at Kraber, looks of puzzlement on their faces.

“I think we’re not in a position to say what’s weird,” Aegis says carefully. “Especially not me.”

“Agreed,” Kraber says. “But. I just. I need to understand that now, I’m here. And that I’ve taken what I used to be and destroyed its eiers. And so have you, Heliotrope.”

“Is… is that metaphorical?” Grayson asks. Dancing Day has totally forgotten he was there.

“It’s really not,” Heliotrope says. “I used a captive bolt pistol to do it. Kraber…”

“I don’t even remember how I did it anymore,” Kraber says.

“Please don’t remind me,” Dancing Day says. “That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“How could you even do that in front of a foal?!” Astral Nectar asks. “When we get to that part, I’m not… I don’t even want to remember how you did it. That was horrifying.”

“I’m sor– Kraber starts. “No. You know what? I apologize for literally anything I did except that.”

“I’m not asking for an apology,” Astral Nectar says. “It was that or–”

“Kwaai,” Kraber says. “Because that fokkin’ kontgesig deserved for me to TAKE THEIR FOKKIN’ NON-METAPHORICAL EIERS AND–”

He stops, eyes darting from left to right.

“Holy balls,” Grayson says. “Viktor. What did you do?!”

“Let’s… not make this about me,” Kraber says. “It’s not time.”

Heliotrope

“Alright,” Yael said. “Bliss and Nebula are in there, so…”

She dialed them in.

“Corporal Bliss. Petty Officer Nebula,” Yael said. “I’m going to keep things brief, because we haven’t got much time. What’s your status?”

“Still here in the cafeteria.” Kraber Bliss said.

“Yeah, that prisoner of yours?” Heliotrope said. “Remember what he said about the PER heading upwards for escape? We figured they must have installed a teleportation device. So here’s what you’re gonna do. Head up to the rooftop, and keep them from teleporting, by any means necessary. You see anything that looks suspicious, destroy it.”

“So,” Bliss said, “I’m being told… to go hurt PER?”

“...Yes?” Yael asked.

“Fokkin’ sweet,” Bliss said. “Don’t kill the prisoner while I’m gone, okay?”

“You seem to care a lot about leaving PER alive,” someone said from the other end of Bliss’s earpiece.

“In my defense, I was kind of running low on prisoners,” Bliss said. “That, and… I don’t know, I did kind of just truth them so hard their brain nearly exploded. I want to see where they go from that.”

‘What the Tartarus is going on?’ Heliotrope wondered to herself. And she found herself smiling, knowing full well that she couldn’t stop Bliss’ enthusiasm.

From the looks of things, neither could Yael. Who was quite conspicuously not telling Bliss to stop. Or telling Heliotrope not to smile about it.

“Heliotrope?” Yael said casually. “Don’t you think they might need some air support up there? Someone… invisible?”

It wasn’t as if it satisfied Heliotrope not to be told ‘no’. In a month or so, it would… but here? Now? It didn’t even register.

Kraber

Idly, Kraber remembered something from a book by Brandon Sanderson. If one day, he walked through a door and found himself with his old college chommies in some Irish pub in Boston, or in Faneuil Hall eating chowder, there’d be no way his past self would recognize him, maybe even vice-versa. He’d grown a little, his face was lined with worry even today, he’d racked up an impressive tally of scars, he…

Hell, he probably wouldn’t even think he was the same species. Which one would think that? Past or future? Yes. Obviously.

He remembered that silly Polaroid that Erika had taken, the one with him holding Kate, lifting her off her feet, smiles on both their faces. He remembered the two of them meeting at Anime Boston, both having snuck out of class, and… heh. He did remember Verity. She’d looked so happy back then.

And it turned out that Zo and Erika had been there, and captured him hugging Kate, with her looking very pregnant. Kate had been happy to see him, and kissed him right on the lips. “You came!” she’d said. “I didn’t know if you’d be able to use those passes I bought.”

And, when the convention had winded down, Kraber had treated her to dinner with the money from that… well, adult movie… that he’d worked on with all his chommies.

Fok it, he missed college. He missed all the food, getting to eat meat at a moment’s notice. Sure, there’d been a lot of small worries, but dammit, at least you could have fun. He missed Polo, he missed Bly, Erika… so many friends.

The last contact he’d had with a lot of them had been back when he watched the sermon-turned-riot that lead to the death of the old HTF – Polo had thrown a bottle at Reverend James Thomas’ head, Bly had been screaming into Kraber’s ear over the phone that “No, this wasn’t right!” Miranda had gone off to something in PHL Medical, and…

So many friends, so many things had been lost since those days. Whether drowned in the ponification serum, or erased by the Barrier, and then, inevitably, if anyone had gotten ponified, their memories were locked up, the Newfoals convinced nothing happy was to be found in them.

‘Maybe they’re not so bad,’ Kraber thought as he ascended the staircase. They were near the last floor before the rooftop, now.

And Nebula was talking to Yael, one foreleg to her earpiece.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she was saying as Kraber followed closely behind, “does ‘A yellow spike of crystal’ count?”

Said yellow crystal had been awkwardly jammed into a wall, just next to a radiator. Nebula stared at it, confused.

“Smashing glowing things usually works out at times like this,” Kraber said.

‘Isn’t that one of the things we found in Maine a couple days ago?’ Kraber asked himself, looking it over, confused.

“That’s a transfer crystal,” Nebula said, looking equally confused. “Or teleport spike, depending on who you ask.”

“Magic-illiterate, here,” Kraber said. “No damn idea what that means.”

“These were common Crystal Realm equipment,” Heliotrope said. “Think of portals as being like a permanent passage. These are more like…. like folding space for a moment. They transfer anything in a circle between them almost instantly.”

“How come I haven’t heard of them?” Kraber asked.

“We... I mean, the Solar Empire... didn’t use them in the War, and never got the hang of it,” Heliotrope said. “Portals are much more consistent. They require a lot of precision.”

“What happens if I throw this out a window?” Kraber asked.

“You already did, didn’t you?”

Kraber looked sheepishly… down at Nebula, who was rearing up and had the yellow crystal perched on her right forehoof like an American football player about to throw the thing the length of the field.

“...no,” Kraber said.

He must not have sounded very convincing. Heliotrope just sighed, and said, “Alright. So since you already did it, that’ll really throw the ritual out of sorts. I don’t know where this will send them… but either way, this might not end well.”

“YEET!” Nebula yelled, and flung it out an open window. “Huh, that is fun to say.”

“You need to find the control crystal, now,” Heliotrope continued. “Otherwise, this might teleport you… anywhere. Might even end up in a wall.”

“How will we find it?” Kraber asked.

“Look for the edge of the circle, and try to move towards the center,” Heliotrope said. “Keep looking, and you’ll find it soon enough.”

Kraber looked to Nebula, and nodded.

They kept quiet as possible as they made their way through the top floor of the hospital. There could be PER anywhere, they were absolutely certain of that. And while the common stereotype was that their only weapons were vials of potion that splattered harmlessly against armor, well…

Tonight had proven that oh so very wrong.

Kraber peered around a corner, staring down the Fostech’s sights. It was running low on ammo – in fact, he didn’t know why he’d picked it up, it was so heavy.

‘Oh, right,’ Kraber thought, spying two humans and four ponies in PHL armor that’d been defaced with what looked like a purple sun. ‘Auto-shotguns are cool.’

“We are getting creamed out here!” cried one armored pegasus. A mare, by the sound of it.

“Don’t worry,” said another pony, in an overbearingly cheery tone that made Kraber certain of one thing.

‘That’s it. He’s dying first.’

“We will prevail. Besides, no way he could get through Schuller and Hot Pie.”

‘Who in the fok are they?’ Kraber wondered.

He’d ripped through so many tonight that they blurred together. If he’d killed either of them, chances were he just hadn’t noticed.

“We will win because our cause is just, our wills are strong,” the Newfoal continued. “And–”

“Our guns are very large?” one human asked. A big, burly man in green armor, carrying a big, long-barreled shotgun that looked more like an AA gun.

‘He has good taste in comics. He dies last,’ Kraber thought.

The Newfoal looked up at him in distaste. “Well, yeah, but there’s our responsibility. We have to do this, b–”

It was at that moment, at 10:43 PM, August 8th, EST, that the minuscule shred of Kraber’s patience sharted itself to death.

‘That’s it, they’re dead. I don’t give a shit what order it’s in.’

“Besides, MINE’S BIGGER!” Kraber yelled, and opened up with the Fostech.

The Fostech did not pierce armor. But at this range – the point-blank of point-blank – there was enough kinetic energy in the buckshot that it didn’t matter. Each pellet slammed against armor like tiny little hammers tumbling through the air at 1200 FPS.

The green-armored man took the brunt of the first shot. And - as far as as Kraber could tell - his organs collapsed on impact.

“HRBLUARGLK!”

‘Welp! I lied.’

Kraber and Nebula screamed incoherently, saturating them with lead. Beside Kraber, Nebula was screaming like a banshee despite her mouth being clamped over the mouth trigger.

The other PER human thought they could fight, trying to return fire. They found themselves salted and peppered by a spray of bullets from Nebula’s assault yoke, and collapsed to the floor, bleeding like a sieve.

Kraber fired two rounds from the shotgun, vaporizing an earthpony’s leg.

Nebula rocketed forward, a gust of wind buffeting Kraber.

‘I’m not going to want a shotgun, here…’ Kraber thought, switching to his Model 29.

He fired away from Nebula, the pistol bucking in his hands, brass clinking to the floor. In almost the same instant that Kraber was pulling the trigger, firing a fourth shot – the previous three had peppered the wall – Nebula slammed the entire weight of her body against an armored unicorn pony.

There was a wet ‘thud’ that Kraber didn’t so much hear as feel, and the pony collapsed like a pile of snow against a plow, thudding off a wall.

Their helmet cracked, revealing an expanse of lime-green fur.

In that moment, Kraber was firing the .44 into a unicorn, one that was poking their head into line of sight to cast a spell.

They tumbled back, a bullet in the soft, weak neck of their armor.

Nebula stood over the lime-green pony she’d body-slammed.

“How’s it feel,” the pony rasped, and Kraber could see from their glassy eye that they were without a doubt a Newfoal. “How’s it feel, knowing I’m more of a pony than you, you miserable, carnivore, near-human...”

Nebula twitched, and reached around the Newfoal with both forelegs.

Heliotrope

“RAAAAAAAAAA-!”

“NO NO NOOOOOOOO-”

A Newfoal with lime-green fur was thrown out a window, screaming.

Heliotrope barely had time to perceive it as any more than a green blur and a rush of air, before it swooped past her beating wings. It made her jump, or close, in mid-air.

She did glance down, briefly and on instinct, but didn’t bother to check if it’d land. That was a foregone conclusion.

‘Oh thank Faust,’ she thought. ‘Missed me by a hair!’

Heliotrope looked up to glare at the offending window. They couldn’t see her, of course, that was the whole idea. But she somehow doubted they’d have been careful with their throwing, even if they’d known.

“What is with those two and throwing things out of windows?” Yael asked in the earpiece, to nobody in particular.

“When you’re up this high, the opportunity sort of opens itself up!” KraberBliss called out over the comms.

Kraber

“Well, so much for not being a copycat,” Nebula muttered, panting heavily, hooves stained with the Newfoal’s blood.

“...What was that?” Kraber asked, leaning against the wall, trying to catch his breath.

‘This has been… oh… oh God… oh man… so… fokkin’... sat… such… long night…’

“... ‘Nother… crystal…” Nebula panted, staring into a nearby doorway, trotting towards it, and steadily regaining her stamina.

She bit down on the mouth trigger, the bullets shattering the thing.

Click.

The lights flickered, and the speakers poured out static. Despite the fact that he was wearing a helmet, Kraber felt compelled to clasp his hands over his ears.

“Nnngh,” he hissed through his teeth.

“Stop. Doing. That.”

Kraber and Nebula looked around, scrambling to find the voice. And there, in the middle of the hallway, stood an earthpony with a dark blue coat, and a black pompadour streaked with green.

Kraber’s blood ran cold. It was Shieldwall...

“Celestia,” Shieldwall sighed, “I’m trying to–”

Nebula and Kraber looked at each other, shrugged, and opened fire. Kraber roared at the top of his lungs, emptying the remaining nine rounds in the Fostech’s mag into the stallion before them.

But there was no blood. Shieldwall, or rather the image of Shieldwall, simply stood in the middle

“You didn’t think I was actually here, did you?” Shieldwall asked.

“We could only fokkin’ hope,” Kraber snarled. “This was you, wasn’t it? The hijacking, the ship that let Lovikov go free, all the killing.”

“I haven’t been killing anyone,” Shieldwall said. “You have. And going by what I’ve heard, you’ve been enjoying it. I did know about the hijacking, and thought it’d be an acceptable diversion. The ship, though…”

There was a brief pause.

“Honestly, I’m as confused as you.”

“What?!” Nebula yelled.

“I mean it, though. Where would I even get that? I’d like to think it was the PHL, but that doesn’t make much sense, then, does it?” Shieldwall asked, shrugging. “Or maybe it was Russians. I’m sure I’ll find out.”

He sighed theatrically.

“This is why I have to do this, you know. We provide you the best opportunity to cast all this aside, and here you are. You monkeys, passing it up so you can throw shit at each other.”

He, or rather, his projection looked over to Nebula.

“And you. You had paradise at your hooftips, nightkin. What makes them worth it?”

“Paradise,” Nebula said, through gritted teeth. “You call war, secret police, and our people being made to just get their objections cut out with scissors… a paradise. That aside, if I had to betray my Princess for a place in it, it wouldn’t be worth living in. What are you offering, Shieldwall? A world where people like you say ‘nightkin’ as if it’s an insult?”

“No,” Shieldwall said gravely. “We’re ponies. We’d never.”

Nebula stared at him, steely-eyed.

“I wouldn’t allow it. Not for a hero of Equestria,” Shieldwall said. “Any pony willing to give for the Empire deserves a reward. Give unto it, and your works shall not be in vain.”

‘He really believes this,’ Kraber thought, marveling.

“This one,” Kraber said, “Will be. This is over. We’re not letting your troops get away wi–”

Something shook.

Heliotrope

Heliotrope felt a tremor.

At first, it seemed to come from the building. She heard a rumble from inside. Too low and continuous to be a grenade.

Then it stopped. But only by half. The tremors from inside remained. The tremor within her suit had reached a high, then cut out.

‘Wha-’

Her head, her barrel, her flanks itched all over.

She pulled up her forehooves, unable to stop herself. And she found she was no longer looking through, as she should, but an erratic honeycomb-pattern of solid and translucent. Her limbs were melting back into view.

“Heliotrope!” shouted Yael. “The hell! Is that you I’m seeing up there? They’ll spot you!”

“My suit…” murmured Heliotrope. “Something’s messing with my suit…”

“And what exactly are they not getting away with?” Shieldwall asked. “We already have fresh herds of convies. We already have a wrecked city. I’m not even here. This isn’t even a speedbump in my plan. Nothing you do will have any effect.”

And then a wall exploded.

“And I do mean nothing,” Shieldwall said calmly, like that hadn’t happened. “Oh, yeah, did I mention,” he added, fixing on Nebula. “Ze’ev’s little stooge? Were she here, you’d see her. But she’s not coming. She forgot she isn’t the only one who can play with crystals…”

Rubble from the ceiling, from the remains of the wall, crumbled onto the floor, and standing there was a unicorn with glassy red eyes.

“Which had… interesting side-effects.” finished Shieldwall. “Ah…. so hard to know how to make new friends these days, isn’t it? Fortunately, I have a… good connection to the other side. So, I made my own.”

The Newfoal stood in the midst of a hole in the wall, surrounded by rubble. She was a charcoal grey unicorn mare, her horn upraised like a sword poised to drop. Had amber-red eyes appeared to glow in the dark, and her mane was a shock of bone-yellow-white hair that extended all the way down her back before re-erupting into a frothing tail.

Rather absurdly, she looked to be clad in an old-timey nurse’s outfit with high socks. Both the uniform and the leggings were as shockingly white as her mane, except for the blood-red trim and patterni…

… Oh, the red wasn’t part of the design.

“Reaper…” Shieldwall said, “Play your part.”

His projection flickered out.

“Now, now... don’t you recognize me, Bliss?” the new mare chirped.

“No,” Kraber said. “Far as I’m concerned… you’re just another fokking obstacle.”

“Another pony to kill?” she asked. “To shoot in the knee, kick in the face, break the collarbone, and leave to die, without the mercy of even a wee sip of potion?”

“... Sylvia,” Kraber breathed. “FOK! You just can't kill people like you used to..."

“You left me a vial,” she said sweetly. “I had to drag myself all the way to the vending-machine, more dead than alive, my blood trailing after me... but it was worth it, wasn’t it?”

She tipped her head back and screamed, a boiling screech like a saw-toothed steam whistle. It was a rusty, tortured sound, that told of scalding water and shattered glass and savage, primal triumph.

“No, no, no… not triumph, Victory…” corrected an unwanted voice, and he saw the damn Newfoal that called itself by that name, standing beside the raving mare...

“... How it burned, broiled me to the bone, so deliciously deep that even Her Light couldn’t heal the scars...”

“Look at her, Kraber,” Victory giggled. “She’s so much like me… a war-born Newfoal, a prototype of what’s yet to come… Oh, the great Nepenthe would love to have a magnificent mare such as this in her sisterhood… and you too…”

“... Look at me, Viktor. I’m so broken that I can’t even connect to my brothers and sisters… cast out on my own, running on auto-law, my brain too smashed to share in their screams, from all that you did! Behold the face of your daughter-mare!”

“Great. Another love-child. I’ll have to use protection next time...” Kraber said.

Nebula stared at him. “Wait, what?”

