“We will need a regiment of at least three hundred Earth ponies and twenty or twenty five pegasi with a squad of unicorns trained in shield magic to back up our ground forces.” General Solemn Creed, once again outfitted in his full combat armor, pored over the requests for more materials. It was to be sent to the differing Equestrian fabrication companies to procure the necessary items for armor, weapons, and spare parts.

The jungle-green stallion moved the first paper away to check another which outlined the supply routes for foodstuffs. Scrutinizing it carefully, he filed it away with the materials request. While most thought of Creed to be the stallion in command, that wasn’t entirely true.

“Creed! Get in here!”

He was the pencil pusher for the Grand General at Arms: Hollow Point.

Creed burst into the Grand General’s office, a salute already planted and his eyes steeled with determination. “Are those files finished, General?” a shadowed figure asked from behind a large desk. Sunlight streamed through the windows, spreading light across the end of the desk all the way to the doorway across the room.

Solemn Creed responded promptly. “Yes, ma’am, all commissions and requests for materials and products are complete.”

The shadowy figure gave a dainty chuckle and circled around the desk, coming into the light. “Very good, Creed. Make sure the ponies get their training in for the day, I’ll take care of the rest.” A dainty mare a full head shorter than Creed came into the light, her silver mane shaped into a bob cut. A silver and gold military barrel plate encased her pale blue coat, the insignias of Luna and Celestia entwined on the front.

“Thank you ma’am,” Creed said as he saluted and left the room in a swift and mechanical motion. After seeing the doors swing closed Point sighed. Her first war just had to include an unknown factor that was capable of being parallel, if not stronger, than the Equestrian Military.

This Sevilin Jacobs had proved to be quite the adversary during the Crystal Clash, obliterating the gemstone monstrosities with an almost beastial ferocity. His technology had been displayed a grand total of three times: the weapon brought back by Silk Shot, the slim armor that managed to cripple the guards with but a thought, and the hulking white armor that contained ranged explosives and a type of containment field.

No matter how much the other soldiers swore it wasn’t magic, Point couldn’t possibly believe that the energies displayed could be anything but. For another race to have such power… without a mental or physical limit, frightened her.

Boundless possibilities for such technology, and his race uses it to wage war on their enemies and conquer cities as their own.

Luna’s self-reflections on the memories obtained after the Dreamsculpt had helped greatly in determining Sevilin’s origins and his people’s capabilities.

“If Sevilin has access to a Hades Weapon Platform…” Hollow Point shivered at the destructive nature of Jacobs’ Roman Empire. The word ‘empire’ had never been her favorite, part of the reason for this was King Sombra’s malevolent reign. Many times she considered asking Princess Celestia to simply rename it.

Many things were clear, while some others were not in the slightest. For example: why the Whitetail Woods? What could possibly be there that would be of benefit? Geologically, it was a tactical nightmare for defense from northern attacks. Furthermore, there was nowhere to escape to if need be: the mountains prevented escape to the east, the west held only more enemy strongholds, and the sea blocked their southern exit.

Starring at the map on her desk, she just couldn’t understand what Sevilin Jacobs was doing in such a strategically weak position. The mountain range defended them from the east, but there were no major countries hostile to Sanctuary, nor did they know about them, currently.

Hollow Point sighed, using a hoof to massage her neck. One city of ragtag species against the largest superpower on the planet; the odds looked better than good. Even with Sevilin’s rather frightening capabilities while within his armor, he was still only one soldier. Without a formidable military force, one that would also outnumber Equestria’s, Sanctuary was doomed.

Pushing off of her desk, Hollow Point decided to head to the mailroom. With all plans and preparations under way, there wasn’t much for her to occupy herself with professionally.  

Hollow let a contented smile grace her lips on her way back to her office. A letter from her niece, Brush Tip, informed the Grand General of the small filly’s progress in the seventh grade.

Hollow Point slipped into her office and sat down at her desk, sitting down in her comfortable chair with her hooves curled to her chest. The letter went into explicit detail on how Brush was doing in Equestrian History.

The latest thing we learned in class was The Colossus Strike. It was a big meteor that hit in the Whitetail Woods hundreds of thousands of years ago. After that, the Magical Revolution happened and the powerful mages began to heal the planet. It took a long time (ten thousand years!) but they did it in the end! It just goes to show how great magic is, huh?

