"The wind began to switch, the room to pitch, and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch!" laughed the pale mare. "Off you go, Octy." Vinyl released her friend and began to drift away. "Say hello to Beakie for me, and go kick tail!"

"Wait, Vinyl!" the earth pony yelled as the roar around them grew louder, "how... how will I know that I am really out, and it is not just another figment of my mind?"

"Eh. Ever go snow-skiing?"

"What? N-no!"

"I love doing that, it's such a rush!" The vampire grinned wide as the winds swirled them back and forth around one another. "Hate the cold, though. Brrrr. Anyway, what they tell you to do if you get trapped by an avalanche is to spit."

"Avalanche?" Octavia yelled uncertainly.

"Yeah. You spit to find out which way down is. If it falls up, you're upside-down. If it falls down and hits you in the face, you're downside-up." Vinyl shrugged, apparently thinking her nonsense was somehow perfectly clear. "Dreams work the same."

"But that does not make any-"

"I'm sorry, who's the expert here?" The pale mare grinned as she fell away into the abyss. "Showtime, Octy!" Octavia saw her friend's purple shades growing larger and larger in the darkness until they suddenly vanished. Nothingness surrounded her for a moment, but she still felt as though she was falling. She crashed back into the floor of the hotel and twitched from head to hoof for a few seconds with her eyelids still shut. The roar that had swirled around her mind was still there, if anything it had only gotten louder. At first she thought it might be the dragon. Octavia raised her head and forced her eyes open, only to find her vision filled by a cracked helmet visor, and behind it the eyes of an angry gryphon.

"On your hooves, asset!"

Octavia bounced upright, her stiff limbs responding automatically to the barked order.

"Shift back two, right now!" he growled. She backed up two steps. He moved forward the same distance to keep his armored beak right in her face. Her comm-bead was still in her ear, and her cello case was still on her back. He had relieved her of her pistol, though. On his back was a misshapen bag, and she could see blood oozing down the outside of his helmet. "Is your throat torn out, asset?"

"No, sir!" she replied groggily. Her heart thudded against her ribs. Had it stopped beating entirely while she was unconscious? How long had she been out?

"Are you confused about your loyalties?"

"No, sir!"

He stepped back, out of her face, and lowered his voice. "Then, please explain to me why I found you sleeping on the job."

"Sir, I-" she began, but suddenly he was in her face again.

"Does The Organization pay by the hour, asset?" He flexed his wings. She noticed one of them bent oddly. "Do we just have mares and material to throw about? Will somepony else be around to cover your duties if you need a nap?"

"No, sir."

"Did I give you permission to die, or to rest, or to do anything except kill one nutball cultist leader?"

"No, sir." Octavia coughed, then bent her head and hacked something transparent out onto the floor. It did not fall back up into her face. She shook her head and straightened up. Her thoughts were clearer now.

The gryphon glowered. She saw blood ooze down into his eye from a cut, but he blinked it away and kept glaring. There had been an entire class about glaring on Pendulum Island. "What are you?"

"An asset of the Bon Hadescream Organization, sir."

"What is your function?"

"To eliminate threats to Her Solar Majesty's nation and populace, sir."

"When do you stop?"

"Not until the mission is complete, sir." It was a simple thing, being yelled at and forced to answer, but it shook the last of the figments from her mind. Octavia was ready to finish her assignment.

He stepped back, coughed, and looked her over. "Good. You're stable." Under his breath, she could hear him grumble something. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the elevator. "Time's up, asset. We're scrubbing the mission and pulling out."

She stared at him in shock. "Where will we go? And... and we cannot leave, the cultists have what they need to summon a dragon. We have to stop-"

The gyphon glared at her. "The window of opportunity for that has closed. We've taken casualties." He shifted the misshapen dark sack on his back. Octavia realized it was a body bag. She swallowed hard as she realized what must be inside. While she could regenerate from almost any injury, the operatives were merely common mortals with armor, weapons, and a will to fight the madness. Few of them had grown up like the gryphon, as a ward of a secret society. All across Equestria, most operatives were simply ponies fighting for their homes. "The enemy has consolidated their forces. We do not have the resources to stop them. Withdrawal is the only tactical choice available."

Octavia realized she must have been unconscious for a short while. Facts began falling into place in her mind. By now, Scoffing Song would have reached the ground floor and set up her summoning circle in the atrium. Likely with some kind of protective bubble as well. The dragon would be summoned, there was no way they could prevent that now. And yet... that was good. That was excellent, actually. Provided that the tidbits of knowledge she had dug up were accurate, the situation was still salvageable. Not with weapons, but maybe with music. She looked into Rollins' eyes and saw fear. He was terrified, but he was still trying to think clearly and act decisively. The gryphon was blaming himself for throwing the team into this mess, and for leaving her without support. That was why he had come to recover her himself when she had stopped responding over the comm-link. The pegasus who had flown up to the roof with him was likely the one in that body bag, her remains technomagically preserved in the hope the Organization's doctors might somehow produce a miracle. He knew he had failed all of them, just as Octavia had failed her mission, she saw that in his eyes. But he was also silently begging her to give him another option, one that would make the blood spilled here worth it. Not for his sake, but for theirs.

