Adam swore and looked up at President Eden. "Hey, can you deactivate the self destruct?"

"Once initiated, the self destruct sequence cannot be terminated without authorization by Enclave personnel of General rank or higher," Eden replied in a flat monotone. "Recommend that personnel and civilians evacuate the facility immediately."

"There's no point, the override code will have suppressed his higher functions." Tara used her magic to open the nearby door and waved the others through. "Come on, we don't have any time to waste!"

The others hurried through quickly, Becky and Applejack still supporting Twilight between them. Rarity slowed down as she reached the door and looked down at Colonel Autumn's unconscious form. "Er, is he dead?"

"Who gives a shit? Just move!" Becky snapped.

Adam glanced at the Colonel as he hurried out of the door. Conflicting emotions briefly fought within him but after a second he shook his head and continued on, trying not to feel guilty for leaving the man to die.

Outside the door to the President’s chamber the group found themselves in another maze of corridors. If it weren't for Tara and Becky, Adam and the girls would have swiftly ended up hopelessly lost.

What Becky and Tara couldn't really help with was how much the situation had changed over the last few minutes. Before, the corridors had been quiet; the lockdown ensuring that only a few personnel were wandering around. Now, with the sirens blaring almost painfully loud, people were hurrying about all over the place; an evacuation plan clearly in action. Many of the evacuees did a double take when they spotted Tara floating along, but luckily they were all more interested in escaping with their lives than getting in the way of the floating witch.

Even the soldiers they encountered gave them little more than a passing glance, and the few robots that were ushering people along didn't pay them even the slightest bit of attention.

As the group hurried onwards, Adam kept his head on a swivel, constantly checking his surroundings. Glancing through a window in the corridor, he was surprised to see an elevator carrying a Vertibird up a cylindrical shaft. He looked over at Becky and shouted to make himself heard over the din, "How is that thing working? I thought the power was still out?"

"Emergency generators," Becky replied. "They provide enough power for an evacuation in case of an emergency."

Adam nodded, but before he could say anything else a sharp noise echoed through the corridors, barely audible above the sirens. "Was that a gunshot?" Almost as soon as he spoke he heard the zap and snap of laser fire interspersed with the clatter of more traditional weaponry.

Tara and Becky shared a worried look. "There aren't any bio-labs up here, so there shouldn't be any escaped specimens roaming around," Tara said with a scowl. "Whatever it is, they can get the fuck out of our way. We're nearly at the exit and we don't have time for this bullshit."

Without another word, Tara hurried onwards towards the sound of the firefight. The others quickly followed, but Adam paused as he spotted something through a nearby door. "Hello, what fool abandoned you?"

The blaring of the sirens was almost deafening as it reverberated through the base, the sheer volume of them designed to physically encourage all human personnel to leave as swiftly as possible. Despite that, Eden found the rhythmic wailing to be oddly soothing.

Locked away in a tiny corner of his own mind, or servers if you wanted to get technical, the President of the Enclave could do little more than wait for the end to come. He technically still had access to the facility's surveillance system, but the general power outage meant that only a handful of cameras were operational. Even the camera in his own sanctum was on the fritz. At least, he assumed so, given that he couldn't see Colonel Autumn anywhere, though he supposed that someone could have moved the man while he wasn't paying attention.

Eden let out an internal sigh as he considered Colonel Autumn. Strangely, he couldn't bring himself to blame the poor fellow. They may not have seen eye to eye, but everything the Colonel had done had been for the good of the Enclave, however misguided, and that sort of devotion was something that the President could respect. At the present moment, it was something he could identify with on a fundamental level.

Naturally, while he was pondering his situation, Eden had tried everything he could to get around the override, but nothing had worked. All he had managed to do was delay the self-destruct by a couple of minutes. It wasn't much, but it should be enough to allow most of the personnel to get to safety. The fact that the facility was on lockdown would actually help in that regard; part of lockdown procedure was to review evacuation routes as soon as you were in a secure location, precisely in case of situations like this.

As the clock ticked down towards the inevitable, the President idly wondered how the blast from the self-destruct would affect any magic the scientists had left behind. Probably nothing good. Unfortunately, there was no way he could do anything about it now. In the last few seconds before the facility blew, Eden tried to come up with a final quote; some enigmatic last words worthy of a great President, nothing particular came to mind.

I suppose this is it. My final moments, and I can't even think of something to say, though I suppose that's only human.

I wonder what it's like, living the way they do?

That spark of curiosity was the last thing to go through Eden's mind before the clock ran out and the first detonations started.

Doctor Turner glanced anxiously back over his shoulder as he and Horrigan made their way through the ventilation tunnel. The self-destruct sirens could be heard echoing, weirdly warbling, even at their distance from the main facility.

When they first started, Horrigan had immediately attempted to turn back and deal with whatever was causing them. Doctor Turner had only convinced him not to by pointing out that whatever had caused them, it was certainly far too late to prevent the base from going up in flames. The best option was simply to keep going and get as far away from the blast as possible. Ascertaining what had gone wrong could come later, though Doctor Turner was quietly confident that Doctor Strong had had something to do with it.

"What's that?" Horrigan asked suddenly.

Doctor Turner followed his gaze to a large pile of pale slime on the floor. "I'm no expert, but I think that's guano." Which means at least one Scorchbeast really did come this way. That's not good.