Hollow Point smiled fondly at her niece’s eagerness to learn. No matter what the subject was, she always…

“Wait… The Whitetail Woods?” she thought, taking a pause to read the letter again, this time more carefully.

…a big meteor that hit in the Whitetail Woods hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Hollow placed the letter to her right and practically threw herself onto the desk, examining Sanctuary and its position once again. Right up against the mountainside, with heavy metal walls going underground…

Looking behind the city and focusing on the mountains, she traced the bulge where the mountains had grown around, leaving the tall, rocky hillside without any massive peaks. Furthermore, the mountains around said area were shorter than the others, with veritable chunks missing from them.

“Perhaps the meteor wasn’t a meteor at all,” Hollow Point whispered to herself. If Sevilin was the military might that his memories claimed, then he was either a terrible strategist or a vehement protector of something beneath the mountains.

Hollow Point would bet her life savings on the latter.

“Princess Luna, I have come to ask something of you. My request is related to the war effort against Sanctuary.” Hollow Point’s arrival had certainly turned a few heads in the throne room, but her request was what boggled their minds.

“What can I help you with, Grand General at Arms?” Luna asked.

“Princess Luna, could you reach back into Sevilin’s borrowed memories and search for anything near the size of The Colossus Strike meteor?”

The question sucked the air from the room, with the Grand General bowing before the Princesses and with Luna’s face stuck in a confused stare. Recomposing herself, Luna cleared her throat and continued on with the conversation.

“Of what importance does The Colossus Strike have with this war? The event took place tens of thousands of years before my sister and I were even borne into this world.” Hollow Point stood tall and stared her Princess in the eyes, her steely will being transitioned into her speech.

“I believe that Sevilin is hiding a massive weapon of some kind. If he is truly as old as his memories say, and if he has successfully repelled attacks during battles as complex as what you saw, then I don’t believe he would choose such a place to set up headquarters.”

“The very spot is a tactical nightmare: he’d be fighting our forces off from the north, east, and west simultaneously. There is no possibility of winning, or even a chance at survival, against those odds.” Hollow Point took a few steps up to Luna, bringing herself ever closer.

“That is, unless he has a weapon that he’s confident enough in to crush us from any angle we attack. You’ve seen the kinds of weapons his people harness, Princess: a Hades Weapon Platform, a Zeus Singularity, Hermes Shocktrooper Mechs. I worry for our forces if he even has a fraction of the technology you described to us from his memories.”

Princess Luna closed her eyes in thought, mulling over this explanation very carefully. “I will need to take some time and energy to sift through the memories… they can be… quite daunting in nature.”

Hollow Point backed down from the steps and bowed deeply. “Thank you, Princess.”

Sevilin stood in front of the massive Alexandria doors once again. Instead of asking for his identification, the Library recognized the armor immediately and unsealed for the titanic mechanized man.

Sevilin strode into the massive complex, the machines shifting and whirring occasionally, as if restless and wanting to work. Sevilin’s intention, thankfully, was exactly that. With a deep, grating voice like rust be scraped across a hollow pipe, Sevilin gave an order that drove the entire complex into a busy frenzy.

“Begin troop construction.”

“Order locked: Troop Construction. Type and quantity?” the machine asked.

“Centurions, eleven hundred of them.” Sevilin crossed his thick metallic arms and continued to glare at the factory floor several stories below. Instantaneously, the machine confirmed his order and began to pull from the metals and resources the Sanctuary Alloy Dogs had mined over several months.

Sure, they wouldn’t be as high quality as they could be, what with limited working materials, but it was the numbers that counted. “With any luck,” Sevilin thought, “our numbers and these machines will send them packing.”

The rhythmic, regularly collisions of space-age materials against iron and steel created a dark, foreboding symphony that carried through the Library Alexandria. Closing his eyes, Sevilin cleared his mind and lost himself momentarily in the song of war. He slowly opened his eyes within the suit and sighed.

Pulling up the Library’s interface, he began checking records. The stored logs detailed trooper launches, power divisions, section lockdowns, outside stimuli, fleet movements, production stages and so on. What he was looking for, specifically, was set two hundred thousand and seventy-eight years in the past.

Pulling the footage from the cameras up, he stared at the massive wall of encroaching ships. Encroaching Xerothanian ships. Xerothan, the rival empire of the Romans, and the ultimate finishing piece to their demise. Ludicrously advanced, strong-willed, and committed to ensuring freedom amongst the galaxy. Their mantra clashed directly with the Romans’ creed of assimilation or destruction.