"I can stop them, sir."

"They put you down once."

"Not with bullets."

"No?" He nodded. "I thought as much. No holes in your uniform. What, then?"

"Some kind of mind-trickery I was not expecting, but my domitor protected me from the worst of it." She saw his eyes narrow when she referred to Vinyl with that word.

"We're out of time, Asset. I can't let you." The gryphon glared hard at her. "For all I know, you're compromised, and I'd be letting you run off to join the cultists' ranks."

"If I do not stop her, this city will be destroyed." If not by the dragon then by ARGUS' response when they finally noticed the monster. "What have we to lose?"

Rollins looked away, then reached up and pulled off his shattered helmet. It had already taken too much damage to be useful anyway. Blood oozed from a gash down the side of his head, but she had seen him with worse injuries. "You'd be on your own. I can't come and wake you up again. The other Operatives are disengaging and pulling back. Once the cultists started mobbing and arming up, the tide turned. What do you have in mind that will not only stop the dragon, but the small army of crazies too?"

The grey mare smiled, and stretched her front legs. "I am going to play a song." She shifted her cello case on her back.

Rollins stared at her for a long moment with a deep scowl on his beak. Then he sighed. "Strings... can you really pull this mission back out of the chamberpot?"

She nodded. "Yes sir. I will not fail you again."

He shook his head. "Wrong mindset. You can't let the fear of past failure weigh you down, Asset. You have to push, and struggle, and reach a little higher each time." She could tell he was saying it for his own sake as much as hers. "Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Anypony else, I'd tell you to shut up and follow me. But you're an Asset, that means you're a wild card to be played when the chips are down. I've seen you do the impossible before, and I believe you can do it again. The Lady Bon Hadescream believes that too, or she wouldn't put you in the field." Rollins shifted the weight on his back. "I need you to get down there and prove her right once more."

Octavia felt refreshed, as though she had just enjoyed a nice nap rather than a terrifying romp through old memories. She glanced down at the spittle on the floor. This was the Real World. The cellist knew she could win here. "Yes sir, I can do that."

The gryphon studied her for a few seconds longer, then stepped to one side. "All-right, then." He held out her pistol, butt-first and safety on. She took it and slipped it into her holster. "Request approved." He turned and marched to the elevator, dug his claws into the crack where the two doors met, and pried them apart with some grunting and cursing. "Power's out for the whole building. Don't ask." Things had been going so well. The two cultist engineers had surrendered and repented. They had secretly been thinking of leaving the cult, believing it was not a place where a foal should be raised, but knew Scoffing Song would never allow it. With their help, the operatives had begun a safe shutdown of the power room, which went fine right up until the point where more guards stormed in and began attacking everything that moved. There had been too many of them, and they were too coordinated to be a shift-change. The only explanation was that Scoffing Song had sent more guards to vital areas, with orders to kill everything. Either she was trying to eliminate unneeded followers, or she realized that her fortress was being overrun. She wouldn't need electricity for the ritual, just magic. The guards had blown out a control panel with a poorly-thrown spear and overloaded something, sending the entire room into darkness. That had been a mistake. Never fight a highly-trained cat with wings in the dark. Rollins had taken them out, but not fast enough. He was never fast enough, or strong enough, or good enough.

Octavia wasted no time, charging toward the elevator and leaping across the gap to grab the cable that dangled down the middle of the shaft.

"Strings!" Wind-one called after her. She wrapped her lower legs around the cable, then looked back at him.

"Yes, sir?"

The gryphon pulled his shattered helmet back on. He might not have been good enough, but he was still a Pendulum rat. Remorse is something you wallow in after the mission is complete. "Kill bodies."

"Aye, Lieutenant." And with that, the grey ghoul slid down into the darkness.

Author's Notes:

This chapter is a transitional one, sort of like changing flights at an airport. It's short, but hopefully meaningful. I'm so happy to see how many readers, especially long-term readers, are checking out these chapters. When I started the story up again, I didn't know if anyone would actually read these installments! However, I put in the effort because I personally wanted to finish out this tale. It has been rattling around in my brain since I first began to tell it long ago. Even though Bon Hadescream has never been incredibly popular, it has enjoyed a very steady readership and some extremely kind comments. (Writing that reminded me of something similar said by the team behind the Deadpool comic series.) New readers are also favoriting the story, which is a surprise and a delight to me.

More readers would of course be nice, but I hope to earn that with continued regular updates until this story arc is complete. If you know someone who might enjoy this story, pass it along to them! As always, I'm reading all the comments, and though I might not respond I take all of them under advisement.