The Newfoal’s horn flashed, and the still night air whipped up into a breeze that swept back her mane, exposing the fur around her horn…. which was lacerated and slashed, glowing from within with the same crimson light that burned in the pits of her eyes, as if something just under her skin or her horn was trying to make its way out...

“Are you proud of the destruction you’ve wrought?” She spoke in a voice like rancid honey. She lleered, more bloody light spilling out from her torn face. Disgusting, and yet, almost appealing, like a tribal brand... “Now, I’ll give you one chance…” she chirped, “Join me, and you’ll be happy all the time! I’ll have a new playmate too… after I’ve roughed your brain up a… oh, wait, no, you scrambled your own basket of eggs long ago. This, Viktor, this is going to be kwaai…”

“Go fok yourself,” Kraber snarled.

“But you’re so sad!” the Newfoal protested. “You’re crying all the time, lashing out at everything! If you take the serum, that’ll all just float away! You’ll be superior! You’ll live on forever, with madness myself at your side...”

“First, that’s at the expense of every fokking thing that’s me,” Kraber said. “Second, you’re not superior, you’re a fokking golem someone dredged up from muck of someone’s soul. Thirdly… you’ll never be happy.”

“Don’t be silly, I’m–”

“Dull,” Kraber interrupted, “You can never truly enjoy anything… cos’ what the fok’s enjoyment if you enjoy everything? You’ll just be an automaton in a year or three, unable to feel anything. I may feel like shit every day of my life, but that just means it’s that much easier for the little things to make me happy.”

Nebula stared at him, shocked.

“I blame my parents,” Kraber said, as if that explained anything at all.

The Newfoal shook slightly.

“I am Reaper,” she hissed, levitating two of the PER’s combat shotguns away from the nearest corpse. Then, with a telekinetic tug, she bent the bayonets clipped under the barrels into wicked, sickle-shaped arcs. “I will harvest new foals from the dirt of humanity!”

In that moment, Kraber opened fire with his MG2021.

“Nebula was right. You ponies. Talk. TOO. FOKKING. MUCH!” he yelled.

‘Get out of her way!’ ‘his’ Newfoal whispered in Anka’s voice, and Kraber, before the crazed mare fired whatever neurons in her horn controlled her TK, moved.

Her bullets ripped through the air immediately behind him, missing him by the breadth of one of Kagan’s hairs. Kraber panted heavily as he brought the MG2021 to bear again, blasting in her general direction before hurling himself into a roll, avoiding a second medley of buckshot.

Coming up in a crouch he moved to aim, but found himself staring in horror. The mare, ‘Reaper’, had produced two purple flasks.

Waving cheerily, she teleketically smashed a vial against the sickles, slathering them in the purple fluid...

“Oh, fok…”

...the second, she hurled at him. Staggering, he tripped onto his back, barely avoiding the lethal projectile. As he hit the ground, he immediately found the mare advancing on him, swinging her two shotguns like scythes.

Staggering, he tripped onto his back, barely avoiding the lethal projectile

“You get hit enough with these, you’re done!” the Newfoal screeched in a lunatic giggle. “Now, please sit back and TAKE YOUR MEDICINE!”

‘Dodge, Vikt–’

Kraber forced himself into another roll, and Reaper’s swinging sickles smashed into the spot where he had been.

“RUN!” Kraber yelled at Nebula. “GET THE CRYSTALS!”

“But you–”

“We fight her, we both die!” Kraber yelled, “I’ll hold her off!”

Reaper screamed at the top of her lungs. A bolt of concussive force, tinted red, slammed into the ceiling above Nebula like a train. Bits of sheetrock and crappy ceiling tile crumbled to the floor like beige snow.

“You’re not getting away THAT easily!” Reaper yelled, and dove towards Nebula.

Nebula reacted almost instantly. As if all four hooves were springs, she bounced up off the floor, flipping slightly and planting her hooves on the ceiling.

She sprung forwards, rushing down the hallway.

“I CAN SMELL YOU!” Reaper screamed, rushing forward at high speeds…

Something cracked over her head, and she tumbled to the ground in an ungainly heap.

There Kraber stood, holding a shotgun with wood furniture. The buttstock had cracked in half and was hanging by a few scattered strands of wood.

“Not so fokkin’ fast,” Kraber said, tossing the broken weapon aside and unholstering his MG2021.

“Y-you…” Reaper hissed, picking herself up. “You could have all this. Be as happy as me. And you throw it away for this?! Look how happy I am! Look how much better I am!”

“I’m not seeing it,” Kraber said. “Well? What are you waiting for, princess. Let’s dance.”

He squeezed the trigger.

Yael

Heliotrope landed back down among them. A panting, bedraggled mess. And most of all, visible.

“Oh, thank goodness,” said Yael, more concerned than angry. She went to hug her friend. “Heliotrope… what went wrong?”

“I don’t know…” Heliotrope whispered. “My flightsuit… went wrong. They were running some kind of interference… it completely bamboozled the crystals.”

“Bamboozled?” Yael said. “How do you bamboozle crystals?”

“They must have a totem-prole close by,” Heliotrope said grimly. “Damn if they’re feeling ballsy, bringing one out in the open like that… This has got Shieldwall written all over it.”

“What The Hell Is Going On Up There?!” Quiette Shy said. “There’s… I Can Feel Lots Of Magic Slung Around. It’s Like The Crystal War Again!”

“This is bad,” Oscar said, strangely matter-of-fact.

“She turned into some kind of Super-Newfoal!” Nebula yelled. They’re closing in! Send air support, send help, I don’t know! Anything!”

Kraber

Reaper screamed again, galloping towards Kraber.

There was a hole in the ceiling the size of a large lorry, the kind with those huge trailers. Kraber could see the Moon through it.

‘Top floor,’ Kraber thought, frantically. ‘That’s right, I’m on the top floor.’

He dove behind a particularly large pile of rubble, rested the MG2021 on the flattest surface he could, and opened fire.

The MG2021 spat hot lead at Reaper, all of which plinked against something faint and red-tinted surrounding her.

‘FOKKIN’ SHIELDS!’

Thankfully, his seemed to be holding, too. The heads up display in the lower left corner of his helmet was blue, and he could see a little marker reading “100%.”

‘COME ON COME ON COME THE FOK ON!’ Kraber thought, watching the little ‘100%’ tick down to eighty, then seventy, as shotgun pellets skittered over his shield.

Run.

He didn’t.

Get out of there!

THIRTY PERCENT!

He didn’t. All that mattered was the bucking, shaking, roaring beast of an MG in both hands.

And then the red light around Reaper broke. Kraber smiled under his helmet, stood up, unholstered his revolver, and fired.

One.

Almost the instant it hit her, Kraber knew it wasn’t going to help. The area where he’d shot her glowed red for a fraction of a fraction of a second, and began to wane.

At the same time, her horn glowed.

‘She’s using magic to heal herself!’ Kraber thought, in the fraction of a second before–

Something dropped from the hole in the ceiling, smacking Kraber between the shoulder blades like a rock. He wheezed, trying and failing to catch his breath.

‘Fokkin’... oh… the pain… it…’

Someone held Kraber through both arms, their upper arms under Kraber’s armpits.

“SON OF A FOKKIN–”

“Gotcha now,” one surviving, heavily bleeding PER man hissed, holding up a vial.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit

“You were thinking, ‘if it bleeds, we can kill it,’” Reaper said, laughing mockingly. “Newsflash, Bliss! You can’t kill me!”

She twirled a knife in mid-air, one dipped in serum.

Nebula

Something weird was going on up there. The PHL human in the green armor, the one with the big and definitely not standard issue gun, was...

wait no

Dancing Day (okay THERE we go)

“Wait, you can do this from Nebula’s perspective now?” Lunar Phase asks, confused.

“... Well… ja?” Kraber asks. “Why wouldn’t I? She wasn’t around for a lot of this, and it’d be super awkward getting Heliotrope just to be a glorified framing device.”

He looks over at Heliotrope, expectantly.

“You haven’t talked to her for awhile, Viktor,” Lunar Phase says, “Also you barely talk to her on Facebook.”

“Nebula has a Facebook?” Astral Nectar asks.

“Yeah, she says she likes the emotional validation of having so many friends and supportive presences at her hooftips,” Lunar Phase says.

“She must not have been using social media very long,” Yael says.

“I was the first one there when she set it up!” Aegis adds. “It wasn’t long ago, so yes.”

“Okay, when and how?” Vinyl Scratch asks.

Nebula

Nebula didn’t entirely understand what was going on here. First, the super-Newfoal. Then the teleport spikes.

‘They’d better not be bringing something in!’ She thought, dashing through the top-floor hallways, eyes darting from door to door. ‘Drat. And they expect me to destroy all the crystals?!’

“Celestia,” she overheard from someone. “I can’t believe that was little, mousy Sylvie. To imagine that… that it could… be...”

“You sound apprehensive,” someone said.

“No, I’m not, Curtiss,” they snapped. And all of a sudden – from the smell, from the cadence of their voice, from the haughty way they responded – Nebula knew they were a pony. And the other one was clearly-

‘Huh.’

Nebula fluttered next to on a wall, listening in on the conversation. It seemed logical that they’d be guarding one of the spikes.

And that was definitely a human.

‘Alright. I don’t have time for this. We could be sucked goodness knows where. I don’t have time for philosophy.’

She peered through the nearest doorway. There was a man with a weird PER crossbow that was all wood, pipes, and glass, and a mare with an assault yoke.

And behind them was another yellow crystal.

‘I miss when they just threw vials and bombs. Shieldwall troops really keep their shirts buttoned all the way up.’

“So you’re saying you want us t–”

Nebula lost patience and dashed forward, slightly towards the left wall, and barrel rolled towards the right.

She didn’t have the hardware that ponies like Heliotrope did.

But what she did have was pure rage. As she rocketed into the room, she turned towards the pony that was guarding the shard, and pulled the triggers on her yoke.

The 5.56 bullets shredded her as Nebula flew. But she wasn’t done yet. She slid her wings to the sides, turned her face to the right, and rammed the entire weight of her upper body (and a light, stripped-down rifle!) into the human’s face.

Ponies weighed a lot less than the average human. But, well, the weight of a pegasus at high speed was still the weight of a pegasus at high speed.

The human fell back against the wall. He didn’t get back up.

‘... Did I give him a concussion?’ Nebula wondered, alighting on the ground and trotting up to the crystal. ‘Hmmm. How many more crystals are there? Destroying six should be enough, probably.’

She thought on that.

‘Good thing they’re not bringing anything in. Just leaving. I guess they wouldn’t be able to get reinforcements in.

And then, a scream.

Kraber

“Two are gone!” Reaper screamed. “Are you even good for anything?! Stop her, jus–”

‘I know what I must do.’

“FOK YOURSELF!” Kraber screamed, and he strode forward, taking with him the man restraining him.

He bent down to one knee, leaned forward, and threw.

Kraber couldn’t say what, exactly, had happened, but he felt the weight of the PER man shifting. Above… Further above… Then, right then, in front of him. He pushed out with both arms, in a move that wasn’t quite throw or push, and flung the man towards Reaper, the Sylvia-thing.

One of the man’s shoulders landed, pierced by Sylvia’s horn.

‘I need some air!’ He thought, rushing towards a particularly tall pile of rubble and clambering up, up, up onto the roof.

He could’ve used the opportunity to pour more bullets into Reaper, but he hadn’t been thinking that straight at the time. He dashed into the hallways, the screams far behind him.

“OFF ME, YOU NAKED-”

“MY BACK!”

‘I’m gonna reload, Kraber thought, ‘and get back in the fight.’

Nebula

“MY BACK!”

Nebula wasn’t really sure what was going on there. But it didn’t sound good for the not-pony thing that was menacing them.

She had never liked Newfoals, but she’d super never liked the anomalous Newfoals. They were… Well, the simplest way to put it was that they weren’t ponies. It was like during the Changeling Purges when she’d seen Changelings imitate ponies... poorly. Exaggerated character tics, movements, as if they were putting on a performance. A caricature of a pony, more flamboyant, less real.

Also, they acted like they were more of a pony than her. That didn’t help.

“There’s a batpony traitor in here!” someone yelled. With her night vision, Nebula saw him on one side of a doorway. Earthpony with an oddball assault saddle, one serum paintball, one assault rifle. Definitely a Newfoal.

‘You’re one to talk,’ Nebula thought, and flew up towards the ceiling. Silently as possible.

“Where’d she–” the pony said, their eyes tracking up. “Oh, broth-–”

Before the pony could pull the triggers, Nebula folded her wings to the side, and pile-drove down with one shoulder onto the pony’s neck...

Only to land right in the crosshairs of a woman with a homemade four-barreled shotgun, and a Newfoal pony with a unique assault saddle, mounted with a giant arbalest.

There was a hole in the wall. She could see someone on the other side.

“So you’re the one th–”

“OH, JA!”

And then the wall exploded.

Kraber

That last one had been Kraber.

Who had bodyslammed through the already weakened wall-

“COMBAT TIME!” he yelled, and shot the woman in the knee with his 1911. As she fell, Kraber rushed forward and shoulder-checked the woman.

“Yoink!” Kraber yelled, grabbing a four-barreled shotgun from her hand, and then stomping down on her throat.

She made a horrible gurgling noise. Still holding the shotgun, Kraber turned towards the apparently suicidally overconfident Newfoal.

“Monkey-scum, I’ll–” the Newfoal started.

The shotgun bucked. At point-blank range, what all four barrels did was better left undescribed. One or maybe two solitary hooves stood on the floor, the rest of the Newfoal practically vaporized at such close range.

“... I’m keeping this,” Kraber said, slipping its sling over one shoulder.

Nebula looked down at the floor, seeing another yellow crystal embedded in the wall. Without a word, she stomped on it.

“Any luck on your end?” Nebula asked.

“No,” Kraber said, panting. “She’s… pretty invincible at the moment. Her horn makes her shield. Also heals her. So I’m thinking I need to damage her shield, then un-horn her.”

Nebula nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Only question is how to keep her horn out. I need to wear her down, and work from the–”

“Bliss,” Yael said, “What the hell’s going on up there?!”

“Super-Newfoal,” Kraber said, “It was Sylvia, apparently. And she wants me ponified. So, jou know. Tuesdays as usual.”

“How do you know it’s super?” Heliotrope asked.

“Because I’ve poured a lot of rounds into her with no reaction, and because she wants us dead. She’s using guns. She’s intelligent.”

“That’s… that doesn’t sound good,” Heliotrope said. “There’s one more thing. Newfoals like that usually have some other ability.”

Kraber nodded. “So, what is it? Laser eyes, perfect pitch, super wall-building vision?”

“Kill it before you find out,” Yael said.

“Good call. But can’t you, I don’t know,” Kraber said, “send some fokkin’ reinforcements?!”

Kraber could just hear her jaw tightening. Hear her trying to find reasons to let him die, to stay comfy as–

“... Why would you–” Heliotrope started.

Ja, that was his lot in life. That was how this was always going to go. Who cared if he’d been really connecting with the two of them better than Lovikov, they were going to let him-

“... Alright,” Yael said.

Something pushed at Kraber’s skull. Just above one eyebrow, on the left side of his face. It wasn’t a cluster headache.

‘This isn’t.’

Isn’t what?

‘I’m supposed to do it alone. I’m supposed to be fighting her alone. ...Wait, that’s befok. Me against her alone? What am I thinking?!’

“Hold her off until they get there,” Yael said. “I’m sending Quiette Shy and a few others.”

‘... Bro?’ Kraber thought. ‘Yael has a brother? Or is he a huge douche? I’m so confused.’

“You alright there?” Nebula asked.

“Just… thinking,” Kraber said, reloading the four-barreled shotgun from a bandolier of shells. “How many crystals are we at?”

“Two,” Nebula said.

Kraber smirked, and pointed to a corner of the room, at a light yellow glow behind a bookshelf. The one that had driven Nebula to this room.

Reaper skidded into the doorway.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare, you destroy that and I lose what I’m promised! I lose Paradise, I lose–”

Kraber and Nebula looked to each other. It was… difficult for Kraber to say how much he was getting across behind the mask, but somehow he was sure she got the meaning.

“Alright,” Nebula said, tightly restrained rage in her voice.

She pointed towards Kraber with one wing. And somehow Kraber knew exactly what was about to happen. From the absolutely livid look on Reaper’s face, so did she.

“I’ll give you the same choice you gave him,” Nebula said, and bit down on the mouth trigger.

Kraber started firing in almost that same instant.

The two of them concentrated about half a second’s worth of fire on the bookshelf. It splintered, and behind it there was a strange crackling. Yellow lightning danced across the floor and linoleum, the bookshelf crackling and burning slightly.

“So,” Kraber said, trying not to shake in fear, “I’m guessing that was the last crystal.”

“Y-you…” Reaper said, her eye twitching. “YOU RUINED IT!” Reaper screamed, “YOU RUINED IT ALL, YOU PATHETIC CREATURES!”

Her horn began to glow, and she began to sing.

“Reaper reaper that’s the queen calls me,” the unicorn mare sang. “Because they all, DIE! When I sing I ponify! You act as though payback makes you a noble man is that a fact? Well you’re a goddamn philistine!”

There was a drumbeat beginning from somewhere, something that sounded very much like a heartbeat.

Kraber and Nebula looked at each other and bolted for the hole Kraber had made, and ran for it. Neither of them knew exactly what was going to happen.

As Kraber dove through the hole, he caught a quick glimpse of something behind him. The two PER that he’d just shot were pulling themselves to their feet.

Well, the woman was. Despite the fact that Kraber knew full well he’d crushed her throat under his boot.

“... Run,” Nebula said, and the two of them slid out into the hallway and ran for the stairway.

Kraber didn’t need to be told twice.

