Luna could hardly believe what she was hearing. She had left Sonata on her own for an hour at most, and yet the siren had somehow convinced the security officers at the city entrance to let her outside, given those on the other side of the bridge the slip, and then apparently just disappeared entirely.

“I know you said that the Dazzlings were dangerous, but how much of a threat is Sonata likely to be on her own?” Harkness asked.

“Without her magic or the other Dazzlings, probably not very, but that’s not the point,” Luna replied, keeping most of the sharpness out of her tone. “Either she didn’t listen or she didn’t understand when we were told how dangerous the wasteland is, so right now I’d say she’s more of a danger to herself than others. We need to find her.”

Harkness sighed and shook his head. “That’s going to be easier said than done. Between our bigger population, the changes around the city, and the recent change in the Council itself, I don’t have any officers to spare for a search party. I can ask the Brotherhood or the Enclave for help, but I’m fairly sure they’re in the same boat. Pun not intended.”

Before Luna could do anything more than throw him an annoyed glare, the door opened and a security officer rushed in. “Chief, one of the guys checked around the edge of the cleared lot and found faint footprints in the trail that the Wanderer and Fawkes left through the snow. It looks like Miss Dusk followed them into the metro system.”

“The metro? Why the hell would she go down there?” Harkness wondered aloud.

“There could be any number of reasons, but at least now we know where she is so we can send someone to get her,” Luna added with a pointed look at the Chief.

“It’s not that simple,” Harkness insisted, clearly annoyed. “The tunnels beneath D.C. are a goddamned maze. No-one has really been down there since Liberty Prime opened up a path topside, so we don’t even know how dangerous they are these days. I can’t spare a team to go searching through the metro any more than I can spare one to go picking through the surface ruins.” Luna opened her mouth to argue, but he quickly cut her off, “I’m sorry, I understand how frustrating this is, but I can’t offer what I don’t have. The Council can offer a reward for any citizens who are willing to search for Miss Dusk, that’s the best we can do right now.”

Luna balled her hands into fists, hating what Harkness was saying but unable to counter it. Seeing that she was done arguing, he turned and ordered his subordinate to call the Councilors to an emergency meeting, but Luna wasn’t finished yet. “What if I go and look for her?”

“You what?” Harkness glanced back at her in surprise.

“I’ll look for Sonata,” Luna repeated. “She’s my responsibility, and I’ve been shown how to use the assault rifle that Adam gave me. Trixie will be safe here, or I can ask the Enclave to take her in, so there’s no reason that I can’t go and look for Sonata myself.”

“You don’t have any idea of what you might be facing out there,” Harkness told her.

“Neither does Sonata, the difference is that I have a gun,” Luna countered, sounding far more confident than she felt.

Harkness gave her a hard look, but she matched his glare until finally he sighed and turned to his subordinate. “Go and see if Seagrave has anything useful he can spare for her, we’ll stick it on the Council budget, then fetch a set of medium-size combat armor and meet me at the entrance.” He looked back at Luna as the officer hurried away. “I can’t spare a team, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting you go down there in nothing but a winter coat.”

“Thank you,” Luna said gratefully.

“Don’t thank me for letting you try to get yourself killed.” Harkness crossed his arms and jerked his chin towards the door. “Get your gun and anything else you need, then meet me at the entrance.

Luna nodded and swept out of the room without another word. She strode along the corridors purposefully, but her head was a mess as she tried not to think about how monumentally stupid she was about to be. Luna could practically hear Celestia chiding her yet again for being too reckless. With an annoyed huff, she shoved the useless thoughts to the back of her mind and picked up the pace.

It didn’t take long for Luna to reach the large suite that her, Trixie and Sonata had been sharing on the Enclave’s coin. Trixie looked up from her desk as Luna walked in. “Did they find her?

“No, she left the city. They think she went into the nearby metro system.” Luna stepped over to her wardrobe and threw it open. As she quickly threw on her winter gear, she added, “The security team doesn’t have anyone to spare, so I’m going to go and look for her.”

“Wait, you’re going outside?!” Trixie exclaimed loudly.

Luna finished zipping up her winter coat and grabbed her assault rifle before closing the wardrobe and turning to face Trixie. It was only then that she saw the disassembled article on her student’s desk. “Why do you have a firework?”

“I was just fiddling with the weight distribution, it’s nothing,” Trixie replied quickly.

“It’s hardly nothing, Miss Lulamoon!” Luna insisted, bringing out her Vice-Principal voice. “You shouldn’t be messing around with fireworks, you could ge-”

“Seriously?! You’re literally holding a gun!” Trixie shot back.

