The fact evacuation was now in order on Georgia didn’t actually make the process fast by any stretch of imagination. Where a proper rescue submarine would have had some twenty seats on board to get the submariners out in as few cycles as possible, Fugro’s recently jury-rigged bell didn’t have that.

Its capacity hovered closer to the six mark, enough to fit a small team of divers and serve as a habitat for prolonged dives, not enough to quickly empty Georgia of her crew. Evacuation wouldn’t be quick. On the bright side however, the diving bell’s ability to control its own atmosphere meant they didn’t need to transfer anyone to a decompression chamber up on the surface, so that was a part of the cycle they could skip on and save time.

That still left the process a dozen hours longer than it would have been with an actual rescue submarine, but none of Georgia’s crew were feeling picky as to what was used to get them up to the surface so long that they could feel the touch of the sun again.

As previously planned, the heavily-wounded were the first to be transferred to the surface in the first few cycles they ran with the bell. Every single one of them were immediately transferred to both Rhine’s and Fugro’s sick bays where they began being tended to now that the facilities allowed for proper care. Doctor Delacroix followed them on the last trip, her presence now needed in her own ward on the surface.

On the same trip that brought the French hippogriff to the surface came Graham. Georgia’s XO had been handed the task of supervising actions on the surface while his superior handled shutdown procedures and security measures below the waves.

Most of his work involved keeping track of which sailors went where, as Fugro herself wasn’t large enough to house USS Georgia’s full complement along with her own crew. Impressive as the dive support vessel’s accommodation capabilities may be for a vessel of her class and size, navy vessels ran with crew complements that dwarfed their merchant counterparts at every turn, with maybe the sole exception of the passenger/ferry branch of the industry.

But the monitoring of crew resources on the surface and the talks with the merchant sailors that were rescuing them was but a fickle thing in comparison to what Captain Green was doing still inside the sub. For one, Georgia’s rainbow-maned pegasus of a Captain fully intended to stay true to the tradition of being last to abandon his vessel.

That wasn’t exclusively to abide by tradition though. Not only did they need to make sure Georgia’s nuclear reactor wouldn’t cause troubles to the environment once the boat was empty,, but Green also had to set contingencies so that classified documents and technologies wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands once they left.

That meant ordering a couple of his Officers to begin destroying the guidance systems on their armament of Tomahawk missiles, disarm the torpedoes, shred classified documents and upload all their classified intel on some hard drives before flooding the server room. They may have to abandon ship, but Green would make damn certain nobody could ever accuse him of leaving naval secrets and tech up for grabs.

He didn’t know whether the caution was warranted or not, but now wasn’t the time to take risks and gamble. Along with the hard drives they were taking came every bit of encryption hardware that was not bolted down and small enough to fit in the diving bell, plus some extras they felt they might need in the long run. Miscellaneous bits of intel, technical documentation, underwater charts… anything that might hold some use, he ordered to be brought along.

And… there was one other thing the young pegasus wished to see done.

Once he was done with the classified stuff and the intel, he left the sealed crates containing them with the Coxswain and made his way to the engineering sections, down in the aft compartments.

Which in itself posed a bit of a problem. Ponies already had a hard time opening and closing hatches on the heeled submarine, being half the size of an adult and a third as strong didn’t help. At all. Time and again he had to get a nearby sailor to open a hatch for him, lacking the strength to do it himself.

Trotting about on freshly-healed hooves didn’t help either. He may have used his time to become more dexterous in using his wings as makeshift hands, but not so much when it came to quadruped mobility. And forget about learning how to fly 600 feet below the surf.

Nevertheless, Green eventually managed to reach Ignacio’s denin maneuvering,where he found the D-Dog bitch in the process of preparing Georgia’s reactor core for shutdown, followed by emergency cooling. Going by what he overheard when he entered the room, the whole engineering gang was also keeping tabs on all the systems that had been damaged in the collision, from the minor flooding coming in through the sonar room, to the status of the battery well, to the myriad of difficulties life-support was giving them ever since the CO2 scrubber unit had given out on them.

“Everything alright over here Eng?” Green decided to make his presence known.

