The Princess of Day laid there in shock, not even noticing the near-torrent of blood raining onto her face.  “D-Discord?”  She tried again, unable to believe she’d just watched a fatal blow.

The Lord of Chaos gasped, trying to gain one more breath of air before the end, as if the only thing that mattered was the iota of comfort one last breath would bring.  Then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed on top of her, what little air left in his lungs leaking out.  “Discord, no, please,” she whispered, voice wavering.  “Keep your eyes open just a little while longer, okay?  Just a little while: Swarm’s on his way, and you know how good he is at this sort of thing.  You know how good he is at fixing people up.  You’ll be back in fighting condition in no time, okay?  But if you go…”

She choked.  “If you go, you’ll be gone forever and ever and I can’t stand knowing somepony gave their life for me.  Especially not somepony who did it out of love.  That’d kill me Discord, because I know you don’t have anything even close to a sense of duty, so that’s the only reason you’d do this and…and if you die and I know that it was just for me…I…I’d…” tears streamed freely down her cheeks.  “I…I…I…”

He started to fade from her grasp, becoming more and more inconsistent.  His fur turned to jelly in her hooves.  “Discord?”  She asked as the jelly began to evaporate into clumps of dust, the last bits of his energy, his very essence, dissipating into the nether.  “No, DISCORD!”  She screamed as even the blood on her face grew warm, disappearing with the great quantum wind which swept all beings away into whatever waited for them in the end.  “DISCORD, PLEASE!  DISCORD…”

He was gone.  Just like that.  His body didn’t weigh on hers, his fur didn’t warm her coat, and she couldn’t even feel his blood on her anymore.  In that moment, she would have given anything to even have that back, to have just something of him left, anything…

“Discord!”  Somebody called out mockingly, and a choir of laughter broke out from the forest around her.  She looked up, gazing upon The Ridchir’s army, surrounding the crater and laughing at her.  At HER.  The Princess of Day, the one who raised the sun in the morning, the one who had protected Equestria for millennia, the one who everypony turned to for advice and wisdom.

The one who had just lost something very near and dear to her.

In an instant, Celestia’s pain melted into anger.  She pushed herself up, her wings lightly cleaning her coat.  Something dark washed over her eyes.  She gazed up at the soldiers with the fury of the sun itself blazing in her eyes, and in an instant the laughter stopped.  

“Why did you all stop laughing?”  She growled in a voice that wasn’t entirely hers.  “It was all so very very VERY funny just a second ago.”

The soldiers responded with a volley of shots, spending every last round of ammo in an attempt to put down the pony in the middle of the crater.  A few mortar shells joined in the havoc, raising more dirt and dust than Discord’s impact had.  A few minutes later, the last of their ammo clips had been expended and every soldier stepped to the pit’s edge, lobbing their grenades.  The forest shook with the additional explosions, the pink-leaved trees trembling and letting a few more leaves drift to the ground.

After the onslaught, one officer leaned over the edge, perked an ear over the dust-filled crater, and listened, waiting for the last of the echoes to fade off into the distance.  He needed to rely on his ears: the explosions had kicked up such a thick cloud of smoke that it would have been impossible to judge what was going on by sight alone.  Rubbing more dirt from his eyes, he cupped a hand over his ear, waiting for something.

Quickly and silently, a horn appeared in front of him.  Before he could cry out in alarm, a dark bolt of pure energy blasted from it, sending him flying back into the forest with half his chest missing.  The soldiers nearest to him watched, eyes widening in horror, as a very different Princess Celestia walked out of the pit, her eyes dark and glowing with red energy.   “Well, fine,” she said in a terrible, growling voice. “If you don’t feel like laughing, I guess I will.”

