The smoke was still thick, stinging at the eyes and throats of everypony around. Ambulances, fire trucks, and police cruisers were parked in a wide arc around the wreckage, blocking off the street. An hour ago, this building had been a Crystalline restaurant, owned by a small family of Crystal Ponies who had served the ponies of the Everfree District with a charitable generosity, the tables loaded with customers enjoying fine dining from the Crystal Empire. Now, it was a firebombed wreck of brick, wood, and shattered glass. The firefighters had only just managed to defeat the blaze, and the last of the dead was being carried out of the wreckage in stretchers.

Daring watched in silence as a pair of firefighters, manes damp with sweat, carried out a stretcher. Sprawled across it was the burned figure of a yellow-brown crystal pony, his blue mane and beard blackened with soot, the strange crystalline sheen of his skin dirtied and scuffed, and his eyes closed. A few feet behind her, a light pink mare, her yellow mane done up in elaborate curls, collapsed to her knees and clung to her son, sobbing. Daring turned away, her stomach churning. A curse started to form in her lungs, but the harsh dryness of her throat sent her into a coughing fit instead.

“You okay?” Phillip said, approaching and rubbing the bandage over the burns on his forelegs.

“Fine,” Daring wheezed, swallowing with difficulty.

“You two ponies are insane,” a tall unicorn with an ash gray mane and a brown-black coat wearing a firefighter’s turnout jacket, boots, and helmet said, approaching with a couple plastic cups of water held in his magic. “Running right into a burning building without any protective gear.”

Phillip took a long, grateful drink of the cold water before speaking. “Had to try to help, Embers.”

Lieutenant Burning Embers shook his head and turned away. “I can’t deny that you helped, but next time, leave the firefighting to the firefighters. You could’ve just wound up as two more ponies to save.”

Daring swallowed the water down and massaged her throat until some of the raw dryness evaporated. “So these bastards bombed an entire restaurant just to get one pony?”

“That’s the working theory,” Phillip said, turning and glaring at a single stretcher that stood off to the side. The body atop it was badly scorched and burned almost beyond recognition, but the cutie mark was still visible: a bundle of dynamite sticks wrapped up in a black band, the fuse lit.

“Dynamite Blast,” Phillip said. “The Industry Kings just lost one of their top lieutenants.”

“And Ponyville just lost a lot of good ponies,” Daring spat.

“Thankfully, the Nightmare Moon Disciples aren’t known for their intelligence,” Trace Evidence declared, walking up from the gamewell on the corner. “Surveillance crystal on the side of the road spotted the car they were in, even got a good look at the passenger. And guess who our bomber is?”

“Wouldn’t happen to be an ex-cop, would he?” Daring asked.

“Star Cluster himself,” Trace confirmed with a nod. “And a patrol found the car. It’s parked at an empty apartment warehouse a few miles south of here. Captain Oak is already assembling officers.”

“So why are we still standing here?” Daring shouted, darting over to Trace’s Commander. “Let’s go already!”

Trace and Phillip both hustled over to the car and Trace slid into the driver’s seat. With a grumble and a roar, the Hayson Commander was coaxed to life and began to head south, it’s siren wailing.

The apartment building was a four-story edifice of gray brick and stone, which was crumbling under the weight of time. More than half of the windows were boarded up, and most of the ones that weren’t were broken and grimy. Graffiti and gang tags were painted over the exterior walls and windows, colors and shapes fighting for dominance. The sign next to the parking lot entrance read Peach Orchard.

The arriving officers were gathered in the small parking lot, which had heavily cracked asphalt lined with weeds and grass, the ground littered with beer bottles and cigarettes. When Trace pulled the car in, several cruisers were already parked around a group of officers, all of whom were wearing bulletproof vests and walkie-talkies; some of the older officers were fidgeting with the latter, clearly unsure how they worked. The only other car that wasn’t a police vehicle was a dark blue coupe parked to one side. Its narrow, dimmed headlights seemed to be glaring at the gathered ponies.