Ignacio startled, immediately barking a quick order to her subordinates who all stood up at the closest approximation they could make of an ‘atten-shun’ before Green waved them off.

“At ease, we’re all too busy to bother with that right now.” The rainbow-maned colt told them before motioning for his Chief Engineer to come over with a wave of his hoof.

She had to twist a bit to squeeze her large voluptuous frame between the many control stations that lined the sides of maneuvering, but nothing she hadn’t already gotten used to in the last couple days since their reappearance.

“Something the matter, sir?” She asked.

“Checking on the situation on your side. How goes it all?”

A grimace appeared on her muzzle at the question.

“Well...” She started. “Sir, it’s a good thing we’re getting the evacuation started now. Finding a proper compartment to pump that water is… difficult, to put it mildly. Diesel room was our go-to up ‘til now but it’s almost full, so... Reports have it that the inflow has more than doubled in the last couple hours. There is only so long we can last before we don’t even have the ability to control that flow.”

“And right now?”

“I heard they were done disarming the tomahawks, at least in the foremost tubes. That’s where I’m putting that water next.”

“Good, good.” The Captain nodded slowly. “Reactor?”

“Ready for the shutdown. Current battery load has dropped considerably when we lost part of the banks to the sudden increase in the water flow, so we just have over six hours of battery left. More than enough, thankfully, unless something bad interrupts the evacuation. Except for that...” She paused, drumming her fingers against her thigh pensively. “… life support still ain’t good, but you know that already.”

“That bad?”

“I’m afraid it is Captain.” Ignacio nodded. “We got time… provided the ventilation unit doesn’t give out on us, and it’s having a hard time coping. If it does, we may face a situation where pockets of unbreathable air start to build up throughout the sub.”

“I’m assuming you have someone keeping an eye on the unit to account for that?”

“Correct. ‘round the clock monitoring.”

“Excellent. Now… there is one last thing I want to know whether or not you can manage. For after we’re off the submarine.”

The D-Dog quirked an eyebrow at her CO before rubbing a paw against the underside of her muzzle in thought.

“I’d wager I can jury-rig a timer in a pinch. What is it for?”

“We still have one bank of compressed air in store, correct?”

She nodded.

“Ok, so I had someone draft this for me...” Green began, pulling out a folded up sheet of paper he’d kept under his wing up until then.

Ignacio picked it up gingerly and unfolded it immediately, her eyes quickly surveying the drawing. It was a side-on schematic of Georgia, with compartments and all, heeled backwards on the slope she knew they were currently resting on. The drawing went a bit further than just the submarine too, because it also showed the slope and eventual abyss it plummeted into further off the shore.

With a rather distinctive arrow pointing from the submarine to the depths of the Atlantic.

“Sir?” She queried after a minute of examining the drawing.

“This goes further than ensuring the core is safe and the weapons disarmed, Del Rio.” Green told her. “What I’m looking for here is a way to tip Georgia over the edge of the continental slope once we’re off. Put her in a place where she can’t cause too much damage.”

Ignacio glanced back down at the sheet he’d given her with renewed interest.

“Can you do that?” He prodded.

“Not easily.” She replied at once. “As I said: I’d need to jury-rig a timer mechanism to trigger once we’re clear and input the process in the automation systems we got running. It’s a lot more complicated than plain scuttling her, but given the circumstances and what we’ve been told about the surface… makes sense.”

It might be possible. She’d have to run the math about it, but if they leveraged all the compressed air the sub still had stored up and re-balanced the water that was inside, it might be possible to lift the nose off the seabed and sufficiently high that the inertia carried Georgia the rest of the way into the abyss.

Finicky at best, particularly with the limited compressed air and all. Plus the gashes in the ballast tanks that prevented them from surfacing in the first place. Patch the forward ballast tanks – diver helping-, then direct number five high-pressure air bank to the forward MBT’s, especially port forward, to put a lift and a twist...

“I think it can be done.” She said after a minute. “I’d have to draw up all the calculus and the moments acting on the hull, bu- what was that?!” She stopped herself, both ears flicking at a sound only she could hear, some… groaning, off in the distance.