Having her own unintentional hypocrisy thrown at her felt like a slap in the face to Luna. “It’s not the same,” she said firmly once she’d collected herself. “Sonata needs help, and I’m the only one here at the moment who can do anything about it. I know she’s done some horrible things in the past, but even she doesn’t deser-”

She was interrupted by a sudden sharp knock at the door. “Vice-Principal, are you in there?” Harkness called loudly. Luna frowned and opened the door. She was about to ask why he was in such a hurry, but one look at his grim expression made the words stick in her throat. “We’ve just got word from one of the Brotherhood of Steel outposts,” he said evenly. “I’ve got some bad news.”

Sonata stared in fear and awe at the literal battlefield that stretched out before her. A sprawling maze of trenches, barricades, gun emplacements, and huge mounds of rubble spread out in all directions, bordered by tightly-packed squat buildings. The ever-present snow had been thoroughly churned up by combat, marred by mud, soot and, in many places, blood.

“I’m tellin’ you, I ‘eard somethin’,” a gravelly voice insisted.

Sonata panicked for a second, then dove behind a suitable pile of rubble and peeked through a crack. The hulking beasts that lumbered into view a second later made her profoundly glad that she was hidden. They resembled Fawkes, if a little shorter, but where Fawkes was clean and annoyingly articulate, these two were covered in all sorts of filth and clearly even dumber than Aria. Both were also carrying sledgehammers that were liberally splattered with blood. Super Mutants.

“Where is it, then?” One of them asked loudly.

The other sniffed and looked around. “I don’ know. That’s why we’s lookin’.”

As the two slowly got closer, Sonata decided that she should probably slip away before they discovered her hiding place. Too late, she heard heavy footsteps approaching from behind, and she yelped in fear and surprise as something clamped her arms to her sides and lifted her into the air. “I found a Rainboom! Quick, grab her sparkly!”

The two Super Mutants looked up and whooped at the sight of Sonata kicking and struggling. She panicked as the two charged at her, but to her surprise they dropped their hammers and pawed roughly at her neck and chest. “Hey, let me go! Bad touch!”

“She doesn’t ‘ave a sparkly?” One of the Mutants noted curiously.

“Don’ be stupid, Rainbooms have sparklies!” The one holding Sonata insisted. He shook her like a ragdoll. “You! Rainboom! Where’s your sparkly?”

Between being shaken and having her ribs crushed in the Mutant’s grip, Sonata could barely even breathe, let alone talk.

“Hang on, ‘old her still.” As the Mutant holding her obliged, one of the others reached up and casually ripped her shirt open. Ignoring her blush and furious spluttering, the creep stared intently at her chest, then shook his head. “No sparkly. What now?”

“Shephard wants Rainbooms, sparkly or not.” Sonata grunted in pain as she was slung over the Super Mutant’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Back to camp!”

The other two Super Mutants cackled and jeered as the trio set off across the warzone. They stuck to the edge, striding along in the shadow of the buildings instead of entering the trenches. Sonata tried to shift so she could stab her captor with her screwdriver, but she was being jostled so badly that she ended up dropping it.

“Look, we caught a Rainboom!” Sonata tried to look around as the Super Mutant shouted, but all she got was a vague glimpse of metal barricades and more Mutants, coupled with a vile stench that was somehow worse than the metro tunnels had been. All of a sudden, the Mutant carrying her stopped and dumped her unceremoniously on the floor. “Stay!” He barked before turning to talk to the others.

Sonata wanted very much to disobey, but for the moment she just rolled onto her knees, hissing as new cuts and bruises made their presence felt. She raised her head to get her bearings, only to freeze in abject horror at the sight of her surroundings.

Several large nets had been piled up and hung from the wall of one building. Every single one of them was packed with bloody chunks of meat, while crimson gore dripped from them and formed a wide puddle on the floor. Tearing her gaze away from the horrific sight, Sonata saw that they were all in a small alley between two buildings, with metal barricades at the entrance to fortify it a little. In the corner, a campfire built from broken wood and old car tires was putting off billowing clouds of noxious smoke.

The heavy crunch of hobnailed boots warned Sonata that she was being approached, and she looked up to see a heavily-armored Super Mutant stomping towards her. It wore thick leather headgear and had a mean-looking assault rifle clutched in one meaty fist. It was clear that this was some sort of leader among the Mutants. She cowered as the Mutant leaned over her. “Rainboom. Where sparkly?” It demanded.

“W-what sparkly?” Sonata stammered. She assumed that it meant her new crystal, but there was no way she was giving that up so easily.

“Sparkly! Like other Rainboom!” The Mutant pressed. It patted its collarbone as if that was supposed to mean something. “Neck sparkly that make magic!”

Sonata gave him a perplexed stare. “My siren amulet? That broke ages ago.”