“Did she just raise the fokkin’ dead?!” Kraber yelled.

He didn’t hear her answer – probably a yes? – but as the two of them ran for the stairs, Kraber could see more dead bodies, broken, shot, brutalized, and coming to life. People and ponies with missing arms, gaping bullet wounds…

Strangely, the ones with clear head wounds didn’t seem to be getting up as quickly.

‘Are headshots going to work?!’ Kraber thought, worriedly.

Anomalous Newfoals were the collective boogeyman of anyone that’d spent time on the Barrier Front. Kids told each other stories of them hiding under their beds. Parents who clearly should have never been parents in the first place tried to scare their children straight with such stories.

Which had never been something either Kraber or Kate had considered. Neither liked scaring their kids.

And there was one here.

They Empire couldn’t be allowed to get this asset.

And suddenly, Reaper was galloping behind the two of them, wreathing black, red, and green smoke from her eyes and mouth, holding those two shotguns with the curved bayonets.

“Requiem aeternam, bullet right through the sternum
Lullaby to hell, babe
Reaper’s got your name!”

“EAT THIS!” Kraber replied, turning, MG2021 aimed at her, spraying long bursts… the MG2021 usually broke shields quicker than this...

She fired point-blank into Kraber’s stomach.

“NO!” Nebula yelled, and rushed at Reaper…

Only for a blast of pure concussive force to throw them tumbling down the hallway. As Kraber rolled back, trying and failing to get his bearings, he saw more corpses climbing to their feet behind Reaper.

Pony and human alike.

“Ta’ for now,” Reaper said, and Kraber swore he heard music continuing in the background, “But my ride is here.”

He lay on the ground, stunned from the impact. He heard the beat of helicopter rotors. Getting closer and closer.

“The medevacs I ordered should be getting here any second now,” Yael was saying.

And again there was that feeling of something wrong. That same feeling that this was Not How It Was Supposed To Go.

Breathing shallowly, swearing he didn’t hear the beat of the song in the background, Kraber looked over to Nebula. She… well, ‘lay’ wasn’t the best word. She was flat against the wall, stomach in plain view, head on the floor.

“Nebula,” Kraber said, dragging himself up.

No response.

“Come on. Come on, get up! GET THE FOK UP!” he yelled, struggling to be heard over the helicopter rotors.

The armor was at 20%, now. There wasn’t time left. Thank you, magic-shielded armor.

“We’re the only line of defense!” he yelled, walking over to her and pulling on one foreleg. Helping her into a less awkward position. “We’re not letting her get to those choppers.”

“What if they’re PHL?” Nebula asked.

“If they are, then we’re saving lives. If not… well, hell, do you think we’d actually be that lucky?” Kraber asked.

Nebula looked to consider that.

“Tartarus, no!” she chortled slightly. “Okay. You win that one.”

“Reaper cannot let you in, it’s just not fair
I’m a pure mare–”

The two of them saw her trotting up the animated bodies that she held hostage. They’d formed themselves into something of a stairway, letting her gallop up to the helipad.

“JUST DIE ALREADY!” Kraber yelled over the noise of the rotor, firing his MG2021 in her general direction, idly noting a growing sound like the roar of turbines…

Floodlights swept across the roof, and he realised that what he could hear approaching were helicopters. A quick glance confirmed two of the choppers, both inbound towards the hospital.

‘It wasn’t right last time, and it isn’t now. And she’s not trying to destroy them.’

A voice spoke up on the radio. “The medevacs I called should be heading in,”

“Roger that, Colonel Gardner,” Yael replied.

‘Gardner, huh?’ Kraber thought. ‘So... that is the commanding officer for Yael’s punishment detail. Damn, if getting to do even more of what you want counts as a punishment detail in the PHL, I should get in the Ponies For Human Life business.’

But something was wrong. As Reaper stood on the roof, they saw that she wasn’t attacking them. And the helicopters were slowing down, banking towards the roof.

‘This is wrong.’

“They’re definitely not PHL.”

“Lieutenant Ze’ev,” Nebula said. “Does the PHL use Hind helicopters, or did I miss something?”

Yael

‘I just can’t win tonight.’

This was a thought that had been winding its way through the mind of one Yael Ze’ev for most of the night, since roughly the time that she’d watched the Ship save Lovikov.

She’d been just on the verge of thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would go right. That there was some core of idealism in her that would be rewarded.

‘I now see how wrong I was,’ she thought, as the thestral Nebula pointed out how American PHL didn’t use Hind helicopters.

Well, American PHL didn’t.

So something wasn’t right here. But the visor on her suit designated them as belonging to the PHL.

“Colonel Gardner,” Yael said. “Something’s wrong with the medevacs.”

“What!” Gardner snapped. “Dammit, I put in the request myself. And no, whoever you are. We do not use that Soviet trash here. We use good old American steel!”

Heliotrope watched them closing in on the rooftop.

“Should we…. Should we fire on them?” Eva asked, confused.

“They have PHL IFFs,” Yael said.

‘I’m not going to be responsible for a friendly fire incident on top of all this.’

“Then f…” Gardner started. Then stopped. He seemed to be deeply confused there, if only for a few seconds. Trying to bite something down. “Keep an eye on it. They do anything suspicious, shoot them.”

Kraber

“Those aren’t PHL this time either!” Kraber yelled, watching the two choppers, Russian Hinds, closing in on the rooftop. They were…

Well, that was the thing. They had clear PHL paint, but something was wrong. Something was clearly very wrong. There were ponies fluttering around, and humans manning the guns. One of the was opening the doors as the chopper drew closer and closer….

‘Is it a goddamn clown car?!’ Kraber thought crazily, as he watched the massive amount of people inside.

The two of them rushed towards the roof, Nebula slightly outpacing Kraber.

“OUT OF MY WAY!” Kraber yelled, sending a long, uncontrollable, burst into the general direction of several of the walking corpses that Reaper had raised.

He didn’t have time to see how they reacted. Both he and Nebula hit the zombies like a train – they hadn’t even picked up weapons. Weren’t even lurching. That was… more worrying than it should’ve been. Bullets ripping through arms, legs, skulls, and wings. And Nebula’s wolvers embedding themselves in limbs.

“-colts cannot crack this oyster shell
So go on, whip around that gun
like you're the best, it's just no fun
Another hero? Oh, please!”

Heliotrope

She watched the doors open on the helicopters. Even in the dark, surrounded by light sources, and staring up seven stories or so, her vision was just that good.

She saw the humans, the zebra, and the ponies through one of the chopper’s open doors.

‘Newfoals. Potioning crossbows. Paintball guns.’

“They’re PER!” she yelled. “It’s still more PER!”

By the looks of things Yael didn’t even doubt her for a second, and began firing up at the helicopters. And in seconds, so did Heliotrope. So did Summers, and Zhang, and the National Guard, and even Jolu and Melody.

Fate conspired against them.

Either every unicorn in the Hinds was projecting a magic shield, or the PER’s shields were just that good.

‘Nothing?! Seriously?!’

The bullets from her SMGs pinged against the glowing purple aura around the Hinds.

“Keep firing!” Yael yelled. “Lorne, can you hit them with your grenades?!”

Which was a silly thing to ask. Grenade launchers weren’t designed to engage flying targets, they were too slow, they were–

“Absolutely,” Lorne said, bringing his revolver grenade launcher to bear.

It was at that moment that Heliotrope saw it. The shields only covered one side of the choppers – specifically, the ones that pointed away from the roof.

‘They want the Super-Newfoal to get in!’

“Y… Lieutenant!” Heliotrope yelled. “They’ve gone for double shields on our side!”

Yael sighed. “Just what I needed.”

“It’s all up to Bliss and Nebula now,” Heliotrope found herself saying.

‘They’re so doomed.’

Kraber

“STOP THEM!” yelled a pony on the helicopter closest to Reaper, pointing at the two of them. “They’re gonna–”

Time stopped for Kraber. He saw the pony pointing at him, assault saddle jammed in between far too many people. He saw the… the zebra behind the machinegun? That, that was weird. He’d rarely seen zebra PER.

And for a moment, he imagined Reaper on the helicopter.

“SUCK IT AND FOKKIN’ CHOKE!” Kraber yelled, and opened fire with the LMG.

It was point-blank. Aimed into a crowded helicopter.

Limbs flew every which way. People screamed. One gunner took a 7.62 through the knee, and fell screaming to the hospital roof.

His chin hit the edge, and he tumbled down screaming to the street below them.

“We can’t extract!” a woman yelled, and the chopper picked up speed again, rising up from the roof meter by meter.

“YOU!” Reaper screamed in frustration, turning her gaze to Kraber.

In that instant, the other chopper, the one Kraber and Nebula hadn’t peppered with bullets, opened its doors. From its cabin, pegasi with serum bandoliers swarmed out the side-hatches, along with human PER hanging on the end of zip-lines.

“I’ll run interference on them,” Nebula yelled. “You take Reaper!”

“OH, COME ON!” Kraber yelled, rushing out of the way, panting, just barely dodging two more blasts from Reaper. “CAN SOMETHING TODAY JUST GO RIGHT FOR ONCE?!”

“Reaper cannot let you in, it’s just not fair-”

For once, Kraber agreed. This was getting to be a horrible, horrible day.

“I’m a pure mare
colts cannot crack this oyster shell
So go on, whip around that gun
like you're the best, it's just no fun
Another hero? Oh, please!”

Please let my shield tank this… Kraber prayed, firing into Reaper’s shield as a burst of shotgun shells raced in his general direction.

IT HELD! He pulled the pin on another PHL grenade and tossed at the mare. Then, he swung around the other side of his cover, hoping to catch her from behind once the blast disrupted her shield...

“Requiem aeternam
Reaper has come, sinner!”

CRACK!

“Yes!” he roared, seeing her horn smoulder in the wake of the pink, magical flash.

The MG in his hands roared fire, and by the time she had gotten her shield back in place, he’d landed at least a couple of rounds in her flank.

And yet she still kept on coming. FOK! Why was she so fokking durable?!

“Thigh-high socks are my absolute territory
Go on and drool -
the otaku cannot resist
You think the fire in your eyes
makes you a tiger in disguise?
Dream on, you goddamn pussy!”

The helicopters were overhead now, unable to fire, but dropping their human cargo onto the roof. The men and women falling from the sky were lightly armored, wearing what looked like metal breastplates under their clothes, glowing purple….

Nebula dashed between them.

“You’re all TARGETS!” she yelled, and - wolvers outstretched - cut through one line with both forelegs, like a pair of scissors.

The unfortunate human on the end fell to the ground, screaming.

“IT’S RAINING MEN!” Kraber yelled, letting loose another wild burst of 7.62x51mm up towards one of the ziplines – which, for some reason, seemed to be getting a lot lighter. The LMG bucked in his hands like a bronco, the rounds rushing towards the wi–

The man on one zipline shrieked in an incoherent garble. Something like “AAAAAOOOOUAAAARRRARARGK!”

He’d lost his grip on the rope. And was now falling to the hospital roof, blood trailing from his crotch.

‘That,’ Kraber thought, staring at the man who’d fallen to the roof, clutching the bloody remains of his balls, ‘was not what I planned on at all. I’ve been shooting a lot of people in the balls lately.

I miss kicking them in the face. It was a simpler time.

“SEIZE HIM!” one pegasus cried, pointing at Kraber. “Seize the HERETIC that withholds CELESTIA’S LIGHT!”

“Requiem aeternam
Reaper has come, sinner!”

“I’D LIKE TO SEE YA FOKKIN TRY!” Kraber yelled, opening fire with the MG2021 at the pegasi plunging onto him, clipping their wings and turning dives into death-spins.

Just beside him, he watched Nebula punch another pegasus – this one a Newfoal, probably – right out of the air.

The sound of them smashing into glass and concrete was satisfying, but he couldn’t afford flashy kills. Couldn’t afford to make them suffer. He had to remember what Caduceus told him...

Wait! Those helicopters up there were Hinds, Mi-24s… flying tanks, but what was that line from Snow Crash?

‘Fucking Soviet piece of shit, they made that windshield out of...’

“It’s just one human!” somebody yelled, opening fire from the door gun.

The chopper’s gatling ripped through the area immediately behind him, a bullet smashing against his shield, but it held - thank god, it held, and…

FOK! A bullet rammed into his stomach, the shield and PHL armor dampening most of the force… but not all of it…

… the surplus kinetic energy was enough to throw him back into a solid wall. Again, his shield flashed, and he bounced away from the impact, sprawling onto the rooftop.

“Is tha - IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE KONTGESIGS?!” he yelled, rushing towards a particularly large vent on the rooftop.

But as he slipped behind cover, he was desperately trying to ignore the (Oh God, oh fok, oh fok, why, ow, ow, OH GOD WHY, IT HURT) pain.

“Thigh-high socks are my absolute territory
Go on and drool -
the otaku cannot resist
You think the fire in your eyes
makes you a tiger in disguise?
Dream on, you goddamn pussy!”

He’d been shot before, yes… but never with something so fokking big! Damn, if he ever joined the PHL, he wanted a better shield over his armor.

He tried to breathe in, breathe out. His hands probed his abdomen, finding no entry-wound, no point of contamination for the serum, but he still felt a sticky witness inside the armor, against his skin – and blinding pain when he tried to breathe.

A rib, he realized. The force had been enough to compound fracture one of his ribs. And now he was bleeding out inside his own armor.

Okay… no fokking regenerating health, then. Had to… Had to kill them before he… died of blood loss… FOKKING OW! What had he been hit with, a fokking antivehicle round?!

“Bliss, no!” Nebula yelled.

Dancing Day

“Turns out, it was an antivehicle round,” Kraber says, still wincing a little. “It was a civilian Hind, and they’d managed to find a homebrewed HMG… stung like a bakvissie with teeth in her beef portal…”

Everyone winces, and Dancing Day is not sure whether it’s from Kraber’s description or imagining the sensation of getting hit with one.

“Can your armor seriously tank antivehicle rounds?!” Verity yells. “I’m calling bullshit.”

“Nah,” Vinyl says. “You can survive getting hit with one if the shield’s down… assuming it’s not in the heart or something. The shields can tank it, but not many. There was just enough of the shield left that it blunted the force. It would have gone through his armor with no trouble, though.”

“That, that sounds painful…” Dancing Day says.

“It could have been worse. The later marks had a twin autocannon in place of the Gatling, and that was chambered for 30mm sounds nearly seven inches long...getting hit by one of those would have meant...

Kraber

Damn, he really had broken a rib. He could feel the damn thing rasping against the inside of his damn chest...another hit like that might break it the other way and puncture a lung…

‘Getting potioned almost sounds better than drowning in my own fokking blood. Almost...

He tried to pull himself back to his feet. As he did, Reaper rushed him, her sickle-like bayonets raised. He was in so much pain.

‘It’s so comfy down here,’ he thought. ‘Want to be in a bed… more than anything…’

One time, his father, Paul Kraber, had said these words; “If you’re going to do something, you finish what you start.”

Kraber had been near-collapsed under a heavy backpack.

“I’m not going to leave you here...”
He had to get up though.

Had to keep fighting.

Had to–

“BLISS!” Nebula yelled, flying towards him, guns blazing down towards Reaper’s shield.

And then there was a sudden stab of pain.

Nebula

There was Reaper, one shotgun in her TK.

And there was Nebula, everything going white from pain, wondering why she couldn’t control her flight anymore. The ground, the hospital, everything was a blur, and she kept spiralling to the right.

‘Why can’t I stay in control?!’ Nebula thought frantically, as the rim of the hospital’s roof loomed closer and closer.

She stretched out her wings, feeling her belly scrape against the concrete. She felt that against her stomach, straight through her fur. Felt blood against her fur.

For a moment, she looked back to see…

A curiously unobstructed view of the night sky. Something felt wrong, though. As if she couldn’t move. As if everything was frozen around her.

‘Oh,’ she thought distantly, looking back. ‘My left wing is gone.’

Somewhere, distantly, she realized she was probably in shock. But she had to get control, and she felt her muscles moving far too slow, at a glacial pace that felt years behind her impulses.

‘Oh, shi–’

She slammed headfirst into what, by now, had to be one of the hospital’s only intact windows.

Kraber

“HA! GOT HER!”

It was a gleeful yell from the earthpony in the chopper. Kraber could see a human bending over to high-five them.

no

A pony had just taken a bullet for him. Basically crippled herself.

… No.

He was definitely not feeling sadness. Or regret. Definitely not overcome with guilt. Because feeling guilt for what a pony had done, that was just crazy talk, right? And he was definitely not numb at this moment, as he sank to his knees.

“Oh, what’s this?” Reaper asked, the song’s beat still inexplicably continuing in the background. “A human being surprised that their tools can get hurt?”

“She,” Kraber said, surprised at how hard it was to get the words out. “No, no… she was...”

His friend? Maybe. Someone he’d grown closer to? Absolutely.

“Come on,” Reaper said, the beat in the distance growing more subdued. “You humans. You wouldn’t care a whit for ponies, if they couldn’t save you. You’d all sooner cut your throats than even dream of sharing our Harmony.”

Kraber pushed out with one hand. Pushed himself up against a wall.

“Ponies, slaves to humans,” she said. “You’ve subjugated every creature in your world you did not butcher. Pets, that’s the best we could hope to be to you.”

“So the solution is that everyone loses everything that is them?! Even you?!”

“Who cares?” Reaper shrugged. “Can’t you say you’d be happier, never having made all the bad choices you have? You’re so angry, so hateful, your every choice has led you to the same place! You and everyone you knew, in the before time.”

Emil. Kate. Peter. Anka. Kagan. Cousin Richard. Other Kate, Kate Goodwin from college. Poor Dietrich’s parents. Even Gage. Dacosta’s little brother Silvio, the one with the fragile x-chromosome syndrome. Kraber’s little brother Hayden, who had Koolen DeVries syndrome.