Up on the surface, Rhine’s auxiliaries were doing their job as usual. While the trawlers spent most of their time playing the role of water-taxis between Rhine and Fugro, particularly with the emergence of sailors from the rescued submarine in need of a transfer, the two torpedo escorts had taken up screening positions around the fleet and were periodically pinging the water with their sonars.

That involved remaining far enough from Fugro that said sonars didn’t deafen all the seapony divers they had below the surface. Sonar pings weren’t exactly quiet by any stretch of imagination, and as far as they knew most of the world’s navies prior to the Event regularly stopped pinging their sonars whenever sea life was spotted on the surface like dolphins. At least in peacetime.

Ted was captaining one of the two, pretty much the usual as of late for the Greek sphinx that was part of Rhine’s barge department. There wasn’t much to the task, just circling the fleet at sedate pace for a couple hours and checking the sonar for anything that might pop up before they would head back to Rhine every couple hours for a refueling and a crew swap.

In all fairness? Had it not been for some chat they kept going throughout the whole operation, it would have been mind numbing. As it stood, Ted got to learn a lot more than he ever thought he would about his two Liberian subordinates. Lekan in particular. The female Abyssinian turned out to be a rather interesting person to talk to, given she got to overhear a lot more than you would expect ever since she started doing some radio stuff with Amandine’s radio operator.

She was pretty popular at it too. She had a nice voice with an exotic accent the audience frequently requested to come back.

The random info and speculating on colonies the world over was entertaining in its own right too.

Lekan was in the middle of explaining to Ted all the stuff she’d learned had happened in Belfast since their departure when all of a sudden the sonar system started emitting a long, guttural groan.

“What was that?” The female Abyssinian paused, twisting in her seat to peer at the consoles.

“Imani, any info?” Ted inquired to his sonar operator, a white draft horse of a centaur with wine red skin on his humanoid half.

“That’s… long range, very low frequency according to the spectrogram.” The Liberian told, scowling at his console.

“A whale’s call?”

“Nah...” He shook his head. “We got one the other day, didn’t sound like that, and it’s not even coming from the same direction. Increasing range to twelve nautical miles, bumping up ping rate from twenty to five seconds.”

From the outside, the torpedo boat stopped dead in the water as Ted and Lekan leaned over Imani’s shoulders to peer at the sonar screen. The green-on-black display kept quietly rotating in front of their eyes, none of them daring to voice the assumption that weighed on their minds.

A zeebeast. Sea monster. Because if there were monsters on land, then-

Ping.

“We got contact.”Imani said solemnly. “Range: twelve nautical miles. Bearing: zero-three-fiver. Depth: three hundred meters.”

“Gamoto!” Ted swore. “How accurate is that?”

“More or less. We could narrow it down if we ask for sensor backup from the other torpedo boat.” Imani said before another ping rang out. “Eleven point five nautical miles.”

Ted scrambled back to his seat, quickly ordering Lekan to arm the torpedoes’ warheads and prepare for a launch as the sphinx took hold of the VHF’s handset in his telekinesis.

“All ships all ship all ships, this is Romeo-Foxtrot-Charlie-Alfa, we have sonar contact.” He started. “I request additional sonar resources to assess potential threats. Over.”

“RFCA, this is RFCB...” The reply came from the other torpedo boat. “Interrogative: are you certain about the threat? Over.”

“Negative. I require additional sensor data for confirmation. Can you move to… bearing one-zero-zero from Rhine Forest? Over.”

“Understood RFCA, moving into position now. Out.” The other torpedo boat pilot said over the radio as Ted spotted it move into position in a quick burst of speed that brought it from one flank of the stationary fleet to the other.

It was only a minute or two later that their own sonar picked up the pings emitted by the other boat as Imani kept tracking the contact.

“Eleven nautical miles.” The centaur warned.

“RFCA, this is RFCB. We confirm a contact to the north-east of the fleet...” Ted heard before the other torpedo boat told him what he was seeing on his own sonar.

Simply tracing said contact on his chart confirmed that they weren’t imagining things.

“So what do we do?” Imani asked.

“Warn the fleet for one. Lekan, your torpedoes?”

“Primed for firing.”

“Good, keep it that way.” The sphinx nodded before once more taking hold of the VHF’s handset. “All ships, be advised: we have a confirmed sonar contact in the water. Potential zeebeast threat, please cease underwater operations for now and have all divers surface.”