“Ah, good, we have all gathered,” Captain Hewn Oak declared from the midst of the cluster as Trace, Phillip, and Daring disembarked. “Now, listen up, my brave lads and lassies. Our target today is the traitorous snake that we all know as Star Cluster.” He held up a photograph of the former unicorn police officer. “Our intelligence leads us to believe that he is the new leader of the gang known as the Nightmare Moon Disciples, allied with Whitestone. The cowardly attack earlier seems to indicate that he is at war with the demon we known as Zugzwang." He paused to catch his breath.

"We’ve spotted the vehicle that he used in a cowardly attack just minutes ago at the Per il Cuore diner.” He held up another photograph, this one a still from a surveillance crystal footage. It showed the dark blue coupe driving up the street, with Star Cluster leaning out the passenger window to throw a large black object.

An angry murmuring like the hissing of snakes rose up amongst the other officers, but one pony reacted differently. Flash Sentry shifted his weight from hoof to hoof as he stared at the picture of his former partner, licking his lips and adjusting for the weight of the armored vest.

“You okay, Sentry?” Prowl whispered to him from his right.

Sentry swallowed and snapped himself to a position of attention. “I’m fine,” he nodded, staring straight forward.

Prowl studied Flash for a few moments of silence, her lips thin as she pondered, but returned her attention to the Captain.

“Now, here is what we are going to do,” Hewn Oak continued with a scowl. “We are currently running under the assumption that our serpents have made their den in this abandoned apartment complex.” He nodded behind them. “They may or may not still be in there; Sergeant MacWillard has not seen any signs of movement from within, nor have we seen anypony attempting to leave.”

Daring looked up and spotted the familiar griffon, along with a pair of hippogriff police officers, circling around the building from the air.

“Reluctant as I am to send my lambs into the lion’s den, we cannot allow this traitor and his pack of wolves to escape us,” Captain Oak continued.

“Is he incapable of talking in normal Ponish?” Daring whispered to Phillip. Bumblebee, who was standing next to them, let out a loud giggle, prompting Prowl to elbow him in the gut.

“So this is what we’re going to do,” Oak stated. “We will go in there and search floor by floor, rooting them out wherever they may hide. We will find anything that even smacks of suspicion and hold it for evidence. And if any of them are there, we will bring them in and lock them in cages like the animals that they are. Am I clear on this, ladies and gentleponies?”

“Hooah!” Prowl shouted.

“Hooah!” the other officers shouted in one voice, though Flash was a beat late.

“All right, let’s move out, and may Celestia go with us,” Oak declared.

They flowed across the parking lot as one unit, guided by one thought, with Prowl in the lead. Phillip, Daring, Trace, and Oak brought up the rear. Prowl reached the door, which was just barely hanging onto the frame with a single hinge, and kicked the door open, her gun raised to sweep the area. “Clear!” she barked.

They entered a small entrance lobby that had only a round table and some old creaky chairs next to a grimy window and an old heater covered in cobwebs. At some point, a vase had been placed on the table in a feeble attempt to liven up the area, but the water had long evaporated, and the dead remnants of the roses drooped sadly over the dusty glass.

“Bee, Dancer, you two take the lobby,” Prowl stated. "The rest of us, four to a floor. Move!”

Bumblebee and Creek Dancer both remained in the lobby while the rest filed up the stairs, which creaked and groaned under their weight. Flash hung behind so that he could follow Trace, Phillip, and Daring all the way up to the top floor.

“You okay, Flash?” Phillip whispered to him.

Flash nodded. “I gotta be,” he said, even as his wingtips shivered slightly in a manner that Phillip strongly suspected had little to do with the cold that had long seeped into the wood.