When one PER kontgesig tried to ponify his brother, Kraber had kicked that bastard in the face. Word was, his jaw had needed to be wired shut.

And according to Reaper, none of that mattered. Nebula didn’t matter. She was just a tool. And he didn’t matter. He was just supposed to die.

‘Like hell I will!’

“You think you’re happy?” Kraber whispered, finally back on his feet, “I’m a doctor, you lying fokmaggot. And it’s time to cure you of that.”

“You are just a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?” Reaper smirked. “This is what your exasperation results in. Are you sure you stuck with your family out of love… or penance? You weren’t free then. Now you are… uninhibited. What I offer you is freedom from all that.”

She began to sing again.

Reaper reaper that’s the queen calls me!
Because they all, DIE!
When I sing I ponify!
You act as though payback makes you a nobleman
is that a fact?
Well you’re a goddamn philistine!”

Adjusting the Russian-made grenade launcher sight he’d added onto his scavenged pipebomb launcher, he ducked behind one of the numerous buildings on Maine Medical’s roof, ran onto a recent upward expansion, sighted his target and fired.

The pipe-bomb flew upwards, reaching the apex of its arc just as it impacted…

… face-first into the windshield of the nearest hovering chopper.

The rest was physics. The pipebomb’s detonator initiated, and the force of impact plus the tiny jet of superheated plasma on the tip of the blast was enough to shatter the ill-maintained glass, filling the cockpit with scintillating crystalline shards and good-ol-fashioned shrapnel.

“KABOOM, BABY!” Kraber yelled.

The explosion itself was comparatively small. The results were not.

For a moment, just a moment, Kraber saw a severed arm, and a pegasus wing, fly out of the burning wreckage, chopped apart by the rotor. Then, unguided, with all of its controls shot, the chopper slewed sideways onto its beams and fell out of the sky, dropping into the street.

As it sank in flames past the roof, the tail-rotor struck the tip of the building, and flew off its mount. Trailing sparks, it spun across the roof like a demented firework, bisecting an unfortunate PER man on its merry way. The upper half of the unlucky bastard’s torso, diagonally cut through, jumped up about two feet in the air, blood spraying out both halves of his body….

All this chaos and viscera left only one small problem. There was still one chopper, and Kraber found himself now fresh out of pipe-bombs..

‘Please God, if you’re listening, make this shield work.’

He poked his way out of cover as he prayed, sending a burst up in the direction of the second Hind, ducking back as something hit him in the shoulder, leaving a splatter of purple.

Were they using ponification pellets in paintball guns? There was a sick logic to it all – even if he won the fight, he still stood a chance of getting the stuff on himself while changing out of armor. It would be a Pyrrhic victory, but still another Newfoal to the cause…

“Is that how I’ll be born?” giggled Victory. “Oh please yes, please fall over and be reborn just when you think you’ve won!”

Another rifle round, this one bog-standard .223, punched against his armor… then another, a heavy .308 from one of the battle rifles most militaries had gone crazy for in the earlier days of the Conversion War.

His shield flashed again and again – 53%! – so that instead of ripping through bone and tendon, the impacts felt only like being hit with a mallet.

Already clutching at his burning chest, Kraber struggled to ignore the fresh pain, instead gritting his teeth and reloading. He tossed out another grenade stolen from the PHL, this one a flashbang. Good for riot control. He threw it out in what he assumed was the general direction of the PER varknaaiers standing on the roof, shielded his eyes from the blast, and then rushed out through the disorientated mess, MG2021 aimed up at the helicopter.

But as he fired that last manic spray, roaring in defiance and agony, another round smashed into his thigh, whipping that leg out from under him.

“Go for the opening!” screamed a pegasus, who rushed rushed towards him, knife in mouth.

Ah fok fok fok fok it hurt, and he could feel his blood dripping down through into the legs of the armor - Heh, no way this was going to be an open-casket funeral, not looking the way it did right now-–

NO. No time for that!’

The second helicopter was still overhead, trying to swing around and paint him with its own MG. He couldn’t take any more rounds. No matter how many the PHL armor could take, there wouldn’t be many before it punched all the way through him.

He felt for his armor’s chest, and found two more grenades, one of them a flashbang, the other with Japanese characters on it. He vaguely remembered them, though he had no idea what they meant…. Fujin? The purplish-pink stripe on the rim told him it was another anti-magic weapon, but it still had an explosive charge like any other frag-grenade…

‘Why did Imbeault have these, anyway?’

He weighed it in his hand, and tried to remember an old episode of Mythbusters. Shooting live grenades out of the air…

What he’d taken away from that episode – incidentally, myth confirmed, kinda – was that a blow might be enough to trigger a grenade’s explosion. Like, say, a sniper round. Or rotor spinning at over 300rpm.

Well, here went nothing.

“HERE, HOLD THIS!” he yelled, and tossed it up in the general direction of the helicopter.

He would have loved to see what followed next in slow-motion, seen which rotor-blade struck the grenade, and flicked it away with enough force to trigger the reaction.

It wasn’t so much sound, or a shockwave, but Kraber felt in his bones.

The grenade had not exploded, per se. A giant purple-pink-black sphere had formed in mid-air, right where the helicopter’s midsection fuselage had been, sucking up everything and everypony save for Reaper, who stayed stubbornly attached to the ground, her hooves looking almost rooted to the concrete.

Kraber, for his part, was apparently heavy enough to remain ‘on deck’, weighted down by the sheer mass of his gear, holding onto a railing...

The PER grunts however, in their lightweight armor, followed their pony compatriots and were drawn, screaming, up towards the pocket-singularity. A few overshot it and flew into the helicopter’s whirling rotor, twirling around the singularity in an unstable arc, which had sheared off its driveshaft and was now suspended above the vortex, held in place between its own lift and the suction of the void. The sky filled with a matrix of blood as it sliced and diced anyone unfortunate enough to strike it, limbs and droplets swirling back into the singularity like a fountain in reverse.

The bisected halves of the helicopter spiraled around the sphere as if rooted to the ball of energy, the tail end slicing through the hospital roof and another Newfoal.

“Kwaai…” Kraber whispered.

And then, as if unable to sustain itself, the glowing singularity wound down, and . lLike a sun going supernova, violently rejected everything it had swallowed. Comets of ultra-compacted metal spewed out, embedding themselves in surrounding buildings.

A noxious cocktail of blood, oil, aviation fuel and coolant gushed out as if from a cracked egg, baptiszing Kraber and washing the potion off his armor.

What remained the helicopter’s nose crashed into the roof, bounced, and dropped to the street. The tail section, still airborne thanks to the spinning tail rotor, tumbled away, cutting through a pegasus, and tried to mate with a nearby house.

Fragments of Hind and hide rained down from the sky. A forearm with a wristwatch still attached landed on Kraber’s chest, and he hugged it in silent shock as if it were one of the stuffed animals in his pack.

The few PER who had fallen back to safety before being consumed got shakily to their feet, laughed weakly…

...right as the helicopter’s main rotor, still intact and spinning, dropped down out of the sky like a razor-edged flower head caught on the breeze…

Blood, metal, and shrapnel flew everywhere, pollinating the roof. Kraber, still lying prostrate on his back, saw blades spinning inches from his face, before the bloodstained rotor came to a creaking halt.

He picked himself up from behind a clump of flaming wreckage, MG2021 reloaded.

“Life’s good to me sometimes,” he whispered, and weakly climbed to his feet. “Oh, you have got to be tuning me kak…”

Reaper, a little worse for wear, stood not thirty feet from him, smilingly splashing one hoof in a puddle of… something. Fragments of superheated metal lay around her, from where the rotor had evidently struck her magical shield, and come off the worst for it.

“Want some?” she asked, holding up a hoof. “It’s the kind of stuff you like…”

Kraber caught the reek of petrochemical loveliness, and staggered backwards out of the pool of blood and fuel.

“...the kind that BURNS!”

She kicked a small wave of the stuff onto the fizzing metal, and with a sound like a elephant splatting against concrete from thirty-thousand feet, the entire roof was on fire.

Yup. Destroying the helicopter had neatly doused most of the surrounding rooftop with quality fuel, and the damn Newfoal had just set it on fire.

‘Wow,’ Kraber thought distantly, watching the flames dancing, ‘Maine Medical is going to be fokked when this is all over. Bet it gets condemned.’

She didn’t seem to care, strolling through the flames with her shield up, the rising air wafting her mane almost angelically around her face. The orange-blue flames were actually a very complimentary color to her searing red eyes and the seething ruptures in her face.

But she was still humming that insufferable tune.

Wheezing, exhausted beyond belief, Kraber reloaded the MG2021, and squeezed the trigger.

“... Will you stop the fokking song!” he rasped, unable to get his voice above a pained whisper.

But Sylvia, or Reaper, did not listen, continuing the inane, prattling lyrics, closing the space between him even as his bullets dimmed her shield.

“Requiem aeternam
Bullet right through the sternum
Lullaby to hell, babe
Reaper's got your name!”

“COME AT ME, YOU UNDEAD LITTLE SHIT!” Kraber wanted to roar.

But it wouldn’t come, his burning chest wouldn’t obey, leaving him trapped in the silence of his rage and the crackle of the flames.

Driving him back towards the edge of the roof, she whipped one shotgun up, the bayonetReaper whipped out her twin sickles, slicing through his armor - Wait, fok, wasn’t there supposed to be a shield?! - , and cutting a run through it…

ItThey wedged, jamming between two plates.

“Well, that’s annoying…” she shrugged, and fired.

The pellets smashed against his stomach.

Reaper looked up to him, annoyed, and levitated a huge rifle at him. It looked like a sniper rifle.

At point-blank range, the muzzle was inside what remained of his shield, and the bullet tore straight through his abdomen - damn that hurt. . “But a mere setback.”

“BLURGK!” Kraber yelled, feeling something wet in his mouth.

Even as she kept on singing the song, Kraber could see her aiming the shotguns towards the hole in his armor.

So Kraber did the only thing he could. He reached forward, grabbed hold of Reaper’s horn, and let his weight fall forward, twisting as he did to force her under him, grappling hand-to-hoof on the roof as the pool of flame expanded and swallowed them.

Kraber was wounded, but the armor was evidently fireproof. Reaper did not have to deal with injury and blood-loss, but was unable to shield herself when pushed face-first into burning liquid.

Yet she didn’t scream, even as Kraber felt her body spasm and smelled her flesh burn. Instead, Reaper bucked him with her hind-legs and turned them over, so she was now on top of him.

At least she’d finally stopped singing, though.

“Hi there…” she squealed, mashing her scorched face into Kraber’s and planting her hooves on his chest… “I’m Reaper, the Pret…”

“I’ve fokkin’ heard that already,” Kraber wheezed, and headbutted her.

He wished that he’d kept the spiked HLF helmet, but the attack did its job. She staggered back, whatever spell she’d been about to try disrupted, and Kraber took the opportunity to knee her in the stomach. With her thrown off, he rushed up to her, and kicked her in the face.

While she staggered to all fours, Kraber pressed the revolver’s muzzle into the soft pocket of tissue between her neck and barrel.

“This won’t save anyone,” Reaper whispered.

“It’ll make me feel better...” Kraber coughed, and something cracked in his chest. Felt like someone had thrown a bulldozer at him.

The revolver’s cylinder snapped open, more blood pouring from the open breach, and smiling back at her, he twisted the speedloader into place, closed the cylinder, and summoned the wull to pull back the trigger.

“Jou like that… jou fokking kontgesig…” he spluttered.

Her grin grew even wider, even lying there impaled on the revolver.

“This won’t end it…”

“Yes it will…”

He fired, again and again and again, his prone posture bracing him as all six rounds punched her barrel apart, blood dripping in great gouts from her wounds, splattering against him.

She went limp. Kraber dropping her to the side. Then, with an afterthought, lifted her up and threw her into the flames.

“Fokking...!” he wheezed, turned away and clutching at his side.

And then he heard a whisper.

“Reaper, reaper-”

And Kraber, for no reason at all, realized that the reason Kate didn’t let him name Peter ‘Dragan’ was because she didn’t want their son to be named after a man who gave beer to Kraber when he wasn’t even ten and taught him to make molotov cocktails at home.

‘Maybe she had a point,’ Kraber thought, trying to ignore the pain in his chest.

“YOU THINK HER FIRE IS SO SIMPLE TO PUT OUT!”

He spun, stumbling, and jabbed back with his elbow, knocking her free.

“FOK!” he hissed, clutching his arm - the poesgesig had broken his collarbone! -Kraber hissed, clutching his arm, and grabbed back at the revolver, slinging the MG2021 on its strap over his shoulder. Okay, okay…. FOK! Down to just one-handed guns… against a psycho Super -Newfoal. Yeah, he was fokked.

He kicked Reaper in the face yet again, and rolled to the side, wincing as he landed on his bad arm, brought up his .45, and fired uselessly.

I am, Kraber realized, Probably about to die.

But like hell he was going to let it be to this thing.

Thankfully, the semi-automatic pistol had been optimized for a truly one-handed reload, and he remembered this as he placed it in his left hand, trigger finger closed over the guard, which pulled back the slide as he inserted a new mag.

“RISE!” Reaper cried, standing framed within the flames, and as she screamed, the flames turned black as night, and the pink-purple of sunset…

“Fokking metal…” Kraber winced, before he heard a shuffling sound that froze his blood. “Oh, you’ve got to be tuning me kak…”

The corpses, any corpse by the black flames, were standing up. Like puppets on strings. Humans, Newfoals and ponies all shambled to their feet and hooves, flickers of onyx light crackling on their limbs, in their eyes, on the shrapnel and glass that pierced their flesh.

Even worse, the few dying men and women on the roof, those scant survivors that were little more than brains, spinal cords, and failing organs were ponifying as Reaper harvested them...

“I AM THE REAPER!” she screamed in ecstasy. “LIFE AND DEATH BOW AT MY WHIM!”

She was a freak… a walking nightmare. A prototype of something to come...

‘I have to kill this thing before it get standard-issue somehow,’ Kraber thought. ‘The Empire can’t have this monstrosity!

But killing her would be no mean feat. Kraber fired his .45 once more, aiming for the skulls of the now-actually-zombified Newfoals.

“COME ON, COME ON! THIS ALL JOU HAVE?!” Kraber yelled. “I’VE PICKED THINGS OUT OF MY ASS-CRACK THAT WERE MORE THREATENING THAN JOU PIELKOPS!”

“Come on, come on….” Kraber whispered, fanning the trigger, desperately wishing he’d sprung for that laser sight.

He ducked back behind the roof’s AC unit, wincing as his broken arm flopped against his torso. It hurt not moving it, but it hurt more moving it...

He switched the pistol to his left hand, then tossed a grenade over his shoulder. There was a flash, and Kraber ran for the hole he’d jumped through in the first place.

‘Gotta get to Caduceus!’

Well. He tried to run. It came as more of a limp, and his body felt like it’d been thrown in a trash compactor and dragged out feet-first.

“He’s getting away!” Kraber heard one Newfoal scream. He saw a stallion, pointing. “This way, he’s here!” the Newfoal cried again – in Reaper’s voice. “Come on, Bliss, or whatever your name is! I heard you talking to Cady!”

He lowered himself dow–

The floor rushed up to meet him, and he fell too hard on his left side. Kraber felt blood flowing past his teeth.

“ARM!” Kraber hissed through gritted teeth. It hurt, it fokkin’ hurt, oh God, it hurt, it hurt so much, it was blinding, for a moment sight didn’t matter, then-–

“You wanted to die, didn’t you? Come on… we have something better!”

He stumbled down the stairs. Heh… maybe. Maybe he did want to. But no matter what… no matter what… He had to be brave. Had to keep! Fokking! Moving!

I. Am not. STOPPING!

Movement was life. And here he was, being hunted by the walking dead.

The hospital was silent as he seized hold of an abandoned gurney and pushed it ahead of him, using it to bear some of his weight. Except for the squeak of the wheels and rasp of his breaths, there wasn’t a sound to be heard…

Another staircase forced him to abandon the gurney, yet he hoped to find a wheelchair, maybe, to replace it.

But no, there was nothing to hand. Instead, bracing himself against the wall he pressed on, ignoring the minor, distant sensations in his leg, his chest, and collarbone.

He kept moving. Somehow, he felt like he should stop. Except that’d make him a coward. Oh, he could stop, and just give up. Be with his family once more – but he would never again be Viktor Marius Kraber.

“Would that be so bad?” Victory asked, leaning against a doorway. “You’d be happy! Vicky’s a sad, crying man with nothing to live for!”

At what cost? His eyes darted from door to door as he skulked through the hospital's hallways. If he drank of that stuff they called their mercy, would he know what he once was? Would he remember himself, would he truly be happy with his family?

“Come on, you deserve ponification,” said Victory, checking her hooves, up ahead. “A fresh start equals–”

“Maybe I do,” Kraber said, cutting her off. “But other people... other people in this hospital… fokking well don’t.”

So, he limped forward, gasping and wheezing, desperately trying not to think of where the blood everywhere had come from. In this hallway, the lights were flickering, there were IVs strewn everywhere, and–

ANKA!

It was her body, in front of him, a .44 Magnum-sized hole in her skull.

And standing over her, he could see himself. Wearing his HLF armor, now rusty and pitted, covered in… bones. There was an equine skull on one shoulder, a human one on the other… Then the figure winked at Kraber, held up a glass in toast, and drank deep from it. Purple liquid dribbled over his chin, and he smacked his lips.

“Tastes like...freedom…”

‘If I get out of this,’ Kraber told himself, ‘I am going to get so high. Or gesuip. Find the vilest, nastiest, liver-punching rotgut I can find, drink the whole bottle with time for seconds.’