“You do know they’re going to be pissed if you make them stop the evac for nothing?” Lekan pointed out.

“And you do know the divers would be pissed if they found a monster munching on their tails, right?” Imani deadpanned.

“What makes you so sure it’s not just a whal-”

She was interrupted by the sensors ringing out with a deep, thrumming roar that spiked on the spectrogram’s lower frequencies.

“Range: ten point five nautical miles… looks like it’s speeding up.” Imani warned.

“Permission to fire?” Lekan asked.

“Denied!” Ted was quick to reply. “Hold your fire, these torpedoes have a range of 12.000 yards, don’t open fire until it’s inside the six nautical miles radius. We have two shots, we can’t waste them. Imani, range update?”

“Nine point five.”

“Alright...” Ted breathed out, closing his eyes for a second to focus before he grabbed the torpedo boat’s throttle controls in his telekinesis. “Let’s meet this thing before it can reach the fleet. The further our torpedo detonates from the fleet, the better.”

And thus, he gunned it in the monster’s general direction, hoping to quickly reduce the range and do their job of screening the fleet from any possible threat. The other torpedo boat was quick to catch on to his plan and follow up behind them.

From a surface view, at first it only looked like the boats were rushing away from the fleet for no good reason, but then the monster decided to near the surface as it got closer to its prey. The first thing they saw was a dark shadow just beneath the waves, about the size of a trawler, large enough to make the water bulge as it swam.

It wasn’t until its head breached the waves that they saw what the monster was. Its orange colors made it stand out sharply against the dark blue waters and foam wave crests of the Atlantic, a gigantic eel with the head of an anglerfish and the serrated, curved teeth that came with it, each of them as big as a pony’s leg. It was glaring at them through a pair of dark purple eyes, the third one afixed to its angler bait swiveling about to cover for its blind spots, looking on either side of the sail ridge it bore on its back, a dark orange membrane of the same texture as the angular fins it had on the sides of its sharp head.

That was about what they could see from the distance where both torpedo boats fired their first set of torpedoes before each making a sharp ninety-degree turn in opposite directions to clear the bearing and let their gunners guide the ordnance.

Still… from six – correction: five, bloody thing was fast- miles away, Ted could sense there was something wrong with the monster. More than just being a zeebeast that is.

Figuring that out would have to wait though, because the angler-eel-thing put out a burst of speed soon as it took note of both torpedo boats, forcing them to really gun it and push the engines to their very limit to avoid giving it the opportunity of checking whether its serrated fangs could pierce their boats’ composite hulls.

Ted had to switch all of his focus away from the monster and onto the steering. The boats may be fast, but at the speed they were going the waves and swells were as much of a danger to them as the monster, and he also had to account for the tether that still connected the boat to the torpedo while Lekan was busy guiding it on target.

Little thing with the Mk46: it’s wire-guided, but as soon as the tether breaks, Miss Torpedo is no longer your friend and may very well lock onto your own ship if you forgot to program the warhead properly. Ten kilometers of wire on a torpedo is not known for structural strength, and there had been cases of the wire breaking in use.

“Lekan?!” Ted growled as the boat crested another wave and he had to jerk the helm to avoid sending them flying.

“Twenty seconds to target...” She replied, scowling at her screen as she used a joystick to guide the warhead.

Behind them, the monster was fast approaching, not bothered in the least by the same waves that forced the relatively small boat to alter course every few seconds.

At this point Ted may have been far too focused on the navigation to notice a detail about the monster, but Imani sure didn’t. The centaur quickly pulled out his phone and managed to start filming – unsteady as it was-.

There was a… corruption, of sorts, covering the monster. Purplish blisters and veins running along its hide and burrowing into its flesh like tumors. Imani didn’t get more than a glimpse of them before its entire head turned into a red mist as Lekan’s torpedo connected with a direct hit. Blood, foam, bone and flesh sprayed in all directions as its head basically disintegrated from the more than forty kilos of explosives contained in the warhead.

If there was any doubt whether or not that was enough to kill it, the other torpedo boat’s torpedo put a stop to it: a few seconds later, another explosion impacted it right in the gut and sent even larger bits of bone and flesh up in the air.