It started as a chortle in the back of her throat.  She took a step forward, and the laughter grew into a few mild guffaws.  Then she slammed her hooves down on a man’s skull, crushing it like an overripe grapefruit, and the laughter exploded from her chest, booming off the treetops and scattering the remaining soldiers.  She began to hunt them, slicing them down as quickly as she possibly could.  There was no predator-prey dynamic.  There was no splitting them up, tactically dividing and conquering.  This was just butchery: sheer madness done out of love for the feel of fresh blood on one’s body.  There was nowhere to run.  There was nowhere to hide.  Within minutes, twenty men laid dead on the ground, their bodies trampled, burned, and blasted into smithereens.  A minute later, it was fifty.  And still, the laughter continued, reaching a maniacal pitch as she sliced a red path through the enemy’s ranks.  She chortled as she ripped them limb-from-limb, giggled at the sight of terror frozen forever in the bodies’ eyes, and let out a deep belly-laugh as a few gathered together with some branches as weapons, attempting to make a pathetic last stand before she sliced them down with a single, energized swipe of her hoof.

Suddenly, a gray streak appeared from the sky, slamming her into the ground so hard that it created a small crater of its own.  Her eyes ignited with pure rage at the sight of the man in the gray trench coat with his hand around her throat.  Snarling, the creature that used to be the Princess of Day struggled in Mars’ grasp, only to stop when his free hand gripped her horn.  The air hummed with power as bolts danced around the point where he made contact, and slowly, Celestia’s struggles grew weaker and weaker.  Eventually, the darkness left her eyes entirely, and she collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily around Mars’ hand.  He sighed and closed his eyes, sucking in a breath before opening them again.  They were pitch-black.

Celestia struggled as the hand around her throat clenched tighter, her eyes widening in horror as Mars released her horn to stroke her mane.  “When I find your sister,” he whispered.  “I am going to fuck every hole on her body until I have filled each with my seed, and when I run out of those…”

He leaned in close to whisper right into her ear: “…I’ll make more.”  He grinned ear to ear as he raised a fist over her trembling form, letting her watch as it transformed into one long, silvery spike.  “I just wanted you to know that before I killed you.”

Without warning, a crack sounded throughout the forest, and the spike snapped in half with a flash of energy.  Mars screamed in rage as Luna swooped out of the sky, her horn blasting magical bolts.  Dodging effortlessly, the man in the gray trench coat scooped up an assault rifle from one of his fallen comrades and drew a bead on the Princess of Night, only to have the weapon smacked out of his hand by a lightning-quick judo chop from Swarm, now in his business suit.  Mars backed away, producing a small, grey ball from the folds of his uniform.  Swarm’s eyes widened immediately, and he backed off.

“Oh, you recognize this?”  Mars said mockingly.

“I can read the energy signatures off it,” Swarm replied, holding a hand in front of Luna to halt her advance.  “And still, I can’t believe even you would be insane enough to use it.”

“Ah, but can you risk it?”  The grin widened.  “Are you willing to gamble that I won’t drop this?”

“Swarm, what is that?”  Celestia asked, now recovered and back on her hooves.

“It’s a ball of anti-matter, Princess.”  Swarm grimaced.

“Absolutely right, Daddy dearest!  You should be proud: it took me quite a bit of processing power and time to create a ball this size.  Now, the million-dollar question: what happens if I drop it?”

Still glowering, Swarm replied: “If anti-matter comes into contact with normal matter, the result is a massive burst of energy in which both particles are destroyed.”

“Give the man a cigar!”  Mars laughed as he spun the ball on the tip of one finger, allowing everyone to see just how dangerously close to his fingertip it was, their breath caught in their throats.  “By my calculations, the explosion produced by this ball making contact with the ground would crack this planet in half, burning its surface a few dozen times over and annihilating all multicellular life upon it.”

“You wouldn’t!”  Celestia gasped.  “Even you must know that would be suicide!”

“In a way, yes,” Mars replied with actual regret in his voice.  “But, being just an offshoot, my other incarnations would live on to carry out my work, and so it would be a perfectly acceptable sacrifice.”  