They reached the landing of the fourth floor, stepping onto a mold and moth-eaten carpet that might have once been red. The hallway extended out to their left and their right, the only light coming from the sunlight struggling through the grimy windows and the light of their torches. Doors with faded numbers attached to them stood in rows along both walls. Aside from the muffled voices and banging from below and the floorboards creaking beneath their hooves, there was no sound.

“Okay, Phil and I will go left,” Trace said. “Sentry and Do, you go right—”

“Wait a minute,” Daring interrupted, holding up a hoof. She paused, holding her breath as her ears swiveled back and forth, checking for any sound out of place.

“What’s wrong?” Phillip whispered.

“This feels too easy,” Daring hissed back, one hoof drifting up towards the shoulder holster as she looked back and forth up the hallway. “I mean, Cluster bombs a restaurant, lets himself get caught on a surveillance crystal doing it, and then leaves his car out in the open?”

Phillip scowled. “Ambush.”

“Damn right,” Daring nodded.

Trace frowned. “Okay, let’s go slowly.”

They approached the first door on the left, labeled 41 in faded gold. Trace stood to one side and opened the door with his magic. There was no reaction, so he nodded to Flash to enter first. Flash swallowed, but nodded and strode forward, gun raised.

The apartment on the other side had only three rooms: a combination kitchen and dining room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The only occupants of the apartment were the rusty frame of a bed and the grime-choked sink and toilet in the bathroom. There was no sign of habitation. Nor was there any in apartments 42, 43, and 44, all of which were similarly empty. The entire time, reports from the officers on the other floors came through Trace and Flash’s radios, declaring that nopony had found anything.

“Where are they?” Flash muttered.

Trace started to open the door to number 45, but Daring abruptly reached out a hoof and stopped him. “Wait! Trap!” she barked.

Trace froze where he was, as did everypony else. Daring approached the door carefully, focusing upon what she had seen that alerted her: a tiny thread that ran from the interior doorknob to the inside of the room. Moving with silent step, she extracted her hoof mirror from her pocket and tilted it so that she could see through the crack into the room.

The reflection showed her what the tripwire was attached to: the triggers of a double-barreled shotgun clamped to a table, aimed at the door.

Lowering herself down so that she was close to the floor, Daring extracted a pocket knife from her pocket, flipped open the scissors attachment, and lifted it up with a wing. The blades of the scissors embraced the tripwire, and she cut it with a snip of her wings. Everypony winced in anticipation, but there was no responding gunshot. Trace quickly cleared the room and found it empty.

“How in the hell did you see that?” Trace asked as he broke the shotgun’s barrels open and emptied the shells out.

“Because I was looking for traps,” Daring replied. She smirked at Phillip. “See? And you said that Hayana Pones was unrealistic.”

“When you have to disarm a trap in an ancient temple with treasure, then we can talk,” Phillip deadpanned.

A thunderclap suddenly resounded through the building, causing everypony to jump, raising their weapons. Muffled shouts of surprise and fear came from the floors below.

“What was that?!” Trace barked into his radio.

“This is Greenwood,” an officer’s trembling voice came over the radio in reply, his syllables marked with shaky gasps. “We’re all okay, but...the door was boobytrapped. Had a shotgun rigged to it. Be advised, watch for traps.”

The four of them let out a breath. “Okay, come on,” Trace said, starting to turn to leave.

“Wait a minute,” Phillip said, raising a hoof.

“What, another trap?” Trace asked. Flash gulped again.

His nostrils flaring as he sniffed, Phillip slowly turned and walked towards a small closet with a latticed doorway. He opened up the door, still sniffing the air. He looked down and spotted a dark red stain on the bare floor of the closet, a stain that ran up the floor and onto the wall.

“Blood,” he muttered. “Fresh. Arterial spray. Somepony was crouching in the closet here. Somepony else cut their throat from in front.”

“So where’s the body?” Daring asked.