Ted throttled down on the engine, letting the boat drift on its inertia for a few seconds, long enough to watch the carcass sink below the surf, leaving behind nothing but a red stain of blood on the surface and a small slick of that weird purplish goop which evaporated into fumes after a little while.

“You got that on tape?” The sphinx asked Imani.

“Most of it.”

“Aight...” He grabbed the VHF handset. “All ships, this is Romeo-Foxtrot-Charlie-Alfa… threat eliminated. All normal operations may resume as planned. Out.”

Martin felt pretty content at the moment, all things considered. Sure, recent changes in the fawn’s status had made his life considerably more busy ever since he’d met Lord Cernunnos, but he got to hang out with Mister Merlin-Starswirl (he never was too sure what to call the wizard) a lot, and Meadowbrook’s lessons were pretty cool.

She and Rockhoof, he was really glad they wanted to be his new mom and dad. They were awesome ponies to be around, even though Rock always insisted he do something else than stick around Merlin and Meadow, like play with other kids.

Except the other kids were boring, was what he thought as he played on his own in the woods that surrounded the castle, well, within sight of the moat. Some were fawns like him, others unicorn foals, but…

Granted he could tolerate them for the school stuff the adults had had the brilliant idea of bringing back – no offense to the teacher Mister Pauline-, but why would he stay and play with them when he could either be out playing in the woods or learning from Merlin the Enchanter instead?

Plus the woodland creatures could be some nice company too, so it wasn’t like the other kids were the sole option either. Hedgehogs, mallards, squirrels, rabbits, he wasn’t exactly starved for choice, and they were all pretty nice to him.

Wandering around the edge of the part of the woods the adults had deemed ‘safe for playing’, Martin stopped by a young tree to take a bite off a growing twig and rub his antlers against the trunk. The velvet around them had started to itch as of late, and young as he was the little fawn was still pretty sure he’d start shedding it any day now.

At least that’s the way he estimated it, going off what Merlin had taught him about his species.

Idly, he wondered if he could make a magic staff from fallen antlers. Merlin had told him he would need to get one eventually if he wanted to practice magic.

Human magic that is. The ghost had been quite clear that deer like him couldn’t just do magic like unicorns did with their horns.

Good thing he didn’t need to. Human magic made sure of that. Not only would he eventually grow into the powers and abilities Cernunnos claimed he would gain, but Merlin had also promised to teach him about human magic.

From what little Merlin had taught him on the subject already, he should be able to practice human magic – wizardry and druidic rites that is- even though he wasn’t human anymore. Something about it being tied to the soul and not the body or something, Martin hadn’t quite followed. The ghost tended to ramble on at times.His tutor seemed to have a fixation on whether or not returnees’ offspring would have souls able to connect with human magic or not.

Martin didn’t share the fascination. So long that he could do it, he was happy. Druid magic, cleric magic, wizard magic, they said he could do it all, plus some of Meadowbrook’s alchemy because his species was gifted in that field too.

That he was quite content about.

“Bonjour monsieur lapin!” He greeted a dark brown rabbit as it peeked out at the passerbyfrom its burrow, nose twitching. All along the way, the content grin on the fawn’s muzzle didn’t even drop for a second, because why would it?

Things were going well.

For the better part of an hour in this late afternoon, Martin kept playing about in the woods with the local animals, sometimes taking a nibble of some tree bark to fill his stomach between a round of hide-and-seek with a brood of hedgehogs and a game of chase-the-rabbit.

He had yet to win at the latter. The little mammals may not be able to outrun him in a prolonged chase, but they could dash, dip and dodge under shrubbery he had to go around.

Martin was about to call it a day and head back to the castle to help Meadow with cooking dinner when he stopped dead in his tracks, right on the edge of the safe area. His ears twitched, swiveling in a direction he vaguely recalled as where the Golden Tree was.

His vision flashed. A glimpse of the tree with an aura around it, the whole clearing…

Come…

An image. One of the six pedestal-trunks that surrounded the tree, the one with the purple gem.

The vegetation rustled.