After banding together with the six other races to form the Coalition… well, you know the rest.

While sustaining heavy damage to their fleet, the battle found itself at the edge of an event horizon. Within seconds, entire ships and floating hunks of debris were pulled into the invisible singularity, ripped from one universe and thrown into another.

Sevilin continued to watch the battle through the eyes of his past, examining every killing blow he made aboard enemy ships, every pilot he doomed to the vacuum of space, and every pulse from his Zeus Caster that rent the armor from his foes like tinfoil, frying them to a crisp before they even blinked.

The human watched as the Library was pulled into the singularity, watching it disappear in the silence of space. He watched his own futile efforts to stop the bank of human knowledge, going so far as to drive the Nero against it.

He watched as he was flung from the ship’s bridge. He watched as he made the decision to die with his brothers and sisters.

He watched everything as it ceased to exist.

And he watched everything as his existence began again on Terran. Had the Gods cursed him to this existence? Was his punishment to be wrenched from his people and thrust into a world that was unprepared for the horrors of his civilization. Perhaps he was meant to be destroyed by the two god-like Princesses who swept through the battlefield like demons from Hell.

“No,” Sevilin declared, letting his clawed metallic fingers scrape against the alloy of his pole arm. His grasp locked the weapon within his talons, and within the suit his face twitched in angry defiance. “The Gods have not forsaken me like my people did them.”

“I have been placed here to redeem those who have fallen from grace. The Gods are not done with me yet. This is no punishment, this is a reckoning for Equestria. They will know the will, might, and strength of our unity.”

Sevilin shut down the displays within his suit and turned to leave the Library. “And our Unity is unbreakable.”

Princess Luna closed her eyes as she slipped into the warm bath. The mixture of ointments and oils within the steaming water allowed her to better focus on her Dreamsculpt capabilities, honing her telepathic senses to a razor edge.

She exhaled a pent up breath and let all her stress fall away, falling with the stress, she slipped under the covers of sleep.

“FIRE!”

Luna’s eyes opened to a brilliant explosion of light, sound, and force. The entire space shook with the force of thousands of artillery weapons expelling death upon their targets. Soldiers armored in bronze-colored space alloys and armed with blades and firearms ran to and fro, rushing to their posts and preparing their nerves for the coming onslaught.

“RETURN FIRE INCOMING! BRACE YOURSELVES,” a voice bellowed above the clamor.

All at once, the ship Luna found herself on rocked as if being battered by a monstrous storm, causing the alicorn’s teeth to chatter. Vibrations rang throughout the massive beams overhead before the shaking passed.

A great roar rattled Luna’s eardrums, and she watched hundreds of triangular Roman fighter-craft rush out to meet the tens of thousands of Coalition ships that threatened them. This was an unfamiliar memory to Luna. Armored humans ran past her, hurrying in their suits of metal and power to fend off their greatest foe.

A streak of light sped toward the massive window looking out into the fray, and Luna had barely a second before everything went stark white.

Blinking her eyes, she now found herself within a command deck of sorts. It was huge, much larger than any space she had witnessed within these memories. In her sights she saw four figures: three titanic humanoids and one smaller golden man.

The three huge suits of maroon armor each had small differences in armaments or decoration. For instance, one had long golden horns that shone with every flash of explosive fury outside in the silent void. Another carried a circular shield and a large axe. The last seemed to be weighed down with every weapon available at the humans’ disposal.

The golden man lacked the intimidation of his soldiers, though Luna had witnessed the ruthless capabilities of the being’s tactical prowess within other glimpses of Sevilin’s mind.

“Vuso. Aid the Continental with their attempts to fend off the enemy fliers.” The human armed to the teeth nodded and ran to an airlock with more speed than Luna expected from such heavy armor. “Butina. You will support the troops on the Neptune with evacuation. The enemy has boarded them, so hurry.” The human with axe and shield rushed to another airlock.

The emperor, clad in his golden armor, sighed sorrowfully. As Butina was fired out from the airlock, the emperor held his head in one hand, reclining in the red and gold throne. “Sevilin.” The last human looked over at his master, his yellow retinal systems glaring into the emperor’s faceplate.

“Yes, my liege?”

“Stay here with me and watch our Empire die.”