All of a sudden, the vision of himself, mouth wet with potion, shuddered and appeared to shrink inside his armor, limbs shortening, sleeves flailing, like there was nothing inside.

Kraber whispered the shema, knowing what was going to happen next.

It didn’t disappoint – within seconds, like a butterfly from a cocoon, Victory the Pretty Pony had crawled out.

“Hey, Vicky,” she said, smiling up at him, “Look behind you.”

He ignored her.

“I said… Look behind you.”

“You’re not real…” Kraber hissed. “I’m bosbefok. I’m… I’m crazy, and by God, I’m getting out of here and saving everyone from those PER without you fokking me over.”

“Oh, such a disappointment,” Victory said. “I just wanted to warn you about the terrible, horrible monster behind you…”

“Don’t listen to her!” he heard Kate yell from… somewhere. “She wants you to get converted! She’s not even real!”

“Oh, but I am, unlike you,” Victory purred. “I’m as real as his nightmares. As real as his fears, as real as he makes me out to–”

“HOU JOU FOKKIN’ BEK!” Kraber roared, and fired the revolver, leaving a massive bloody stump where Victory’s head had been, blue smoke wafting up from it. “BOTH OF YOU! YOU DON’T CONTROL ME! EK BEHEER ME!”

Victory collapsed, blood spraying out from her neck-stump against the wall.

‘None of this makes any sense!’ Kraber was screaming internally. ‘She’s not real! How did I just shoot her?! How the fok could I shoot her. What the fok’s going on?!’

“Honestly, I’m as confused as you,” said Victory - who was now Anka, lying on the floor, blood staining ashy grey skin and oozing forth from that hole in her skull, puddling in what might have been hair. “Partly because I am you, but, well, semantics.”

“Oh, Celestia, that hurt!” somebody else yelled. “The ape shot me!”

The lights flickered on, and Kraber could see another pony there, this one a scarlet pegasus. He’d punched through both of her wings, grounding her.

“Wha… I didn’t… Where’d all this blood come from?!” the pegasus screamed, staring up at Kraber. “I… whose blood is that?!”

She pointed in the direction of where Anka and Victory had been, only for Kraber to realize that their corpses weren’t there.

And yet the blood remained. Kraber could even see strange hoofprints and even an imprint in there, with no trail. Like a strange equine had just been standing in the blood and fallen over, their body disappearing...

He abruptly decided it was better not to question that, and shot the scarlet pegasus in the head.

He heard a noise. Like someone crying, hidden deep in the shadows.

“Victory?” He spun and fired blindly into the dark. “Anka?”

There was a wet thudding sound, then a scream of pain. He’d certainly hit something...

“Over here!” another voice screamed, and Kraber limped away, desperately hoping that the Newfoals wouldn’t find him – neither the real ones, or the ones that stalked his thoughts.

Heliotrope

“... Bliss?” Yael asked. “What’s going on?”

“I… think I might need more room on that medevac…” Bliss’s voiced wheezed over Yael’s comms. He sounded like he was dying. No two ways about it. “Is it still... coming?” he asked.

“No dice,” Yael said, with barely-restrained fury. “Those lying f– the PER somehow took the codes, and spoofed the system so the dispatch says they already got here. It’s up to us.”

“Who would…” Heliotrope asked.

“You just can’t k– trust people like you used to,” Bliss said, his voice strangely raspy.

“Alright. While we’re here… What happened to you?!” Yael asked.

“That… that Newfoal can raise the dead,” Bliss said. “As in… she makes their bodies walk… like puppets on strings… nnngh, oh, God…”

“We’ve sent in reinforcements,” Heliotrope said.

“Get to Nebula first,” Bliss said. “I… I can find a few grenades. I’m going to use them if the PER get to me first.”

‘Suicide.’

Heliotrope had seen many humans take that over ponification. Had seen countless people turning themselves into bombs, killing themselves rather than going pony.

From what she’d seen of Newfoals, she couldn’t blame them.

“...It’ll only be a last resort, right?” Heliotrope asked.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Kraber Bliss said. “Just… tell the reinforcements to be careful. I don’t know much about how the zombies act, but this one’s full of surprises.”

Ambrosius Bro

Zombies.

The man who insisted that everyone refer to him as ‘Bro’ had grown up fairly sheltered secluded nearly imprisoned. There’d been a lot that he hadn’t known about the world outside his family home. Years ago, he would’ve been laughing at that. Zombies? Seriously?

Two years in college - he’d put off his studies until the war was over - and the utter weirdness of the Conversion War had slowly beaten the idea that anything was “too weird” out of him.

He could tell that the National Guard that their squadleader (his name was Olson) had sent alongside him, that weird Mikkelsen guy, Summers, and Smoky.

Smoky was taking point, carrying a pair of .308 machineguns in his assault saddle. Quiette Shy slowly trotted behind him, lighting their way with a shield that glowed lightly red.

“Can you, maybe, use a less creepy color for this?” Bro asked.

“I’m Sorry,” Quiette Shy said, “I Don’t Choose What Color This Gets To Be.”

“So is it connected to eye color?” one National Guard soldier asked.

“Maybe?” Quiette Shy asked.

“So then what happens if you have heterochromia?” Bro asked. “If you have blue and yellow eyes, is it like… a marbled aura? Is it green?”

“I Don’t Know, Okay?” Quiette Shy asked. Bro imagined that was her snapping at him. Maybe. Having one of the only sources of light they had washing the hospital in red was absolutely not helping matters.

“Damn,” Summers said, looking over the carnage.

Bro looked at his squadmate, and - not for the first time - was very glad that they’d gone with transparent visors. It wasn’t as protective as the solid helmet Bliss had gone for, but it just felt better being able to see someone’s face.

“One guy did all this? How the hell is he just a corporal?” Summers asked, with terrible sickly excitement.

Bro couldn’t quite believe it either as they tramped through the hallways.

“And he took down two choppers! What a badass!” Summers said.

“Can you keep it down?” Olson asked. “We don’t know what’s in here…”

“How many more PER could there be?” Bro asked, affected confidence in his voice. He didn’t want to admit it, but the PER scared the shit out of him.

Becoming one of… of those things…

It reminded him of Delia Daisy Bloom Delia.

He’d shot her in college after she took the slow potion. The things she’d described towards the end… well, Bro was happier not thinking on it.

He shivered as he looked over the corridors. Bliss and Nebula had really torn it up in their fight through the hospital.

There were bodies. Everywhere. Pony and human alike. And it looked like there were potion vials

Wait.

Bro stared for a moment at the body of a red unicorn. Had it twitched, ever so slightly?

In the distance, he heard the sounds of someone running, boots hammering against the linoleum.

This is wrong. This is….

The lights in the hall flickered.

“It moved that time,” Bro said, pointing at the red unicorn. “It definitely moved.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Smoky asked, turning back towards Bro. “There’s no-”

His words died in his throat. Bro followed his gaze to see someone leaning against the wall, their face shadowed. In the red light of QS’ shield, it was difficult to make out their features and even harder to want to, in this light.

“Sir,” Summers said, turning around, aiming his M4 at the new arrival. “This is a PHL operation. Evacuate the area.”

The figure didn’t respond.

Bro stared at them, through his FAL’s reflex sight. The figure stumbled out, and-

A light flickered. Smoky gasped, and even Quiette Shy made a noise of surprise. Bro saw her mouth move under the bandanna.

The figure was missing an arm, and had no lower jaw.

They were making a horrible noise. Something like bones or metal grinding together.

And they were holding a small knife in one hand.

“Sir-” Bro started. Even though in part of his mind, he knew exactly how this was going to go and you did too.

In the instant that the man lunged for them, Summers fired a split second before anyone else.

The first bullet didn’t even make the man’s eyes widen. Though he staggered back, all the same.

Bro fired, the FAL smashing against his shoulder like a Newfoal trying to buck his collarbone into shattered fragments.. Quiette Shy fired. Olson fired a shotgun.

Bullets ripped through the mutilated man. A spray of 5.56 rounds cut through their arm.

Finally - after more bullets than Bro was willing to admit had been fired - the disfigured man collapsed. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

“What Was With That?” Quiette Shy asked.

“He didn’t respond,” Olson said, amazed. “He didn’t… he didn’t say anything.”

“He didn’t even react to getting…” Summers said, before walking over to the dead man. “Huh. He’s….”

He held two fingers to the man’s throat.

“No pulse. And, this arm-”

He looked at the stump.

“He lost more than enough blood that he should be dead twice over,” Summers said.

“Uh,” Quiette Shy said, trotting over to the body. “He is dead twice over.”

“What?” Smoky asked, as everyone crowded inch by inch towards the body.

“His body lost most of its blood a long time ago, “ Quiette Shy said. “This…. This wasn’t a person. This was just somepony puppeteering them. Like a golemnetrist.”

“....Awful thing to make into a golem, though,” Smoky said. “You…. you were in the War too, right?”

Quiette Shy nodded.

“So then you know this is an awful thing to make golems from,” Smoky said. “They normally went f-”

It was difficult to say what made them all stare down the hallway. But what Bro - and Quiette Shy, and Smoky, and everyone else - was certain of was that there was a noise, and then there they were, staring down an ever-increasing crowd of animated bodies staggering into the hallway. But some…. Some were walking near-perfectly upright.

How did the PER get this many?! Bro thought frantically.

“QS, keep the shield up,” Summers said.

“Since When Do I Take Orders From You?” Quiette Shy asked.

Summers didn’t respond as the horde drew closer. “Everyone, hold your ground. They’re just shamblers, even dumber than Newfoals!”

The horde of animated bodies rushed up against Quiette Shy’s shield. Bro didn’t even have time to question how it was possible to shoot through it (how apparently it wasn’t one-way, how in the…?) but within the space of a second, suddenly he was.

And the world became bullets.

Quiette Shy

A massive tide of bodies crested against her shield like a rogue wave in the ocean.

AM I EVEN DOING ANYTHING?! Quiette Shy wondered, as her twin 5.56 assault rifles blazed away at the animated bodies. Someone screamed, an absurd high-pitched falsetto. For a moment, Quiette Shy wondered if it was her (Which seemed silly - Who just didn’t realize they were screaming? Come on) but then, there it was.

Smoky wasn’t firing. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, in utter terror.

Bro’s FAL, Summers’ M4, Quiette Shy’s twin assault saddle rifles, Olson’s box mag-fed shotgun, all roared in the close confines of the hallway.. Sure, they were punching through two, three, even four enemies, but she didn’t feel any real impact to her shots. There’d be an arm that flew off, holes in the chest, but there was always another body to replace what she’d hit.

They just. Kept. Coming.

“I Can’t Hold This Forever!” Quiette Shy yelled.

And then - suddenly, incredibly - an opening. Quiette Shy saw through the horde, to the end of the hallway…

To a woman with half her head missing, holding a crossbow made from scavenged materials.

Another one? Holding a weapon? Is she...

“They’re just bodies!” Summers yelled. He didn’t seem to notice “Just keep shooting, we’ll be able to-”

The zombified woman seemed to be shouldering the crossbow. And then, there was a crossbow bolt sticking from - no, through - Quiette Shy’s shield. Potion dripped from the tip, slow like molasses.

Oh no.

They’re using guns.

And the shield’s getting weak…

“RUN!” Olson yelled.

For once, your fear has served us well, Quiette shy thought, and began moving ever so slightly backwards.

She looked back, looking past her flanks, to see Smoky bolting towards the exit.

Bro followed.

And finally, so did she and Summers.

Kraber

The stairs. Had to get to the stairs! Fok! If only he had some claymore mines, something! Anything! FOK!

‘Shema yisrael Adonai eloheinu, adonai echad...’

Ah, fokking hell, his leg hurt as he descended. It was all he could do not to scream, hissing out between his teeth, spittle moistening against his gas-mask.

He had to ignore it. Pain was just chemicals, like any other drug.

‘Just a dull buzz’, he just barely failed to convince himself.

He just… of course he walked this way. That was only natural. There was no pain, he just needed to get out…

I can find the gun! Kraber thought, working his way down the stairs. The cafeteria was only a few levels down, he had to-

It was difficult to say what happened next. He was limping down the stairs one minute, then-

Reaper was there.

“You seemed to like what you did to my friends,” she said, almost purring. “How about a taste?”

Reaper’s horn glowed, and everything went off…

Off….

Well, that was the strange thing. It was like forward was up, and he felt himself flying backwards, crushing the glass window beneath his weight.

And the whole time, Kraber had this sense. That somehow, the fact that gravity had taken a hard right turn, the fact that he was being thrown out a window and worst of all losing to a Newfoal, failing, was the least wrong part of this all.

Shards of glass danced around him as he tumbled through the air, the streets just below.

I’m not supposed to be here.

He saw Yael, Heliotrope, their squadmates.

Neither are they. They were never here. Not until this very moment.

Heliotrope was pointing up to him with one foreleg.

It didn’t make sense, but Kraber had this pervasive sense that before two or three or four minutes ago none of this had been happening, that Yael had never been here.

The only thing Kraber had time to think as he saw the roof of the building rushing up to catch him was:

“Oh, shi-“

Kraber didn’t land on the roof.

His upper back took the brunt of the impact, and he bounced off. Something snapped. He felt…

Well, that was the thing. Kraber would never really be sure what happened.
It was like he fell asleep for a few seconds, and the next thing he remembered was falling towards the ground, everything burning, everything feeling like he’d been hit by a train, and oh God, he hurt everywhere, there were tears in his eyes and he raged at his own calm as the ground came up up up up and no no, he couldn’t die here, he was not gonna die not gonna die, please, God, not here, not here, if there’s a hell, please be merciful, I refuse to die here, just let me see Kate aga-

Heliotrope

It would’ve sounded like a melon being dropped from the sky. If not for-

“GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGHK!”

That.

Bliss had bounced off a building. Then plummeted down to the street, his left side taking the brunt of the damage.

Then he’d screamed.

And then he was silent.

...He’s dead, Heliotrope thought.

“ Ze’ev!” Summers yelled, over the radio. “They’re coming!”

“What is, Summers?!” Yael yelled, eyes darting from side to side. “What’s going on?!”

“We’re being chased, that’s what!” Bro yelled. The nearest doorway flew open, and the PHL and National Guard - led by Smoky, who was galloping away at full tilt, a look of utter terror on his face.

“By?!” Yael yelled over.

“ZOMBIES!” Smoky yelled, and as if to punctuate that, the bodies spilled out the doorway behind them. Mutilated bodies, missing arms, heads, any body part but legs.

….Great, Heliotrope thought.

She reared up on both hindlegs, jumped up, and took flight.

Below her, she saw a massive horde, even worse than some of the Newfoal rushes they’d had to fight, and-

Were some of them using cover?

This is so much worse than a Newfoal rush, Heliotrope thought, watching the chaos below her.

Before Heliotrope’s eyes, she saw a zombified Newfoal that might’ve been blue at some point, missing most of its skull staggering forward, wearing an assault saddle. As Heliotrope watched, it bit down on the mouth trigger, letting loose a spray of wild, unaimed shots...

Towards Yael’s perimeter.

They ambled towards a wrecked car.

Oscar fired a Penetrator round through the zombified Newfoal’s skull. Even at such slow motion, the Penetrator’s bolt had much the same effect as a captive bolt pistol on a man’s testicles-

“That seems kinda Freudian,” Aegis says.

“I did what Yael wanted,” Heliotrope says. “There’s no subt-”

“No, you did what you knew was right,” Yael says.

“He means that it was a weird thing to reveal,” Kraber says. “Like, it betrays a lot of unresolved feelings.”

Staring at Heliotrope, Kraber then adds: “You know, like how I keep saying I earned the dent in my boot, or the thing with the shock collar I did.”

Astral Nectar just stares at him.

“I read his Freud library books,” Kraber says.

The bolt destroyed what was left of the Newfoal’s skull.

Something strange happened, in that moment. It wasn’t as if the Newfoal died, it was already past that point - it was more like someone cut the power. It sprawled limply.

Are headshots the key?! Heliotrope thought, banking towards a particularly large group of zombies. She bit the trigger, and 9x32mm rounds sprayed down towards them.

Two heads exploded - one belonging to a unicorn (Can’t they use their - NOPE! No, I am not jinxing it!) and another belonging to a human.

The unicorn stopped firing. The human…

Well. Despite being headless, they kept firing. But the rifle fired wildly, unaimed.

And then they broke into a full-tilt unstable run, rifle held like a blunt cudgel. But they had no head. They had no head-

Quiette Shy fired at them. Straight through the legs.

They fell, and finally stopped moving.

It makes sense!

What even is tonight?! Heliotrope thought frantically, before yelling: “We have to cut off their limbs!”

Yael

Right. Dismember them.

That made sense. If they couldn’t move, whatever it was that controlled them would… well, lose control.

From behind a car, Yael aimed for the legs of one charging earth pony zombie, carrying a molotov cocktail in its jaws. She fired, driving a 7.62 round through two of its legs. It tumbled on its broken stumps, falling onto its face, before bursting into flame.

I am going to be seeing this in my sleep, some distant yet calm part of Yael thought.

“We can do this, right?!” asked a National Guard in cover next to her.

“Yeah,” Yael said. “We can-”

The National Guard man took a crossbow bolt through the eye. He fell to the ground on his back, screaming as purple fur sprouted around the socket and his eye grew faster than his socket. He screamed, clutching his forehead as a horn ripped its way out from under the skin and his bloodshot eye forced the bolt out his skull.

I don’t even know his name, Yael thought. I never looked at his nametag. I only just met him and he’s dead.

Training took over Yael in that instant. She snapped her Galil towards the man, and drilled a 7.62 into his skull at close range.

His skull exploded. For the second time.

Wherever you go, I hope you’ll be fine, she thought.