By the time Meadow came to this section of the woods calling him for dinner, Martin was far deeper inside Broceliande than the pregnant mare ever suspected.

In Savannah, sometime after midnight, a couple of armed silhouettes were spotted leaving the docks, silently making their way downtown through the darkness offered by the cloudy night. Amandine’s group of veterans, each of them geared up for close quarters combat, having replaced their usual rifles for the P90 SMG’s that otherwise rarely left the armory, along with as much armor as they could carry, trauma kits, flashbang grenades, even some first-aid variant health potions.

None of the bandits that inhabited the Westin on the other bank of the River Savannah noticed when those four silhouettes made their way up to the roof of a building in preparation for what was coming. They did have sentinels, unfortunately for them they were focused inward, intent on keeping their prisoners inside instead of repulsing potential attackers, even after their recent debacle of an attack against the truck stop.

Their funeral.

Artyom knelt on the edge of the roof, the blue dragon quietly gauging the hotel with his three companions behind him. He checked the time. Five to three in the morning.

“Five minutes...” He whispered. “You all ready?”

“All clear.” Bart replied, the unicorn coming to sit on his haunches beside him after he was done connecting a headset to his walkie-talkie. “Channel… eleven, right? Are the vehicles ready?”

“Captain reported they were standing by.” Artyom said, eyeing the sole light he could see coming from the hotel at the moment. A bandit sentinel roaming the prisoners’ floor. “They’re keeping at a distance on the interstate. We call, they’re there in five minutes.”

“Goed, goed...” Bart nodded slowly, running one last check on his P90 before chambering a round with a pull of his telekinesis. “Sri?”

“As ready as you are.” The hippogriff whispered as she took position beside them, her frame significantly enlarged by all the kevlar and ceramic plates she had added to her gear.

It made it hard to fly, but they only needed to cross the river and break through a window.

Doable.

The only thing the three other veterans didn’t know about her gear was the little blessing ritual she had asked Aleksei to do for her prior to leaving the ship, which the cleric was all too happy to comply with. Details were a bit… hazy on what it exactly did. It wasn’t a protection outright, but Aleksei said it would make her aim true and herself less likely to be injured.

It showed as a faintly glowing triskelion symbol on her breast feathers, right now hidden beneath several layers of armor, clothing and tactical gear.

But divine protection was nothing to scoff at, and Sri wanted to stack the deck in her favor as much as possible.

Artyom checked his watch again.

“Three minutes...” The Russian said.

“Stressed?” Scarface asked, the gargoyle being the last to finish checking his gear, having had to pause to adjust his flak jacket so that it didn’t hamper his flying.

“Haven’t fought intelligent creatures since the First Chechen War, and history knows that went well, right?” He huffed. “Hell, Gods knows how that ended for me… Anyway, you all remember the plan?”

“You lead the way and break the window. Me and Sri, we carry Bart...” Scarface casually said. “Once we’re in, two sentinels on our floor to dispatch. I use my spells to ease room clearing, shields for us all, we secure the stairways and the lifts then we wait for reinforcements…”

“We gather the prisoners in the east wing nearest to the staircase...” Bart continued.

“And then we kill anybody who’s dumb enough to put himself between us and the exit.” Sri ended.

“So many ways this can go wrong.” Artyom sighed.

“It won’t.” Bart confidently said. “We’re too good for that.”

“Easy for you to say that. You were active duty before the Event.” Scarface snorted.

“Aw, want me to hold your hand and show you the ropes, satyr?” Bart joked, a grin appearing on the Belgian unicorn’s muzzle.

“Again with that thing?” He rolled his eyes.

“Rumors from our sweetest radio operator have it that you knocked up two dragonesses in Belfast, or so they claim. It’s warranted.”

“Wha-” Scarface’s eyes widened.

“Put a lid on it you two.” Artyom interrupted them. “Clock’s ticking, one minute, open up your wings, we’re going in.”

The rest of the team went silent at that, Sri and Scarface moving over to Bart to grab the unicorn by the straps he had on the back of his heavily modified K9 armor. They positioned themselves behind Artyom, waiting for the dragon to take off.

Thirty seconds.