“Broke?” The Mutant kicked a loose rock in annoyance and rounded on the others. “Go find Behemoth! Tell it take Rainboom back home to Shephard! Gently!” A handful of Super Mutants immediately ran off to find whatever a ‘Behemoth’ was. “Rest of you, don’t let Rainboom escape! I go back to Capitol Building.” The leader gave Sonata a disgusted look before stomping off again, leaving three Mutants behind to keep an eye on her.

As soon as their leader left, the Super Mutants casually went about their business. Two of them took up positions by the barricades, while the third tossed his sledgehammer down and started fiddling with a coil of rope tied to his waist.

Sonata felt a shiver down her spine as she guessed what the rope was for. The fact that she had been taken to a second location was bad enough, she could not let herself be tied up as well. She had to escape, no matter how dangerous it was. Sonata quietly gathered her feet beneath herself, then, just as the Super Mutant unhooked the rope from his belt, she launched herself into a sprint. The Mutant tried to grab her as she ran past, but she managed to duck under his clumsy paw and dart between the other two before they could react.

Guttural threats chased after her, but Sonata ignored them and just kept on running straight. The remains of concrete walls rose up ahead of her, too tall to climb over, but there was one point where the surrounding dirt was piled up just enough that she might be able to vault over.

It was a close call. Sonata sprinted up the makeshift ramp and jumped at the last second, pushing off the top of the wall with her hands just to give herself a little extra boost. On the other side, Sonata found herself at the top of another slope with a sandbag wall at the top. Another Super Mutant was standing behind them, holding what she realized with a terrified jolt could only be a rocket launcher.

“Rainboom!” Sonata tried to turn aside as the Mutant raised its weapon, but she slipped and fell on the filthy snow. She rolled down the embankment, each bump bringing more pain until, with an awful lurch in her stomach, she fell off some sort of edge. The world spun as Sonata struck something solid and crashed painfully to the ground. An earth-shattering explosion rent the air less than a heartbeat later, followed by a deluge of dirt and debris.

A high-pitched ringing filled the air, though it swiftly faded away leaving behind only a strangely rhythmic thumping sound. It took Sonata a few seconds to realize that she was hearing her own heartbeat. She groaned and cracked her eyes open, then rolled onto her side. A quick glance revealed that she had managed to fall into a trench. A half-collapsed sandbag wall next to her was probably what initially broke her fall.

Adrenaline surged as she heard Super Mutants arguing above, and Sonata quickly pressed herself against the sandbags. There was some sort of bunker nearby, with its door slightly ajar, but before Sonata could dive into it something huge dropped into the trench, missing her by inches.

“Find the Rainboom!” The Super Mutant commanded, unaware of the siren cowering right behind him. A handful of other Mutants loudly agreed as he slammed the door of the bunker open and barged inside.

Sonata warily pushed herself to her knees and looked around. She couldn’t see any Super Mutants, but they were certainly out there somewhere in or around the trench. Even Sonata could tell that wandering aimlessly without knowing where they were was a recipe for disaster. Then again, sitting around and waiting for one of them to come back and find her wasn’t an option either. She was going to have to take a risk.

Glancing around once more to make sure the coast was clear, and fervently hoping that none of the Mutants would come back too quickly, Sonata ducked back behind the sandbags and slipped two pouches from her pockets. One contained her newly acquired crystal, the other her broken amulet. With a shiver of anticipation, she pulled out her new crystal, then tipped out a couple of shards of amulet.

The shards immediately flew from Sonata’s hand and joined with the crystal. Just as before, the shards merged into it, with new veins of ruby spreading through it as it increased in size. Once the shards had been fully absorbed, she tipped out a few more and watched as the process repeated. It didn’t take long before every scrap of the old amulet had been absorbed, leaving only the little crystal that Sonata had gotten from the Enclave. She held her breath as she took the little crystal out of its pouch. The second it was loose, both crystals leapt from her hands and slammed together with a blinding flash and a sound like a thunderclap.

Sonata blinked to clear her vision, then gasped in awe at what she saw.

A crystalline torc was floating in the air right in front of her. The centerpiece was shaped like an ammonite shell, ringed with small feathered wings, while the arms were formed into spirals that were decorated with tiny dorsal fins and intricately engraved rune-script. Soft light pulsed faintly within it.

Guttural yells snapped Sonata back to reality. The Super Mutants had obviously heard the magical fusion, but with an amulet this powerful, controlling them wouldn’t be a problem. All it needed was a little conflict to provide some fuel.

Sonata grinned and snatched the torc. The instant her skin touched it, her vision was almost entirely obscured by thick clouds of billowing green magic. In just this one small area there was more hostility than the sirens had seen in the entirety of Equestria. It was incredible. There was so much magic, so much power.

Too much.