“Is Rime Ice doing okay?!” she yelled over to Melody.

...I just wanted to dance, she thought. Before the War. That’s all I wanted.

Beside her, from inside the convenience store they were using, Melody levitated a pair of assault rifles. They floated just outside of Yael’s peripheral vision, blazing away at the zombies.

“Is Rime Ice okay?” Yael called over.

“I think so,” Melody called back. “Jolu’s keeping him stable, but…”

But that won’t matter if we don’t hold out. But it’s harder and harder to hold out in the first place.

“Colonel Gardner,” Yael said, evenly. “WHERE IS MY GODDAMN MEDEVAC?!”

“I’m trying to get it through, dammit!” Gardner roared.

“For that matter, where are you?!” Yael yelled. And for a few seconds, she was feeling something as far removed from rage as Earth was from the sun.

Where the hell have you been?! We’re dying out here, and he’s just sitting on his butt?!

“I’m trying to set a perimeter around the city!” Gardner yelled back. “It’s just one Newfoal. You can handle it. Just keep Haddon under lock and key until I get that m-”

“The zombies just keep coming!” Yael yelled back. “I wait long enough, I won’t be sentient enough to even decide!”

A Newfoal pegasus rushed at Yael, divebombing ever closer to her, a vial in its jaws. No, no, no - she thought, aiming towards the once-half-living thing.

“EVEN IN DEATH, MY HAPPINESS CONTINUES!” the pegasus yelled, from frayed, ragged vocal cords.

Quiette Shy looked to Yael. Her horn glowed, and - as if slapped by a giant hand - the Newfoal crashed into a wall, bounced, and didn’t get back on its hooves. Just like Kraber Bliss had.

Thanks, friend, Yael thought.

“We’re Getting Fucked Sideways!” Quiette Shy yelled.

“Melody,” Yael called over to the blue unicorn, “...I’m going to try to get our HVT out. I may have to leave Rime Ice here.”

“And the soldier with the arm wound?” Melody asked.

“What?” Quiette Shy asked.

“Zhang. The Chinese one. She… she’s having a hard time keeping upright,” Melody said.

Quiette Shy and Yael shared guilty looks. Shoot. I didn’t even notice it, Yael thought.

“You’re just going to leave them here, for-” Melody started.

And Yael turned that over in her head. Was she going to risk the lives of two people? For-

Yes. Yes she was.

“If I take them with him,” Yael said, “I’ll be making them targets.”

“You’re not actually going to-” Gardner cut in over her earpiece.

“Enough of this,” Yael said. “I’m moving him out, NOW!“

“We know where you are,” Gardner said. “We can send a helicopter to your posi-”

Haddon was going to die. They were going to die or be ponified.

“I. Do not. Give a damn. About position,” Yael said. “We are getting Haddon out. She paused. “Heliotrope! I’m going to need you to find an ambulance. QS, Summers, Bear?”

Heliotrope looked at her, confused.

“Lorne, Hebert, whatever his name is! Three of you get to her when she finds a vehicle!” Yael yelled, ducking behind a piece of rubble as a bolt of magic sparked over her head, burning through a brick building. “Get him out of here, dammit! And we’re going to find out what he knows, I don’t care how.”

Heliotrope

It was two minutes later. And there Heliotrope was, sitting next to a slightly scuffed ambulance just sitting in the middle of the street…

Right on the eastern edge of the perimeter Yael had originally set up to protect Haddon.

Heliotrope’s blood ran cold at the emphasis her friend put on those last four syllables. For a moment, she was back in Nipville, and Yael was saying not to take prisoners.

“It’s right here!” Heliotrope yelled, perching on all four hooves on the roof of the vehicle.

She looked over to Yael, who was busy issuing orders to the three people that would be helping her escort Haddon out of the city.

She didn’t hear what Yael said over the sound of an explosion, but she heard Lorne nodding.

“QS, can you project a shield while you carry him?” Yael asked.

Quiette Shy nodded.

“Great! We’ll cover you!” Yael yelled.

“Okay,” Quiette Shy said, and ripped a wrecked car off the ground.

WHAT?!

Heliotrope stared at her. At the glowing red car, a beat up metal relic that dated back to the 70s.

“Not what I meant,” Yael said.

“I Obey The Spirit Of The Law, Not The Letter,” Quiette Shy says. “Besides. This Has More Mass. Easier to Lift Two Things At Once, Too.”

And with that, the two humans, one unicorn, and their prisoner broke into a run towards Heliotrope.

“I’ll cover you!” Heliotrope yelled, springing up into the air as if she’d been fired from a cannon. As the three ran towards her ambulance, she stared down the zombified things running and shambling closer and closer to her squadmates. There were a few earth ponies, and some horrifically mutilated humans carrying assault rifles and shotguns.

“We”

“Will”

“Never”

“Stop”

They said, as Heliotrope sprayed them down with SMG fire. They all said that. It was if they were being controlled by a puppeteer that couldn’t decide which puppet to speak through.

A flock swarm of zombified pegasi - moving with unnatural unity - flew towards the three of them, some with assault yokes loaded with Equestrian-made crossbows ready, some with vials of potion in their mouth.

Quiette Shy raised the car up, blocking the storm of bolts and bullets with it. And beside her, Lorne raised his grenade launcher, not quite aiming it. Summers was busy firing on the other group of zombies heading for them, and Quiette Shy was keeping both Haddon and the car aloft.

Which left Heliotrope and Lorne.

You crazy human, Heliotrope thought frantically as Lorne pointed his Milkor M32 grenade launcher in the general direction of the swarm of undead pegasi, readying a shot that was surely only a few steps above a cowboy hipfiring a single-action revolver.

THOOP

It was not.

The grenade sailed through the air, and punched square into the lower jaw of a pegasus dead center in the swarm.

The swarm was shredded. Viscera flew everywhere. Dismembered pegasi corkscrewed to the ground.

Holy buck, did he just get lucky? Heliotrope thinks. Except, as she will find out soon, he did not. Lorne’s skill with a grenade launcher, it will become clear, beggars belief.

But there was one more pegasus coming. An absolutely titanic mass of meat and muscle, one that slightly reminded Heliotrope of that absolutely overmuscled pegasus she remembered from the War, was flying towards them. Blazing away with its assault saddle’s crossbows, wearing the claws the PHL had dubbed ‘wolvers’.

They were dipped in potion.

Heliotrope flew towards them, her own wing blades and wolvers outstretched, firing her assault yoke on full-auto.

Blood spouted out from where the 9x32mm rounds hit. Beside Haddon, Quiette Shy had thrown up a tower-shield like construct of magic. The bolts peppered it, but Heliotrope could see it cracking like thin ice.

He was going to get to Haddon, he was going to kill them, and-

BAAAAAAAAAANG

There was the sound of several pistol rounds fired in such quick succession that they sounded almost like a single peal of thunder.

The pegasus fell limp, the top half of its head separated from its body as if someone had used a blunt guillotine and hadn’t gotten the head all the way through it.

And there, 1911 at the hip, unsteadily resting one side of his body on his massive machinegun, was Bliss.

Heliotrope’s mind shut down for a few seconds there. The closest thing she had to a thought in those three seconds was: How in the goddamn-?!

Heliotrope, Quiette Shy, Lorne, and Summers stared at him.

He’d pulled himself up, jamming the muzzle of the MG2021 into the ground and leveraging himself up. Using the machinegun as a crutch.

“Can’t a guy… get any rest around here?” Kraber Bliss asked, through gritted teeth. He stepped forward, one leg dragging slightly.

Heliotrope gaped at him. “You were thrown out of a window. You bounced on your back. Your organs should be paste. You were already pretty injured before. Your spine should be gone. How in Luna’s name you still alive?!”

“Fuck that,” Lorne said. “How is he standing?!”

“I just sort of assumed... it was PHL armor at work,” Bliss said. He was wheezing slightly. “Think there’s something wrong with my lung…”

“...Its Potion-Proof. Blunt-Impact Proof. Stabproof,” Quiette Shy said. “Not Seven-Story Fall Proof.”

“More importantly,” Summers said, “How did you get here?!”

“I… walked?” Bliss asked, confused. “I mean, my legs are the only things that don’t hurt right now…”

Does he have a concussion?! Heliotrope asked. And she’ll ask later if he did, and Kraber will say ‘well, probably, but I don’t fokkin’ remember, I was in shock.’

“See the walking dead out there?” Bliss asked, in response to a question nobody had asked. “There’s a super-Newfoal doing it. I beat up the woman that turned into it, and I’m in a mood to finish the job.”

“You’re not going to live that long,” Summers said, matter-of-factly.

“I’m not,” Bliss said, “Unless the unicorn there gives me a healing spell.”

Everyone looked to Quiette Shy.

“I… would’ve pointed,” Bliss said. “Except, funny thing.”

He twitched slightly.

“I… don’t think my arm works too well,” he said. “Someone should really do something about that.”

“That Could Kill You,” Quiette Shy said. “We Know What Magic Does To The Human Body, And-”

“We also know what radiation does, and we bathe people in that shit to deal with cancer,” Bliss said. “They’re dying. I’m dying. And it’s that or being ponified, or the tall one trying to shoot me.”

Lorne looked over at Bliss, scowling.

“Not you! The other one! I saw him reaching for his nine!” Bliss yelled.

“No. I. Wasn’t,” Summers said, in a tone that made it absolutely certain he hadn’t been.

”He fokkin’ was,” Kraber will say in December of that year. “I’d swear on it.”

“Even then?” Yael asks.

Kraber just nods.

“Damn,” Yael says quietly.

“Wasn’t the first time it’d happen, either,” Aegis says.

“Wait. You too?” Kraber asks.

“That’s sick and wrong…” Heliotrope breathes.

Heliotrope looked over to him. It was true, the Last Rite was just something you did to the ponifying. But this man here was, incredibly, not dead. Yet. And Summers’ hands weren’t on the pistol grip of his Beretta.

“I’ll Do It,” Quiette Shy said.

“But.. you saw what magic…” Heliotrope started. “What’s even your plan, anyway?”

“There’s a grenade launcher in the building with shield disruptors loaded,” Kraber Bliss said. “Quiet there is going to heal me. I’m going to take it. I’m going to get in close and break her shield. Then I’m going to saw Reaper’s horn off and stab her in the fokkin’ throat with it.”

“That sounds suicidal even after the part where you get doused in magic,” Lorne said.

“I’m sure that’ll be a big fokkin’ concern to me when I’m getting ponified. Don’t worry,” he said, and-

He took a breath. Failed.

“HNNGURK,” he choked, and stumbled back, hitting a chunk of rubble with his right arm.

“Are you okay-” Heliotrope started.

“Do I fokkin’ look okay, ya dumb-?!” he took a breath. “Right. There’s nobody that’d miss me if I die from cancer, and my parents would probably actively fokking celebrate their racist kontgesig shitstain of a son dying. I’ve nothing to lose if you just fix my body.”

“I’ll Try, Then,” Quiette Shy said. “Just-”

“Oh just fokkin balls, for the love of God JUST FOKKIN’ RIP THIS BAND-AID OFF ALREADY!” Kraber yelled. “Just pull up your skirt and strap that dildo on! A lot of people are going to die if you don’t help me out!”

“If You Say So,” Quiette Shy said, her horn glowing.

Kraber braced himself, feeling a strangely calming warmth as Quiette Shy’s burgundy-colored magic washed over him. It tickled, her aura, and rose goosebumps all down his back and legs, as if he was sitting, comfortable cool and damp beside a running bath or swimming pool.

But pain came soon enough, a strange sense of coldness in his arm, in everywhere that had been hurting, like he had plunged scalded flesh into ice water…

I can’t scream, Kraber reminded himself. No matter what…

His left arm shook, and it was like being stabbed in the hip again… it popped and crackled, shaking, and every muscle in his left arm, every muscle was burning. It was like being flayed with a white-hot knife, but he couldn’t scre-

Heliotrope

“OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, THE PAIN!” Bliss yelled.

“Apparently he could scream,” Heliotrope will add in December.

And not in December nor August will Heliotrope have ever heard any human screaming like this. It sounded like he was being flayed alive. Like his body was a cup full of thick sauce someone had stuck their finger inside and twisted it.

“IT’S UNBEARABLE! FOKKING WHY?!”

Kraber will later say that wow, that is a good analogy, also to never use that mental image about his or anyone’s internal organs ever again.

“Yael,” said Heliotrope. “I’m not leaving someone to die or get ponified.”

“...I want to argue with this, but I really can’t. Just get Haddon out of here.”

She shut off. Heliotrope breathed, looking in horror at Quiette Shy, unable to step forward and put a stop to what she was doing.

“You’re killing him,” Heliotrope breathed, unable to step forward and stop her.

“He Asked,” Quiette Shy said, yet Heliotrope thought she detected a hint of solemnity.

“MY EVERYTHING HURTS! HOLY FOK, IT’S LIKE READING THE VORRH AGAIN!”

Dancing Day

“Okay, pause,” Dancing Day says. “Did… did he actually say that?”

“He absolutely did,” Heliotrope confirms.

“It’s not my fault Brian Catling’s writing made me feel like I was dying inside,” Kraber grumbles. “I mean this time I was dying outside and inside…”

“Sounds like college,” Grayson says.

“... Wait. He exposed yourself to that much magic?” Verity asks. “You’re crazier than I thought.”

But Dancing Day can tell she’s admiring that level of bravery. She considers it a small victory for Kraber to have won even that small a concession.

“Damn that’s gotta hurt,” Aegis says. “I once had to get my leg speed-healed in the field… hurt a lot, but it worked.”

“Did the pain come from the magic hurting you?” Grayson asks.

“Well, yes and no,” Kraber says. “Sure as fok wasn’t giving me cancer, I checked with the PHL. I’m entirely cancer-free!”

“I don’t think magic gives you cancer or anything,” Heliotrope says. “Besides, Geiger counters don’t go off near us…”

“Sorry,” Kraber says. “Old habits. Really, thought, it just doesn’t make sense. Every study I’ve read has found no evidence, but you go up to any random fokkin’ ou with a pony and they act like you have the plague! I feel like I’m surrounded by antivaxxers!”

“Is that why you act like you’re always surrounded by idiots?” Vinyl Scratch asks.

“Ja,” Kraber says bluntly.

Vinyl looks at him, not expecting that. “Well, damn. Sorry.”

“We should just be lucky you don’t act like you did in college wh-” Rivet starts.

“Ohhhhh, no,” Kraber says. “They do not need to know that! But anyway. It’s just that healing is meant to happen over time, at the body’s natural pace, and artificially accelerating that process really fokking hurts.”

“You’re sure?” Aegis asks.

“My broken collarbone, and a damn rib, were both healed in a couple seconds! Reset and respliced, nerves threaded together, splinters and marrow stuffed back where they had come. Of course that’s going to hurt. It was the second or third worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”

“Second?” you ask.

“...You really, really don’t want to know,” Aegis says.

Heliotrope

“What are you doing over there?!” Yael yelled over her earpiece. “It sounds like a dying hyena!”

“Those…” Bliss wheezed, in ragged gasps, “Sound…! Diff… erent. Oh God, this is worse… than Kate’s goth poetry...”

“We need you to get Haddon to that ambulance, as soon as possible!” Yael yelled.

“I’m not leaving someone to die or get ponified,” Heliotrope said.

Yael sighed. “...I want to argue with this, but I really can’t. Just get Haddon out of here.”

“Are you done yet?!” Lorne yelled, looking down to Quiette Shy.

“In A Moment,” she said, and Heliotrope met her gaze. “He’ll need to keep down for a bit, but we’ll have to-”

Kraber

“That stung like a woman with teeth in her beef portal! But I’m okay!”

And indeed he was. Kraber was back on his feet.

There were a number of strange things today. But most importantly, Quiette Shy - aka, one of Heliotrope and Yael Ze’ev’s most trusted lieutenants - had healed him.

‘The world is just on its fokkin’ gat today,’ Kraber thought, slowly taking the weight off the light machine-gun.

“I Thought We’d be Evacuating You Too,” Quiette Shy said.

“I repeat,” Lorne said. “How. Are. You. Standing.”

“Hate,” Kraber said. “And drugs.”

He pulled a morphine needle out of his medical bag, unzipped one glove, and drove it into the nearest vein he could find.

“Lovely, lovely fokkin’ drugs,” he said.

“...Kay,” said the guy whose name Kraber didn’t know at this point, the bla okay you know what fok it I’m not comfortable with talking about my friend this way Lorne, unsettled. “You sure you’re alright? Because I just watched you get thrown out the seventh story of a hospital, and bounce off another building.”

Kraber looked at Lorne, confused. “Huh. So that’s what happened.”

He looked over to Haddon.

“That’s the bawbag that knows?” Kraber asked. “The one that can blow this wide open?”

Quiette Shy nodded.

“They’re coming,” Haddon laughed madly, “My salvation! The apex of my perfection! The-”

“Don’t make it any more tempting than it is to poke some more holes in there,” Kraber said, scowling at Haddon, LMG pointed directly at his crotch. “And you. Heliotrope. Disinfect him with iodine when you get to a safe place. I want him to know what he did.”

“Damn, that’s brutal,” said Lorne. “Not a bad idea.”

“So are we actually doing that or-” Summers started.

“MOVE!” Heliotrope barked, and the four of them, Haddon in tow, rushed away.

“For Equestria! For Canterlot! For Shieldwall!” one of the few surviving PER yelled. This one a unicorn Newfoal. “There’s just one ape between us, it’s not even remotely fair!”

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Kraber said. “IT’S NOT TOO FOKKIN’ FAIR FOR YOU!”

They responded with potion flasks, which shattered against his shield, their contents burning off in a cloud of purple steam, as ineffectual as ice against the sun.