He gave his SMG one last check. Laser? Ready. Holographic sight? Five bars on the battery. Flashlight… ready if necessary, and the transparent magazine let him see a full load of brass ready to be fired. Artyom’s red eyes zeroed in on their target floor.

His stance shifted. He leaned forward, wings fanning out. Gravity pulled him the rest of the way over the roof’s edge, and the Russian dragon was airborne, a quiet flapping behind him indicating Sri and Scarface were following close behind.

Artyom had picked his target a while ago. There was a window he could see that led into a hallway instead of a regular room, and every few minutes one of the convicts would pass by while they were doing their rounds. He saw the beam of his flashlight more than the actual bandit.

Little difference.

The quiet of the night ended abruptly when the crack of gunfire erupted at long last. One short burst from his P90, its aim true as the low-caliber bullets ripped through the window and ended the life of one gray unicorn clad in makeshift armor, his horn going dark as a hunting rifle and a maglight clattered to the ground with a thud while blood pooled around the night’s first casualty, staining the hotel’s fancy carpet.

A second later, Artyom and his team crashed through the window, the four veterans immediately fanning out to cover all possible angles. Cries were already resounding around the whole floor, some of alarm, some of confusion.

Artyom double-checked the unicorn. Well and truly dead: the bullets had hit center of mass and ripped straight through the armor.

It was Scarface who spotted the second guard. A Diamond Dog, equipped moderately better than the unicorn though still wearing his prison coveralls for some reason. He blindly rushed in their general direction with his flashlight on, trying to figure out what was going on.

Bad decision. With the hallways dark it made it incredibly easy to spot him, a stark comparison to the assault team who was doing their level best to use the darkness to their advantage. A burst of fire from Bart ripped a hole in his guts and made the dog fall over with a very canine-sounding whimper of pain before he started swearing profusely in Spanish.

Bang!

No more swearing. The unicorn lowered his still smoking gun with a scowl.

“Two down. There goes the guards for the floor.” He stated while checking his ammo.

Still more than enough. A perk of the P90, the 50-round mag. He kept an eye on the pitch-black hallway, the darkness only broken up for a brief moment every time the moonlight found a gap through the cloud cover, its silvery rays highlighting the hotel’s fancy carpets and furniture.

Clashing with the furniture were the barred doors. The convicts must have added them at some point, simple bars anchored to the wall and locked in place with padlocks that prevented their prisoners from leaving their rooms. Some of the doors rattled as the rooms’ occupants banged against them begging to be released once they realized someone had come to fight their captors.

On the bright side it looked like the floor was just one long hallway with accesses on either end through staircases that wound themselves around the lifts, meaning their initial tactic had been correct.

“Understood. Time to secure the floor then.” Scarface said sharply, the gargoyle holding an angle that covered the opposite side of the hallway.

“I got the east staircase.” Bart replied.

“Scar, you go with him.” Artyom ordered. “I can take a few hits, so I’ll take the west flank on my own. Sri, you free the prisoners and bring them to the eastwing, ‘member?”

“Prisoners, east side. Got it.” The hippogriff parroted, already grabbing the pry bar she carried on the back of her armor. “Easy.”

She paused when she heard the ceiling rumble under the galloping hooves of the other convicts.

“Uh… looks like they’re more reactive than we thought...” Scarface commented.

“Well time’s a wastin’ then, get to your positions before they overrun us!” Artyom barked before the dragon sprinted towards the other wing. “Sri, you call in the backup once you’re done freeing the prisoners, copy?”

“Solid boss!” She hastily answered before immediately getting down to business opening the room-cells with her pry bar.

No further words were exchanged beyond that. Scarface and Bart rushed towards their own objective after giving her a curt nod, leaving the hippogriff hen on her own in the dark. Not needing to stay in complete darkness knowing her flanks were covered, she was able to turn on her flashlight.

That was the extent of her comfort though, because as the building erupted with more gunfire, she soon found herself once more bemoaning the lack of upper body strength that came with her transformation into a hen.

Seriously, she had a buck strong enough to bash doors open and she couldn’t use a pry bar proper-

“I’m such a fucking idiot...” She said to herself in her native tongue, dropping the pry bar before she rounded up on her hooves and gave a solid buck on one of anchoring points that held the bar that blocked the door.