With that, he raised the ball over his head, preparing to spike it into the dirt.  Swarm dove, hoping to somehow beat Mars’ superhuman speed, but it was obvious that it wouldn’t be enough.  Celestia dove as well, her wings stretching out to block her sister, as if her body would be enough to shield Luna from the nuclear holocaust to come.  Suddenly, an inch from the ground, a shot rang out. A bullet skimmed right across the top of Mars’ hand, sheering the skin and forcing his fingers to turn over.  Not by much, but enough to give Swarm the extra nanosecond he needed to snatch the ball away, immediately sailing off into the night with it safely tucked under his arm.  Mars screamed in rage as yet another bullet impacted his jaw, sending him reeling.  The Princesses turned to face their savior: a man in a leather jacket with jet-black hair and a .38 Peacemaker revolver blasting away in his hand.

Seething with rage, Mars raised a shield made of pure, shimmering energy against the shots, scooping up a stone with one hand.  “You think this is over!?”  He bellowed.  “You’ve yet to even deal with the second wave!”  He let the stone loose, whipping it over his shoulder and sending it sailing into the night, glowing with eerie red sparks.  As the trio watched in horror, it struck the man in the business suit right in the back, sending him spiraling to the ground as his hold over the little silvery ball wavered.  The man in the leather jacket took off after the man in the business suit, eyes locked on the silvery glint in his brother’s hand.  Immediately, the Princesses rushed Mars, hoping to pin him, but he threw them away with a casual wave of his hand.  

“See you soon, ladies,” Mars grinned as he blasted off into the night, accompanied by a supersonic boom.  The Princesses regained their footing just as the brothers returned.

“Should we go after him?”  Celestia asked, frowning at the stars their enemy had just vanished into.

“You’d never catch him,” Chen replied, joining her stoic gaze on the night sky.  “And even if you could, I wouldn’t recommend it.  We need to gauge the situation in-town and set-up perimeter defenses.”

“You can’t be serious!”  The man in the leather jacket gasped.  “That…THING is using the face of someone we love to intimidate us!  We can’t let him get away with that shit!”

The Princesses eyed each other warily.  Chen put his arm around his brother’s shoulder, a regretful look in his eyes.  “Michael,” he said.  “That thing wasn’t just using Mars’ face.  It was really him, in the flesh.”

The man in the leather jacket’s eyes widened.  “No,” he said.  “No, that can’t be.”

“It is, Michael,” Celestia said, touching her hoof to his other shoulder.  “I know this must hurt to hear, but that was the being you know as Mars.”

“It…no,” Michael shook his head, pulling away from his comrades’ embrace.  “No, there has to be some mistake, you’re wrong!”

“Michael…”

“It can’t be!”  He bellowed, tears gathering in his eyes.

“I was close to him: he was practically in my face when he first assaulted me,” Chen said, barely able to disguise the lump growing in his throat.  “I ran every scan I could, brother.  I’m sorry.”

“No, there was some mistake,” Michael just kept shaking his head.  “I…I raised him from a boy, for God’s sake!  It isn’t him!  It can’t be!”

“Michael,” Chen embraced his brother, who stood there limply as the hug wrapped around his shoulders.  “I am so very, very sorry.  I know how difficult this must be for you.”

The man in the leather jacket stood there, dumbfounded.  The Princesses watched, concern in their eyes, until his gaze darkened.  “If what you’re saying is true…”

“It is, brother, it is.”

“Then there’s no time to waste,” he shoved Chen aside and gazed up at the stars.  “Mars will be gathering his energy right now to open the portal his troops need to pour through.  Odds are, he’s already figured out Nasreen’s misdirection protocols, so he’ll be ready to counter them.  Now, he’s a stubborn sumbitch: he’ll wanna face us directly…”

“Which means our plan is still good,” Luna said.  “The enemy will still launch his attack right at Coltton…”

“Which means the good people of Coltton best prepare,” he continued, eyeing the small village in the distance.  Somewhere far off, high in the mountains surrounding the forest, he could see massive storm clouds gathering.  He grimaced.  “The worst is far from over.” Next Chapter: Chapter XXXI: Explanations Estimated time remaining: 34 Minutes