“People?” Kraber asked. “You’re just in time to watch me… practice medicine.”

He roared again, firing the .44 revolver into a Newfoal unicorn’s horn. A lump of alicornal tissue and bone flew into the air, leaving a few rainbow-colored strands of something poking out from the middle of the unicorn’s forehead, and obliterating everything above it, leaving a messy stew of blood and brains splattering the walls.

His next shot went straight through a pegasus mare’s potion bandolier, shattering the glass and punching a massive hole through her abdomen… only for the Newfoal to refuse to die. Instead, the shrieking revenant flew at Kraber, only for him to reverse his grip and pistol whip her with the revolver’s heavy wood-and-rubber grip.

There was an audible crack.

“THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE WITHOUT THE FOKKING BARRIER!” Kraber laughed, and kicked the Newfoal in the face, brains and blood spattering over his boots. “WHY THE FOK WERE WE EVER AFRAID OF YOU!?”

“Because we’ll win…” they all replied in unison, eyes glowing and voices in resonance. “It is commanded that we win…”

He fired again, ripping through the nose of an earth pony that looked to be carrying a mouthful of potion in his cheeks in place of a flask, sending an absurd spray of red, purple, and gray everywhere.

A pegasus Newfoal rushed through the window, a chain of potion bottles in her mouth.

Kraber fired the LMG again, pulping her intestines, leaving one wing flying off into the distance in a wildly improbable, gravity-defying arc.

The pegasus, however, spiraled into the window of a nearby shop across the street from the hospital, ramming facefirst into the wall, oozing blood and perforated with broken glass.

“You mock the Barrier, but cannot answer it…” she gurgled, in synch with a pair of unicorn Newfoals who appeared at Kraber’s flank. “You defy the Sun, but cannot challenge it…”

“NOBODY TELLS ME WHAT TO DO!” Kraber roared, and shot her in the neck. Shey fell, limply, her spine severed.

Their horns roiled with sickly shadows, spells charging, and Kraber fired his revolver again, aiming for the horn of the one closest to the entrance to the hospital.

“You have no recourse, no answer, no future…”

A mare’s head exploded, the unused energy from the spell going wild and shattering the window inwards, pulling a spray of glass shards into the other unicorn’s body. Kraber crossed the distance in seconds, and rammed his boot up into his face.

“Nothing but death… Nothing but our embrace…”

He stamped on its neck. The Newfoal didn’t get up.

“ALRIGHT, WHO THE FOK’S NEXT?!” Kraber roared, sliding a new belt into the MG2021, the old one more-or-less spent. “I LIVED, BITCH!”

Heliotrope

“I LIVED, BITCH!” Bliss called over from the hospital.

That was not something Heliotrope expected.

Lorne stepped towards the driver’s seat, but Summers stopped him.

“Typical,” Lorne grumbled.

“Hey, you’re an insane shot with that thing,” Summers said. “We need that.”

Lorne shrugged, before getting in the passenger seat.

And with that, the ambulance roared off into the night through the ruined streets of Portland, Haddon in the back, Quiette Shy watching over him as he was strapped to the stretcher.

Heliotrope stood on the roof. Tempting as it was to fly behind it, well… that was the thing. Even if pegasi could outrun human vehicles in the best of conditions, there were several problems there.

One: Heliotrope was absolutely not in optimal conditions. Two: An exhausted Heliotrope would be no help to anyone.

The sirens blared as the ambulance tore over broken pavement. This close by, it was deafening.

She squinted through her goggles, feeling the human-made vehicle rattling along on its way out of the city. Towards Gardner’s perimeter.

Towards freedom.

Kraber

“KNOCK, KNOCK!” Kraber yelled, kicking a door open.

Much to his surprise, it flew off the hinges, and fell on an earthpony reaching for a scavenged assault saddle.

Well, whatever. I guess that works.

He stomped down on the door, feeling something crack in the earth pony that’d been caught under it.

He turned to see a pegasus Newfoal mare staring back at him (a ‘normal’ one, not one of Reaper’s corpses) with an absurd, surprised look on her face, flittering in midair, a potion vial in her mouth.

Kraber lowered his revolver and drove his left hand into her mouth, feeling teeth shatter before his fist.

“I thought Reaper broke-!” another ‘natural’ Newfoal yelled. More were coming up the stairs, even as Reaper’s hordes descended from on high…

“Can’t break what’s already broken,” Kraber said, staring down a mass of zombified Newfoals. “Let’s DANCE!”

And Kraber simply waded into the mass of Newfoals, 7.62x51mm rounds cutting through up to five Newfoals at once, sending blood and limbs flying everywhere. A steady stream of viscera flowed down the stairs and splashed against his armor, so much that he could barely see the original forest-green color.

He fired in short bursts that could have been anywhere from 2-5 rounds, keeping the blood pouring.

“IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND!” Kraber yelled, as the 2021 utterly destroyed a Newfoal’s skull.

Then it ran dry.

With barely a thought, Kraber switched to the pipe-bomb launcher and fired, the improvised explosive pinning a zombified human to the floor by their foot….

And exploding.

Kraber only barely outran the wave of heat and concussive force. He shifted the MG2021 onto his back, then unholstered his .44 and a big knife.

“STOP!” screamed a natural-born pony with an assault saddle. “For Celestia’s sake, sto-”

Kraber didn’t even blink. Running full tilt, revolver held in one hand, he snapped so hard to the right that he thought he’d break something, and pulled the trigger.

The Model 29 - the Dirty Harry gun, yes - bucked in his hands, ad the single round punched through his opponent’s face.

A pegasus flew at him. Using his knife hand to rest the pistol, Kraber fired another shot, the round punching clean through the pony’s wing.

They flew towards him. Kraber dodged to the side like he was playing rugby again, and kept up his breakneck sprint for the assault rifle.

Finally, he bodychecked through the doors, feeling their weight against a shoulder that he knew should have been injured. But wasn’t. He shook off the reflexive pain. There was work to do.

They were getting closer! He looked frantically around the cafeteria, and shoved the biggest table he could against the doors.

Heliotrope

Almost predictably, it didn’t go smoothly.

The very, very few remaining pegasi (How many bodies were left?!) swarmed down along the road, passing abandoned cars and bombed-out storefronts.

Suddenly, Heliotrope thought, this seems like it was a very bad idea.

And in that moment, she jumped into the fray, guns blazing, wing blades and wolvers outstretched.

Bullets and bolts whistled past her. But it was like everything was in slow motion around her and Heliotrope was a Mustang Marathon recordholder. She dipped, rolled, and dodged away from the incoming projectiles, hosing the enemy down with 9x32 rounds.

There was something that always happened to Heliotrope in a melee, or when about to hit something. It would be like everything went blank, like there was no up, down, left, or right… And then, there she’d be, right in the middle of it.

Today was no exception. Before she knew it, she hit the swarm of undead and living pegasi like a crashing skyliner, body parts flying, heads drilled through, limbs ripped apart.

With a wordless scream, she then bit down on the mouth trigger barreling towards a Newfoal that looked to be carrying a sack of Potion vials under its belly.

A Newfoal - maybe living, maybe not - curved towards her. And Heliotrope banked to the left, both forelegs outstretched. She raked her hoof-mounted claws through its right wing. It stayed aloft for a fraction of a second…

Before Heliotrope bucked out with her hindlegs, kicking them and sending them careening into the wall of a building. That one, that one had probably been dead.

“Why?!” another Newfoal yelled. “We’re just… like… you!”

“NO YOU ARE NOT!” Heliotrope screamed, and rushed towards it, body checking it with her shoulder. It tumbled backwards, making a hwoof sound as it struggled to stay alight-

Did I knock the wind out of it? Heliotrope wondered, before shooting through it.

It fell to the ground, screaming again.

A bolt tore through the air, only barely scraping Heliotrope’s helmet. She didn’t have time to stare in shock, she just let instinct take over. She dove for the ground, wings spread, aiming for an alleyway. She saw bolts racing towards her, but she didn’t panic. Couldn’t panic.

She glided an inch above the ground. It all raced by her, and for a moment she felt exhilarated. This is amazing!

She heard something crash into a dumpster behind her - another Newfoal.

They’d followed me!?!

She outstretched her left wing, banking in that direction, and bit down the mouth trigger so hard she felt almost as if she’d break the mechanism. The feedback was immediate - three pegasi down, furry undead missiles raking through the pavement and assorted debris that made up the alleyway.

I think I’m good, she thought, flying up above the alleyway, towards the rooftops…

What?!

There were more pegasi - HOW MANY HAD THEY MADE?! - rushing towards the ambulance. Carrying unicorns in either their legs, or in improvised harnesses.

Uh…

Heliotrope was struck by the absurdity of it all for a fraction of a fraction of a second, before realizing: This can’t be good.

In that instant, a beam of pure heat lanced toward her, drilling a perfectly circular hole through the roof of a building that housed several apartments and a laundry.

This was a diversion! Heliotrope thought frantically, beginning evasive maneuvers.

The unicorn passengers fired spell after spell at her, plants growing where they impacted the ground, concrete melting, pavement bubbling, roofs burning or sparking with electricity.

And still she dodged.

“Look Out!” Quiette Shy yelled up, and Heliotrope turned to see the doors to the ambulance opening-

QS, no, why…. This is an awful idea...

-to reveal her projecting a wall of magic over the door, Lorne poking his rifle through it.

That’s not so bad.

Sporadic fire broke out from the rear of the ambulance, spraying down the carrier pegasi. They dodged - but with their payload of unicorns, they were like fridges with wings. Two went down before Heliotrope’s eyes.

“Keep To The Sides, H,” Quiette Shy said. “We’ll Keep Haddon… Safeish.”

“Man, can’t we rough him up a little bit?” Lorne sighed over the radio.

“He Was Hit By Another Ambulance,” Quiette Shy pointed out. “I’m Not Risking It.”

Blasts of magic rattled the ambulance before Heliotrope’s eyes. Another lance of fire shot towards her, and it felt so hot, so dense, that it could have almost been confused for a solid object.

She banked over it, back parallel to the ground, twisted to the left, and sprayed the pegasus. They fell to the ground silently, their charge screaming and trying to force themselves out of the harness, biting through the straps.

It didn’t help. They were only partway out when they hit the ground.

Heliotrope shot at another pegasus. She watched blood spurting out from somewhere - she couldn’t see where - and saw the pegasus carrier dodge down into an alleyway on her left.

Then a bolt of magic shot forwards, scorching the right side of the ambulance and burning off the mirror, peeling the paint in a grotesque mess.

Heliotrope tracked it to see a ragged group of the PER and fake PHL (HOW MANY DID HADDON- no. Forget it. More important things to deal with here) blockading them, taking up the entirety of one street. Blockading themselves behind a set of wrecked cars, carrying massive PER ballistas and rocket launchers.

There was even a unicorn projecting a shield over it.

We can’t ram that! Heliotrope thought frantically.

“SUMMERS!” Heliotrope yelled. “We have to change direction!”

“I see it!” Summers yelled, and the ambulance swerved left, roaring down a hill at a slight incline. The PER bolt flew straight and true, embedding itself in the side of the ambulance-

“WHOA!” Lorne yelled.

“Lorne! QS!” Heliotrope screamed. “ARE YOU-”

“IT RIPPED MY SHIRT!” Lorne yelled.

“WHAT?!” Heliotrope yelled.

“It Punctured The Walls, But…. Neither Of Us Got Hurt!” Quiette Shy yelled.

“That’s a relief,” Heliotrope said, flying above the blockade’s shield, spraying 9x32mm rounds down towards the PER and fake PHL defending it. The other pegasi had tapered off, seemingly - the one remaining carrier was turning away, and it looked like the blockade was…

Wait a minute.

Heliotrope felt a sudden stab of panic.

Oh no.

“Summers!” she yelled, following the ambulance. “Something’s wrong!”

Kraber

He was in the cafeteria now. The place where Sylvia should have died. Tanaka, Caduceus, the survivors, they were nowhere to be seen. He hoped they’d gotten out alright.

It was child’s play to find where Sylvia’s body had been. He desperately tried not to look at the bloodstains near the coffee machine, and the skin that looked stuck to the floor, melted on, even. It was caught between equine and human, with tan fur growing out and random points in the viscera.

He failed. Oh, God, had he failed...

That was an eye on the floor. Somewhere between Equestrian and human, not quite the glassy unnatural amber-red of the pony, not quite the brownish eye he remembered Sylvia having. It resembled a double-yolked egg, two irises bulging from a single orb.

He stepped on it, crushing human and pony alike… no, no - crushing the monsters in between, neither one nor the other… Newfoals squashed beneath his boots.

Her wallet was lying on the floor. It was stuffed with photos where once there had been money and credit cards. He snatched one out at random - Sylvia standing between two other women (one smiling sadly, the other laughing, with a grin aimed at the sad one. He knew that one - the smile of somebody telling you to lighten up and enjoy yourself), while in the background several ponies played blackjack. A mare, her mane a vibrant purple, was holding onto the laughing human women, pegasus wings hugging on tight. Caduceus was there too, photo-bombing the picture, an empty shotglass hanging on her horn...

‘Mercy and Jackie, Cady and Sylvie. And Rio - poor Rio. Vegas. August, 2018. Friends forever...’ said a scribble on the back. He turned it over again, peering back into the past, gazing back before the war. Humans and ponies enjoying each other’s company, smiling and laughing…

You kontgesig, he told himself. He snarled and grabbed the picture, wanting to rip it… but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, to shred a preserved scrap of innocence. There was precious little of it left, nowadays...

Instead he stuffed it back into the wallet, beside the other treasured photos, zipped that into an empty pouch on his armor, and continued to loot through the tattered remnants of a life. A few rations, some medical supplies… spare magazines for that 10mm, which he stuffed into his own backpack. And even a belt with more disruptor grenades…

The disconnect between those artifacts of the world before the war and the weaponry in there was almost heartbreaking. He’d known people like Sylvia at college back in Boston - not that he personally knew her, that would have been silly - and he’d seen them get broken. All of them, in that picture… he doubted they’d ever expected war. To have to hold a gun. He fokking well hadn’t.

I think we could’ve been friends, he thought. Fok. And here I am. Beating the shit out of someone I would’ve liked before the war. Someone with a life. Family. Friends.

And I can’t truly say I’m much better.

And then he realized.

Shit.

The gun’s not here.

At least the grenades are, though! That’s something! He thought. Alright. I need-

He called in Caduceus.

“Caduceus?!” he yelled. “I…. I fokked up. I have the grenades, but no launcher. Where are you, where’s Julia-”

“I’m sorry!” Caduceus yelled. “I took the rifle! We can’t get to you.”

“That’s just like you, isn’t it?” Kraber asked. “You don’t care when people like us die, only your friends. No matter how low they’ve sunk, how low we’ve all fokking-”

There was a crash.

The sound of twisting metal and shattering glass.

The doors had exploded inwards.

Kraber dove behind a support beam. There, trotting into the cafeteria, without a care in the world, was Reaper.

“No, wait!” Caduceus protested. “I - we have -”

“Bliss,” Julia said, “We have a prisoner. We have wounded. I’m sorry, but we can’t risk it.”
“I guess I can’t argue with that. Oh, Reaper’s here, now,” Kraber said, “It’s too late.”

He turned to look the fokkin’ abomination of nature in the eyes.

“And hey. I’m sorry for that, Caduceus,” Kraber said. “We’ve all lost someone. And you’re about to lose me.”

“Bliss, no-” Julia pleaded.

He hung up.

Heliotrope

The pegasus that’d flown left - the one Heliotrope thought was dead - came flying out of an alleyway. Heading towards the ambulance. Carrying a unicorn with a lightly glowing horn.

“NO!” Heliotrope screamed in horror, rushing towards the ambulance, spraying down towards it.

“Heliotrope, What The Ta-” Quiette Shy started.

“There’s a pegasus heading for us!” Heliotrope yelled. “Summers, anyone, we have t-”

That was all she got out before the unicorn’s horn flashed. The ground under the ambulance exploded, and it flew up onto the air tail over teakettle, end over end, front bumper spinning above the ground.

“QUIETTE SHY!” Heliotrope screamed at the top of her lungs. “NO!”

Her friend. The unicorn that’d taught her nearly everything she knew. The pony that had been her rock, her anchor, the one she’d always been able to cling alongside no matter how strange Earth seemed, was almost certainly going to die.

There was one moment where its doors opened down, about six meters above the ground.

Lorne, Haddon, and Quiette Shy were flung, screaming, from the rear of the ambulance. A red bubble had popped into existence around them - absolutely one of Quiette Shy’s shields.

No no no no no no

It bounced on the ground.

Heliotrope rushed towards them, Haddon’s safety a non-issue as she rushed towards a pony who was a friend, no, a partner, no, security, safety, something even more than friendship.

Heliotrope watched the three of them, trapped in the bubble, tumbling along the street. The three of them rammed against each other and against the walls like ball bearings in a tin can.

No no no no no

she watched in horror as the ambulance crashed to the ground, metal compacting and collapsing into itself. She heard Summers screaming at the top of his lungs, trapped in the mass of twisted metal that was now the ambulance.

And somewhere at the end of the street, halfway to the warehouses and what Heliotrope’s maps told her was a Whole Foods, Lorne and Quiette Shy lay sprawled in the street.

Are they okay?! She asked herself, fluttering down towards Quiette Shy. She placed one hoof on the white and blonde unicorn’s throat. Good. Good good good.

A PULSE!

She breathed a sigh of relief. Quiette Shy was fine. Everything was going to be-

She looked over to Lorne, who was moaning lightly, one hand to his temples.

Oh.

I probably should’ve done something about that. Well, he’s… definitely alive…. And not bleeding… the medics can deal with that, I guess?

“Is…. is the prisoner-” Lorne started.