That worked better. Her hooves effortlessly dislodged the thing from the wall in a small shower of plaster, and the bar blocking off the door fell to the ground with a clang, its padlock now all but useless.

“Jauh lebih baik.” The Indonesian’s beak parted in a satisfied smile just as the door opened outward to release three mares who immediately hugged her and began thanking her profusely.

“Hold the thanks for now, this isn’t over just yet.” The hippogriff said quickly, giving them a pat on the back and holding them at an arm’s length. “If you need to pack anything, grab it now and then move to this side of the hallway...” She pointed a talon towards where she knew Scarface and Bart waited. “But I beg of you: stay out of the fight. Now if you don’t mind...” She turned towards the rest of the hallway and the multiple other barred rooms. “… I got other prisoners to release.”

On the other side of the floor, Artyom arrived at the western staircase a bit late to the party. A group of armed convicts was already entering the little hall that connected the hallway to the lifts and staircase when he ran in at a full sprint.

What followed was, by his own reckoning, shameful, sloppy, and grossly unprofessional. He caught himself swearing profusely in Russian as he bowled over a pegasus stallion wearing tires for armor before he managed to catch his footing and roll back inside the hallway just as the convicts opened fire on him.

Some pistol rounds pinged harmlessly off his scales, a rifle shot dug into the back plate of his armor, but worst of all a searing pain erupted in his wing as some buckshot managed to clip his wing and go through the unarmored membrane.

“The Boss is going to eat you alive asshole!” One of the bandits taunted as they all opened fire on the doorway he was hiding behind.

Eh, at least for now they were contained in the hall and he had a fire door to take cover behind.

Could be worse.

Like taking an AK shot to the knee. His mind unhelpfully supplied.

Artyom shook his head, a fierce growl escaping his throat. Nah, don’t think about it. This ain’t Chechnya. His claws dug into his grenade pouch and pulled out a flashbang.

“Eh pizda, go ask your boss how he likes that one!” He yelled as he blindly tossed the grenade in the room.

Short-fused of course. The bandits barely had the time to scramble before the grenade went off in an explosion that would probably cause long-term hearing damage.

Artyom wasn’t doing long-term tonight. Soon as his flashbang went off, he left cover and showered the group of bandits with a hailstorm of gunfire from his P90, the generous mag capacity more than enough to get rid of the entire group.

“Well… if that wasn’t sloppy I don’t know what is...” He sighed, walking in the room and shoving a fresh mag in his SMG.

He shouldn’t have. As a testament to Earth Ponies’ resilience, one of the bandits had survived despite having caught no less than four bullets in the chest and proceeded to charge the dragon with a loud neigh. Artyom didn’t have the time to reach for his pistol before being bowled over and thrown to the floor where the pony began pummeling him with his hooves.

He saw blood.

With a thunderous roar, fire spewed from his maw, drenching the already wounded pony in magic flames that seared his flesh and made him release an unearthly cry as fur and flesh alike caught fire. He kicked and thrashed from sheer pain as the fire wrought far more damage than Artyom could have ever done with guns alone.

From the ground, the Russian watched the bandit make a run for a window that faced the river side of the hotel and ram his way through, his blazing fur setting the curtains and some of the furniture on fire on the way.

Was he…?

He jumped.

There was a swimming pool at the bottom of the hotel.

In his blind panic, the burning pony missed, instead becoming an unrecognizable ball of smoldering flesh after he splattered on the ground, just a meter off his mark.

Artyom felt his stomach lurch at the sight, but before he had the time to dwell on it, a scent reached his nostrils.

Oh right, the curtains were on fire. And the carpet. And the furniture.

“I really shouldn’t have done that.”

Author's Notes:

Oh look! Some action at long last! I'll admit, I do realize my approach of having characters take their sweet-ass time before actually getting down to action is a bit boring... but I really do want to stress how they don't just simply rush into things and have a MO they stick to.

Makes the whole story feel slow-paced tho', which doesn't help the fact I utterly suck at time-skips.

No idea how to go about improving that though. There's always that scene or detail I feel is necessary to add to buff up the worldbuilding or some such. And I don't even feel like I'm overdoing it with the SoL either.