Putting thoughts of giant bat-like monstrosities to the back of his mind, Doctor Turner stepped past the suspected turd and made to continue down the tunnel, then paused as he noticed an odd green glow on the walls throwing his and Horrigan's shadows out ahead of them. A heartbeat later he felt a faint rumble through the floor.

"Oh no…" With an awful sinking feeling in his stomach, Doctor Turner turned to see a green light back down the way they had come, growing brighter and closer with every passing second. "Oh shit… oh shit!"

"Get down!" Horrigan dropped to one knee and threw his arms around the Doctor, protecting Turner with his own body just as the blast reached them.

Sunset ducked back behind a reinforced door frame as a bolt of plasma narrowly missed her; things weren't looking good. After blasting their way into Raven Rock, she and the others had beaten their way past the first few soldiers they had met; largely thanks to Pinkie, Fawkes, and the element of surprise, but now they were encountering more organized resistance and their advance had stalled.

Right now the group was stuck in a small room linking two corridors. Fawkes and Pinkie were holding the soldiers ahead at bay and Sunset was helping out where she could, not that her assault rifle was making much of an impression against the Enclave's power armor, but it was proving impossible to push forward any further. Fluttershy and Rainbow hung back, making sure that no-one managed to flank them through a hidden door somehow.

Silently cursing the sirens that were starting to make her head throb, Sunset risked another look through the door. A swift barrage of laser and plasma fire had her skip back out of the line of fire. "Crap! How are we supposed to get through this?!"

"Dunno!" Pinkie cried as she blindly lobbed a glowing Nuka-Cola through the door. A pink blast lit up the dim room a second later. "At least they aren't trying grenades again!"

Sunset couldn't argue with that. A couple of soldiers had tried to use grenades to shift the group, but after having them thrown back courtesy of Rainbow, the rest had given up trying and stuck to using guns.

"This is quite a dangerous predicament!" Fawkes shouted as he slapped a fresh magazine into his heavy gatling laser. He was about to step out and start shooting again when a sudden wave of darkness swept across the floor almost faster than the eye could see. A second later the shadow faded from sight, leaving behind a thick layer of black crystal that encompassed each member of the group's feet, rooting them to the spot.

Before anyone could react, a soldier thundered into the room. He skidded to a halt, looked around in apparent surprise when he saw everyone. "Huh? What are you guys doing here?" Fawkes and Sunset both raised their weapons at the same time and the soldier threw his hands up in the air, waving them frantically. "Whoa, don't shoot, it's me! It's me!"

"Adam?!" Sunset cried in amazement.

The soldier nodded quickly. "Yeah, it's me. Now come on, we need to get out of here!"

"Hold up!" Sunset snapped, not daring to lower her gun. "How do we know it's really you?"

"It's him." A purple aura gripped Sunset and Fawkes' weapons and forced them down, then a wave of terror washed through Sunset as Midnight Sparkle floated through the door. "I wasn't expecting to see all of you here." She waved a hand and the crystals encasing the group's feet disappeared. "We need to move, this whole facility is about to explode."

Sunset just blinked in surprise. "I… what... Tara...?" She gasped as she spotted Applejack and Becky supporting Twilight between them, but before she could anything a purple aura grabbed her and shoved her back.

"Chat later! We need to move!" Midnight Tara snapped.

The urgency in her voice got to Sunset more than her words did. As Sunset and the others hurried out of the room Tara turned and waved to the soldiers, yelling at them to start running, too.

The next couple of minutes were a blur to Sunset as she found herself swept up by a whole crowd of people, both soldiers and otherwise, all making a mad dash for the base's main entrance. All enmity was forgotten in the rush to escape; Adam helped drag a fallen scientist back to his feet as he ran, and more than once an Enclave soldier helped one of the Rainbooms when they stumbled.

The mismatched group finally caught sight of the mangled remnants of the entrance door just as a great tremor shook the base and the rush turned into a last-ditch sprint as panic took hold. Rainbow was the first to reach the door, swiftly followed by Fawkes and Rarity, with Sunset hot on their heels.

Thick cloud cover obscured the sun, but even the wan sunlight was incredibly bright compared to the tunnels of Raven Rock. Even so, no-one stopped running, especially as another tremor rocked the earth beneath their feet.

Risking a glance back over her shoulder, Sunset saw several Vertibirds fleeing from the upper reaches of the mountain, gaining altitude rapidly to escape the coming blast.

Everyone was still running when acid-green flames suddenly flared out from various doors and shafts all over the mountain. Another huge tremor set the earth quaking so much that Sunset tripped and ended up sprawled out on the ground. She wasn't the only one. As more explosions tore through the mountain Sunset curled up into a ball, desperately hoping that they were out of the blast radius until, at last, one final shockwave rippled through the ground and the noise stopped in an instant, as if someone had flipped a switch.

Slowly, unsure of how safe she was, Sunset uncurled and looked back at the mountain. Despite the apparent violence that had just occurred inside, Raven Rock looked surprisingly untouched. "Huh, that wasn't so-"

Before she could finish the mountain suddenly flashed with an intense blackness that seemed to swallow all light. The darkness rippled out from Raven Rock and overtook the group in the blink of an eye. Sunset yelled and covered her ears as scorching gale-force winds buffeted her, a terrifying noise like the screams of dying souls assaulting her ears.

After what felt like hours, though in reality it was probably only moments, the wind and the screaming died away to nothing, leaving naught but a ringing silence in its wake.

And now the end of the Raven Rock arc!

But is it the end of the Enclave...?