Phillip looked up and studied the closet's tiled ceiling with the aid of a flashlight. He noticed that the dust around the edges of the tile had been disturbed, and there was another dark red stain on the tile. “Trace,” he grunted, pointing at the tile.

Trace lit up his horn and tried to move the tile, grunting as he encountered resistance. “There’s something heavy on top of it…”

The tile suddenly gave with a crack and the weight that had been holding it down tumbled through onto the floor, causing the four ponies to jump back with cries of surprise. The body of a dark blue pegasus mare lay before them, her seaweed green mane spilling over her face. Her jaw was slack and her eyes stared at nothing; coagulated blood clung to her slit neck and marked the stab wound on her chest. A stylized “NMD” was tattooed in silver letters on her foreleg.

Phillip bent over the corpse. “Still warm,” he noted. He spotted and picked up a machine pistol that had fallen next to the body. “She was waiting here. To ambush us,” he concluded.

“So who killed her?” Daring wondered, looking up at the hole.

Trace cleared his throat and clicked on his walkie-talkie. “All units, we’ve found a body,” he announced. “NMD.”

“This is Prowl, got another body here,” Prowl reported.

“Robinson, got a body here, too,” another voice answered. “Looks like somepony shanked them in the chest and throat.”

“Hey,” Daring called, having walked off while the others were studying the body. “There’s more in here.”

The other three followed her into the next room. This room had another shotgun rigged to the doorknob, which Daring had already disarmed. Two more bodies were in this apartment; a unicorn stallion lay facedown in the bedroom, blood from the stab wounds in his chest pooled about him. Another stallion lay against the wall of the bedroom, his left eye having been stabbed straight through, his right eye wide open in an expression of shock accentuated by his slack jaw. A pistol lay on the tile floor next to his hoof, along with a couple of cartridges, and, bizarrely, two bullets.

“What the hell?” Phillip muttered, studying the unmarked bullets. “Fired the bullets, but...they stopped? And why did nopony hear the shots?” He frowned. “Unicorn,” he concluded after a moment of thought.

“They could still be here, keep alert,” Trace warned.

“I am still here,” another voice chuckled.

Everypony whirled around to see a stallion walking right through the wall, which shimmered with a faint golden light. The stallion’s impeccable suit was splattered and stained with blood, some of which still dripped off of him onto the floor. His face held a toothy smile that was far, far too wide for a normal pony, but his black eyes held no sign of any emotion or life as they focused on Phillip.

“Guten tag, liebling,” Zugzwang cooed to Phillip as the walls of the apartment became coated in a solid barrier of golden light.

The four ponies started back in shock, then went to raise their pistols, but Zugzwang’s horn was already alight. With a simple tug, all of their firearms were yanked out of their hooves and tossed into the corner.

“I go to the trouble of stopping this ambush cold for you, and this is how you repay me?” Zugzwang clucked, frowning and shaking his head in a display of disappointment.

Daring snarled, then charged right at him, drawing her kusarifundo from her pocket. The snapping of a baton announced Phillip’s entry into the fight, quickly followed by a shout of summoned courage by Flash.

Zugzwang shook his head and his horn flared. With a rush of heat and light, a golden aura bloomed outwards from his body, shoving all three of his attackers away.

“Room 46, need backup now!” Trace shouted, backing away from Zugzwang while firing stunning spells from his horn.

Zugzwang snorted quietly, coolly deflecting the yellow beams with conjured shields, sending them harmlessly into the walls and floor. “That wall is soundproof, arschgeige,” he scolded. “Nopony can hear you.”

Trace gritted his teeth and let out a growl that failed to completely mask the fear and desperation that bubbled in his soul. His horn crackled and fizzed as he charged up a powerful stun spell, and he fired it at Zugzwang.

A circular shield, its edges decorated with strange symbols and runes, appeared in midair in front of the scoffing Zugzwang. Trace’s stun spell struck the shield with a gonging sound and was deflected back at Trace. His eyes widened in shock, and a cry of “Oh, shi—!” had just enough time to fly from his throat before his own beam struck him in the forehead. Trace’s eyes rolled and he slumped to the floor.