Caught up in her admiration of such phenomenal power, Sonata didn't notice just how much magic was surging into her through the torc until she had taken in far too much for her to even begin to control. Too late, she tried to slow her intake, but her meager efforts weren't anywhere near enough to stem the tide.

Sonata tried to let go of the torc before the magic consumed her entirely, but the artifact was stuck firmly to her skin. She screamed in fear and desperation, knowing that she only had seconds at most, when finally she managed to thrust the torc away.

The magical green clouds vanished instantly. Strangely, loud crashes and thuds filled the air in all directions, but that too faded after a few seconds. Gasping as if she had just run a marathon, Sonata snapped her head up as she remembered the approaching Super Mutants, only to blink in surprise when she saw that her surroundings had changed slightly. The trench wall opposite had been blown out entirely, along with a significant portion of the nearby bunker, leaving behind a muddy furrow that looked like it had been scraped out by a gigantic shovel. Of the Super Mutants, there was no trace.

“Huh, that’s weird.” Sonata stood up slowly, noting that her sandbag wall had been obliterated as well. “Did… did I do this?” Her eyes were drawn inexorably to the torc lying in the mud a couple of feet away. She couldn’t help but break into a smile at the sight of it. The Torc was more powerful than she had ever imagined, the only problem was how to keep the others from finding out about it. Touching the Torc was going to be a bad idea without some sort of covering.

Sonata racked her brain for a few seconds, then shrugged and carefully used the hem of her top to slip the Torc into her amulet’s old pouch. The contained magic tingled through the fabric, but it wasn’t enough to cause any problems.

Satisfied, Sonata tucked the pouch into a pocket and turned her attention back to her surroundings. She still couldn’t see any Super Mutants gunning for her, though she did notice a couple of sticky-looking patches of crimson gunk that she didn’t want to look too closely at. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the slightest clue which way to go to get back to Rivet City, so she decided to just get out of the trenches and see what looked familiar. As luck would have it, there was a new slope that would do the job very nicely. Less lucky was the fact that most of the buildings surrounding the area were so trashed and weathered that they were almost identical.

As she tried to figure out which way to go, the sudden sound of loud shouting made Sonata duck and look around wildly for the source. Relief crashed through her at the sight of two Brotherhood Knights hurrying towards her. That relief turned to ash as she realized that the Knights were desperately shouting warnings about something behind her, something that was making the ground quake beneath her feet.

Sonata spun around, her hand already going to her pouch, but the sight that awaited her made her freeze in terror.

This was the Behemoth the other Mutants had mentioned, there was no doubt about it. The creature was massive, and it was charging at Sonata at a ferocious pace. She barely had time to draw breath for a shriek before the monster was on her.

Sonata felt her bones creak as the Behemoth swept her up in one meaty fist. It let out a deafening roar, ignoring the Knights entirely, and pulled a man-sized metal cylinder from its belt. Sonata tried to yell for help, but nothing came out as the Behemoth bundled her inside the container and closed its door, sealing her in the pitch darkness.

Sunset raised a hand in greeting to the nearby Regulators as her and the girls trudged through the snow-laden paddock. Thankfully, it looked like the Regulators recognized them, as they simply tipped their hats then got back to what they were doing.

As the group approached the door, Applejack stepped forward to take the lead. It was her that Sheriff Simms had sent specifically, so having her be first through the door seemed like the right idea.

“Do we just go straight in, or should we knock first?” Rainbow asked.

“Well, we were told to come here in the first place because Applejack murdered Moriarty in cold blood, so we should probably be polite,” Pinkie replied blithely.

“Gee, thanks, Pinkie,” Applejack huffed as she knocked on the door.

“You’re welcome!” Pinkie said with a bright smile.

The door creaked open before anyone else could add to the ridiculous conversation. A wiry black man stood on the other side, with a metal plate over one eye and a cybernetic hand poking out from the sleeve of his duster. His good eye widened when he saw the girls. “Rainbooms, huh? We were wondering when you’d show up. Come on in, Cruz’ll want to speak to you.” The Regulator held the door open for the girls and called over his shoulder, “Hey, the Rainbooms are here! Someone let Cruz know!”

“As if we need to bother, what with all of your hollerin’!” A grumpy but strangely familiar voice called back. Sunset felt her stomach drop as a girl, no older than Squire Peters, stomped out of a room inside. She got one good look at red hair tied back in a ponytail with a very distinctive pink bow, before the girl’s eyes practically bulged out of their sockets. “Ashleigh!” The girl dove at Applejack and slammed into the bewildered Rainboom with an audible thud, but she clearly didn’t care as she wrapped AJ in a tight hug.

Next Chapter: Chapter 165 - Regulator HQ Estimated time remaining: 8 Hours, 38 Minutes