FUMP

Haddon’s stretcher fell facedown on the pavement. Blood oozed from between his skull and the pavement.

“So is that a no?” Lorne asked, slurring his words slightly.

“FREEDOM!” Haddon screamed, voice absurdly warped by his position on the ground, his broken nose, and the clear pain in his voice. He struggled, in obvious pain.

“...WHY?!” Heliotrope yelled. “Why do you even want this?!”

And it was in the second that she asked, that Haddon took a crossbow bolt to the arm. He screamed in something indistinguishable from pain or joy, his body twisting and practically bubbling under the stretcher.

“FINALLY!” Haddon laughed, a huge smile on what had once been his face, fur bursting from under his skin. Limbs that were somewhere between arms, legs, and tentacles slipped past his restraints like folded paper under closed doors. A horn forced its way through his forehead, skin splitting and peeling off around it to reveal yellowish fur the same color as Haddon’s hair.

And something that had once been Garrett Haddon crawled out from under the stretcher, a smile on its face. A well-built yellowish unicorn with a brown mane streaked with orange.

“I’m… finally… alive!” the thing that had been Haddon cried, a beatific smile on its face.

Haddon was gone.

She’d failed. They’d failed.

“Yael!” Heliotrope yelled. “We lost… we lost Haddon!”

Kraber

“It’s over, Bliss,” Reaper said. “You’ve pushed your lackeys away. All crimes are forgiven once you’re ponified, but for you? We’re going to make an exception. You’re going to be judged for everything you’ve done. Mass murder of ponies and equestrian citizens. Subversion. And I don’t know, possibly littering. We’re going to make you do the sickest, most vile things we can, and we’re going to make you enjoy them.”

She smiled.

“How harmonious,” she said. And as she rushed at him, she began to sing. “ Don’t fear the reaper…”

He fired, and she easily sidestepped the furious shot. As more of her undead puppets rushed to dogpile Kraber, she watched on with laughter in her eyes, and that accursed song on her lips.

“You… you killed all of them…” the first Newfoal to reach him whispered in Reaper’s voice, even as Reaper herself kept singing.

Kraber said nothing and shot the Newfoal in the face with the revolver. Another thirty seconds had dropped everything but Reaper herself, and slathered him in blood.

“Why won’t you take the potion?!” Reaper screamed in glee, as Kraber’s bullets smashed against her shield.

Kraber briefly considered saying something witty, but fok it, it was a Newfoal. Nothing any man or woman could say to them that’d make them listen.

He held his ground, even as Reaper’s shotguns smashed against his shield. Need… more… fokking… time…

It was as if everything was in slow motion. Her shotgun shells crawled through the air, bouncing off, purple smoke hissing off the places where it impacted him.

But they were coming closer and closer with each volley, whereas his thundering responses only seemed to crawl towards the Newfoal beast by millimeters...

Yael

The zombies coming towards their barrier. Piling against a magic shield Yael, her forces, the National Guard, spraying bullets into the charging horde.

It wasn’t working. Everyone that had died - PER, PHL, probably even HLF - was swarming their position. Guns fired wildly towards them.

Oscar cut through it like a cleaver through raw meat. He rushed from side to side, nailing into the zombies with his Penetrator in one hand, a machete from God-knew-where in the other.

He roared wordlessly.

“This guy is a machine!” Smoky breathed, staring in awe as Oscar shouldered such a heavy burden.

Smoky himself stood behind a wrecked car and a newspaper dispenser, firing wildly.

“Heliotrope!” Yael screamed into her comms. “What is your situation, we-”

And then, through heavy interference, she heard it.

“Yael!” Heliotrope yelled. “We lost… we lost Haddon!”

“...shit,” Yael said, simply.

As soon as that syllable escaped her mouth, it finally hit her: We've lost everything. Bliss is going to die. We're going to die. It's all over. I'm never going to find out how deep the PER go here, and I'm going to end up happy with it, as one of those things, begging for a merciful death that will never come, no no no stop, can't think of it, mustn't think of it-

She felt herself breathing faster. More raggedly.

‘No,’ Yael thought. ‘I refuse to give up here!’

“There’s so many!” someone screamed. Yael couldn’t place who. “We’re gonna, we’re gonna-”

They were cut off with the telltale ‘thwang’ of a crossbow, before descending into the mad laughter of a Newfoal.

Zhang, clearly in pain from her back wound, screamed in agony as she took another round through a weak spot in her leg’s armor, her shield spent. She fell to the ground, clutching the bloody remains of her leg.

“NO!” a National Guard man yelled, running towards her, ready to-

A potion crossbow punched through his arm. He fell to the ground, twitching, screaming, his body shifting in unnatural ways.

Smoky turned, and unleashed a short, controlled burst of 5.56 rounds into the National Guard man’s face.

And then, against all odds, he got back up.

“Kill me,” he whispered through lacerated lungs. “KILL ME RIGHT NOW! It hurts, it hurts, everything HURTS! I CAN’T!”

He staggered towards Zhang, ripping the bolt that had halfway ponified him out of his arm, stalking towards her.

“No,” Zhang moaned. “No, no, no, no, fucking no…”

Bro shot him in both knees with that ridiculous FAL he’d taken.

But that didn’t stop the thing that was once a National Guard. He fell to the ground, and began crawling towards Yael.

A sniper round from Eva’s hiding place in who-knew-where practically ripped him apart, lengthwise. Yael didn’t want to remember the sounds she’d swear he made after it happened.

“There’s so many targets!” Eva screamed. “I can punch through eight, but there’s still more!”

“Keep shooting!” Yael yelled back. “Bliss, Heliotrope, they’ve got to come through for us!”

“It’s just one man,” Eva said. “We’re fucked, Lieutenant. I hope you know that.”

Yael didn’t answer. Partly because she didn’t know how, but also because there was a pegasus rushing at her with a big, rusty axe.

“Heliotrope,” Yael said into her comms. “It’s been an honor. I know it won’t be the same without me or Oscar, but… you, Quiette Shy, just… live your lives as best you can. And don’t forget us.”

Heliotrope

“What do we do with the other humans?” a PER human asked, crossbow in hands. Lorne looked dazed, struggling to his feet.

“They’re PHL, and Shieldwall didn’t say we had to bring ‘em in,” said a PER pony, assault saddles at the ready. “I figure we can do what we want.”

“Heliotrope,” Yael said, “It’s been an honor. I know it won’t be the same without me or Oscar, but... you, Quiette Shy, just… live your lives as best you can. And don’t forget us.”

“NO!” Heliotrope screamed, firing 9x32mm rounds towards the PER. She stole a glance at Lorne and Quiette Shy, who - perhaps concussed - were staggering to their feet and hooves. At the ambulance that held what probably remained of Summers, pulped and pasted by the wreck.

Wait.

There he was, crawling out the windshield, a cut on his head, one eye swollen shut.

‘Holy blazes. We’re alive! We’re all alive!’

It was incredible. They’d all survived the crash! Especially Quiette Shy!

“You May Have Destroyed This City,” Quiette Shy said. “Brutalized Us. Converted Us. Betrayed Us. But-”

The volume on her electronic voice box turned up, higher than Heliotrope knew it could go.

“LIKE HELL ARE YOU TAKING US.”

A shield materialized in front of the four of them. There were the PER – of which Heliotrope counted eight, including one unicorn other than the Newfoal that had once been Haddon.

“Look at me,” the unicorn formerly known as Haddon said, laughing, tittering like a schoolboy.

‘Or like a dead person,’ Heliotrope thought, even if that idea made absolutely no sense.

Ice gathered around the Haddon-pony.

“I’m something new. Something beautiful.”

“The hell you are,” Summers said.

“You know you’re gonna die, right?” the Haddon-thing asked, smirking, laughing slightly. “We’re holding all the cards here.”

And in that moment, Heliotrope heard helicopters.

“Hear that?” the thing that had been Haddon asked. “More reinforcements. Face it, you lose.”

Kraber

Had Reaper’s shield gotten tougher? It was still going down at an almost glacial rate.

‘I’m not going to lose!’ Kraber thought. ‘Not to Celestia, not to Lovikov, and certainly not to this fokking thing!’

And just before Kraber could lose hope, the walls exploded outwards and there was Caduceus, standing between some broken pipes.

“But how–” he asked.

“Come to join me?” Reaper asked, a huge smile on her face. “Come on, you missed me so much. You didn’t even mind what I did to–”

Caduceus’ horn glowed, and Reaper’s head rocked back as if she’d been slapped. She stared at Caduceus, open-mouthed.

“You… you hit me,” she said, surprised. “Even… when my human-self’s father hit her, he–”

“Sylvia,” Caduceus said, “has been dead for a long time now. The woman that’d do anything for people she loved, the nurse that worked thirty-two hours? The one I had to drug to make her sleep?”

“You wha-?!” Reaper started.

“Gone,” Caduceus finished. “And all I have is left is you.”

Kraber pushed himself back against the wall, and lifted himself up.

“Neither of us are anything special, Reaper,” said Caduceus. “We didn’t come to Earth to bring peace or love… I wish I could say I did, but… I’m just a messed-up girl looking for her own peace of mind. But you… You’re nothing but a… a sword in their mouth!”

Caduceus yelled, and suddenly, everything was tinted green. A stream of energy from her horn was feeding into Kraber’s shield, strengthening it.

“Here!” She magically tossed him a Kalashnikov with an underbarrel 40mm launcher, the rifle hazed in the green of her aura. “Come and get your birthday present!”

Heliotrope

‘Oh no,’ Heliotrope had thought. ‘More PER. It’s–’

And then, in that moment, an M60 cut through a PER man like a weird sideways guillotine, uneven halves of his body falling to the ground in bloody heaps.

“Hey, Colonel!” someone called. Probably the gunner. “I guess we are the support!”

“That we are, Vango!” yelled the unmistakable voice of Colonel Robert Gardner, who stood by the open door of a blackhawk helicopter, firing his Remington ACR down towards the PER. “That! We! ARE!”

‘What took you so long?!’ part of Heliotrope thought.

“Run!” a PER woman yelled, and they rushed towards an alleyway.

Heliotrope, Lorne, Quiette Shy, and Summers followed, emboldened. Summers screamed at the top of his lungs, firing his rifle full-blast towards the alleyway…

Kraber

“Caduceus!” Reaper yelled in recognition. “Why are you helping this human?! He’ll kill us both!”

“No, just you,” Caduceus said. “But you were never alive to begin with…”

“But… we’re both ponies…!” Reaper screamed, her forever-grin strained for the first time.

“I’ve lived my whole life in Equestria. Whatever you are now, you aren’t my friend, and you’re barely a pony!” Caduceus yelled, before turning to face the man she knew by the name ‘Ivan Bliss’.

She squeezed her eyes shut in concentration. When she opened them, her eyes blazed green.

Reaper’s shield was ablaze with green fire, small baseball-sized explosions radiating out from where Kraber’s 40mm grenades hit. And then Caduceus was at his side, Sylvia’s rifle held in her TK, shaking and shuddering as the same magical energies contained within the disruptor-grenades bound to the bullets.

They were kneeling, both of them. Firing one round at a time like old-fashioned troops armed with muzzleloaders.

The result was a magical firestorm as thaum fought thaum. And then, before their eyes, Reapers shield flickered, cracked, and finally shattered like a glass window.

She seemed frozen in shock as Kraber lined up for the kill, one grenade left.

“No,” Caduceus said. “Let me end it. I covered for her time after time, this is my responsibility.”

“But… we were friends,” Reaper whispered.

“Sylvia,” Caduceus said. “If there’s any of you left in there… Goodbye.”

She squeezed the trigger.

What happened was underwhelming compared to what both of them had expected.

“Fok!”

Instead of a stream of 5.56 rounds, only a single bullet struck Reaper, glancing off her horn. Her head snapped back…

“FOK!”

When the mare’s gaze tipped back forward, her grin had been replaced by a snarl.

And with that, disaster struck. A wave of pure concussive force shot out from Reaper’s horn, and Kraber and Caduceus were both flung back against the wall of the cafeteria. The kalashnikov flew out of Kraber’s grip, bouncing harmlessly against an overturned table.

“I can’t end it like this, BETRAYER!” Reaper screamed, gathering red energy around her horn.

“WILL YOU JUST FOKKING DIE ALREADY?!” Kraber yelled, whipping out his revolver.

His rifle might be out, but her shield was done and he could still fight. Sinking easily into a two-hand grip, Kraber flowed through the action of aiming like flowing silk, and firing all six rounds in what felt like the space of half a second. The resulting sound was not a single bang, but more akin to a peal of thunder.

The .44 rounds punched through Reaper’s horn and her neck, and she fell, coughing blood.

He reloaded, snapped the cylinder shut, and fired them all off once more, repeating until he swore he could see a ridge of bone just above her eye.

One final lucky shot managed to sever her horn, and finally, blessedly, she fell.

Quiette Shy

When they were in the alleyway, they only saw one person left. A human with a wounded leg, blood oozing into the pavement.

“You… you…” the human wheezed. “You just… left me to…”

“Got him!” Summers crowed.

“Join The Club,” Quiette Shy said. She saw rage on Heliotrope and Summers’ faces, as they searched the alleyway for any signs. “They Must Have Teleported.”

“That’s right,” the human wheezed. “They… my leg… they didn’t take me with them…”

All honesty, Quiette Shy didn’t mind that they’d slipped from their… ‘Horn? Hooves? No, fingers totally work better here,’ she thought. ‘Fingers.’

The sun was coming up, now. Quiette Shy looked at their prisoner, and sighed audibly.

“The zombies are falling apart!” Yael called over QS’s earpiece. “I think… I think that crazy idiot Bliss actually won!”

“Holy shit,” Heliotrope breathed.

She sounded like she didn’t quite believe it. Quiette Shy didn’t.

“So,” Lorne said, looking over the alleyway. At the wounded PER man slumped against a wall, clutching his wounded leg. “I… I think that means we’re finally done.”

“Looks like,” Summers said, clutching his side.

‘He should get that looked at,’ Quiette Shy thought.

Finally. After so long, after puzzling out the same things, after struggling to deal with everything thrown at her by Reaper and these PER and the HLF and That Ship, whatever that bucking weird ship was, it all felt like it was finally over.

It wasn’t, of course.

Quiette Shy knew that. There were still people that needed to answer for this. People that’d make them try to answer for it.

‘PHL Command is going to have Gardner’s balls in a vice,’ Quiette Shy thought. I am not going to want to be him, or Yael, or even Heliotrope when the brass come knocking. Also, I am not looking forward to seeing the memes about the Ship. They’re going to be awful.’

But for now, she felt like she could finally relax.

After all this time.

Kraber

Kraber moved forward, cautious.

He’d seen this creature stand up from so much already, he had to be sure…

“Cold…” he heard Reaper whisper, before she made a broken, whimpering noise. “So cold….” the creature repeated, blood leaking down from her horn’s stump. “Cold… everywhere…”

Kraber reloaded, and stared down at her, stone-faced, about to pull the trigger.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I wanted this… and didn’t… It’s all my fault. I can’t… she was in my head… Lady Cadance… called itself... my guardian angel. It was a monster and I invited it in... tore at me, made me want… things… love things.”

She shuddered, vomiting black blood, and then looked back up at him with vivid purple eyes.

“Wasn’t it magnificent, though…”

“There won’t be any more like you…” Kraber responded. “None of these abominations…”

“Oh, there will,” Reaper giggled. “Someday, sometime, another me, another fragment of Her will hit the right configuration, bottle the same champagne… You didn’t even know I was here, I and my sisters are here and will forever be inside every Newfoal… we whisper and talk and plan… this thing, this glorious Reaper, is the potential inside every soul blessed by the serum... and when another sister stumbles on it, we’ll have… Victory.”

Kraber shuddered, absolutely sure that she was staring at him. No, into him.

He shot Reaper in the eye, and the light that radiated out from around her horn dimmed. The body stirred, and then it was a human eye, desperate and pleading. Sylvia’s eye.

“I… I thought… It’s such an easy thing to say you hate something… so easy to hate… I can’t believe I went the easy way… I thought I knew… I wish I knew something…. anything. Shoot me, end all of this!”

“Okay,” Kraber said, raising his revolver.

“Just promise me.“

“What?”

“Don’t lose your way.”

“I won’t,” Kraber said.

“How… sublime…” she whispered, blood burbling up from between her lips.

“Goodbye, Sylvia.”

He fired his revolver for the last time.

END OF EPISODE ONE

Author's Notes:

I LIVED BITCH

Sorry it took so long, guys!

But it's finally here! Some of you may have noticed that this chapter took awhile. And the reason is, well... as much as Philistine is my favorite chapter, it needed a complete overhaul to fit with Yael being in Portland. Then the overhaul needed an overhaul. And I overhauled that overhaul. And Vox overhauled that overhaul. Then I had to cut some of Vox's edits out (I still love you though) to keep this story feeling me.

I wanted a finale (to episode 1) that was as ME as possible. That was more me than the entire first 11 chapters of classic Light were. And, y'know... I think it worked.

It was pretty time-consuming. I'm at nearly 45k words, after all! It didn't help that I was playing a lot of Warframe and Spacelords at the time, so there was a lot of time I wasn't spending on this.

Oh, yeah! I probably should've mentioned this, but this is meant to be the finale to Episode 1. I was going to have an epilogue chapter, but that was getting to be more than 10k words, and I was all "Does literally anyone want a 10,000 word chapter featuring a daring escape immediately after this?"

A dood gotta pace themselves, after all. Pacing was one of the classicsverse's biggest problems, but to call it a problem implies that it existed in the first place.

And so: Grand Finale to episode 1!

The next episode will be a bit more chill, honestly. More intrigue, more wandering, less gore... it's meant to be sort of a breather episode before things get heavy again.