“Hey!” Daring shouted, recovering and leaping at Zugzwang. Her kusarifundo whistled through the air as she attacked, sending the spinning weights at his head again and again with vicious efficiency. Zugzwang ducked and dodged every attack.

Growling, Phillip forced himself back up to his hooves, grasping his baton with an iron grip. Coming up behind Zugzwang, he launched the baton at the back of his hind legs, only for his strike to bounce off a conjured shield: the impact shuddered down his bones as though he’d just struck a steel wall.

Grunting, he struck again, but another shield shoved him away like he’d been hit by a bulldozer, sending him flying into the wall. His vision blurred and his head spun with the impact; he tried to get up again, but a hot metal cuff was suddenly slapped down onto each of his hooves, pinning him to the floor. Panting and grunting, he struggled, but it felt like an elephant was sitting on each of his limbs.

Through blurred vision, he spotted three Flash Sentry’s trying to get up, scrambling for the guns on the floor. A golden band wrapped itself around the stallions’ necks and their heads were violently slammed against the wall, once, twice, three times, each impact resounding like a drum beat. The three Flash’s slumped to the floor.

A blade snapped out from beneath Zugzwang’s sleeve and he lunged forward with it as he ducked another of Daring’s attacks, aiming at her neck. She dodged to the side, gritting her teeth as she felt the blade kiss her skin. But before she could retaliate, Zugzwang snapped his hoof back, drawing the blade across her cheek. A flash of hot pain spread across her face, accompanied by the electric tingle of magic; she cried out in surprise, staggering, momentarily blinded by the shock. She surged forward and lashed out with her kusarifundo again, but the weights went through empty air: Zugzwang had vanished.

She realized that he had teleported beside her a moment later when a stun spell slammed into her head. The ringing of her skull was mercifully short, and she was unconscious before she hit the floor.

Zugzwang stood in the middle of the room, his breath quivering with excitement. He licked his lips and swallowed, turning towards the pinned Phillip with a broad smile that still didn’t reach his eyes. He strode forward, step by step, his whole body tingling, trembling like an excited child.

Phillip’s heart jumped into his throat, constricting his breathing and forcing him to gasp for air; he fought violently against the cuffs, but they didn’t give one bit. Zugzwang stood over him, straddling him, and leaned down.

“Now, listen closely,” Zugzwang cooed into Phillip’s ear. “I sent a message to the mayor earlier today, while you were following the trail that Star Cluster laid for you. I’m going to kill her, liebling. Unless you can save her.”

“This a challenge?” Phillip hissed.

“Think of it that way, liebling,” Zugzwang purred. He kissed Phillip on his forehead, then slowly drew his nose in a line down Phillip’s body, from his neck down to his crotch, taking deep, heavy sniffs. It took all Phillip’s willpower to not flinch at every caress of the hot breath.

“Schön, schön,” Zugzwang whispered, looking up at him with a predatory stare from between his legs. He winked. “The game begins now.”

He lit up his horn and vanished in a flash of light. The cuffs trapping Phillip to the ground vanished a moment later. Panting, he scrambled back to his hooves and rushed over to Daring, bending down to check a pulse. He felt her heartbeat beneath his hooves, slow but steady; she moaned faintly as she tried to wake up.

He quickly checked Flash and Trace and found that they were both still alive. A low breath of minor relief hissed out of his mouth. He retrieved Trace's radio and called for backup, his hooves shaking as they grasped the microphone.

The purpose of this chapter was primarily to show the devastation of the ongoing war between Zugzwang and Whitestone, but also to introduce the main conflict of this case. How are Phillip and Daring going to save the Mayor if they can barely protect themselves from Zugzwang?

Translation: "Schön, schön.”--"Beautiful, beautiful."

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