The Alicorn’s Star was not what she had expected.

She had imagined, briefly, before the damn zomponies began waking up and appearing from seemingly nowhere, that the Star might be in the form of a pony-universal long arm that could be operated by hoof or horn. Or perhaps a weapon component for a Steel Ranger power armor suit—she knew from research back home that those things could be outfitted with enough firepower to level half a city block. Miniguns, magazine-fed grenade launchers, small rocket launchers, and machine guns of various calibers ranging from 5.56mm all the way up to a .50-caliber anti-material piece. MEW weaponry could even be rigged to be powered by the suit’s own onboard power supply, virtually eliminating the need to ever reload the things. She’d had some old magazines in her little personal library that had her up late at night, back when she had nights to herself, gazing upon images of MEW weaponry patterned after a ballistic minigun and said to be capable of reducing entire platoons to ash in seconds. And there’d been talk amongst military officials, one magazine article stated, of having a platoon of Steel Rangers outfitted with these new weapons for field testing in battle. She could imagine the effect such a sight might have had on the zebras—a line of steel-encased ponies, trudging through the scarred, barren fields of war, with MEW-type miniguns spitting out lasers like water hoses and covering their entire field of vision with lances of bright pinkish-red death. Any living thing in front of them would not have been long for the world.

Project Alicorn’s Star was none of this. In its present form only a unicorn or a griffon could make any use of the squared-butt style revolver grip, though on closer inspection she found that the weapon had been designed with some degree of modularity. The “grip”, as it was, was attached to the weapon receiver by two screws, and could be removed and switched out alongside the trigger group housing with fire control parts more suited to an earth or pegasus pony if needed. In overall design, the whole thing was essentially a large-frame, motorized revolver MEW, with the swing-out cylinder section used to load and remove the cylindrical batteries. There were a total of ten of these batteries, all marked RS-1 through -10 and labeled “PROTOTYPE BREEDER MF-B5”. She didn’t have a deep understanding of MEW technology, but she was aware of a line of MEW weaponry dubbed “Breeder-type” which utilized internal self-regenerating spark batteries to power the weapon. Under normal circumstances, the battery’s charge couldn’t be expended all at once, but slowly recharged itself back to capacity as it was discharged. If the user just pulled the trigger as fast as possible, they would probably get around twenty-one shots and then have to wait for the battery to recharge itself over about thirty seconds, or make do with only getting one or two shots at a time in combat. But the battery was usually an intrinsic component of the weapon and not normally accessible to the operator like this.

The barrel defied comprehension. So far as she could tell, it was six and a half inches long, and it was actually TWO barrels, housed inside a box-shaped shroud, with the small barrel on the top and a much larger barrel underneath. This shroud component stretched the entire length of the barrels and was lined with a few powered light diodes, a pair of rubberized buttons on the right side, and a small display screen on the left that at present was powered off. She couldn’t be certain, but it looked like the lower half of the barrel shroud might have actually been designed to unlock and expand outward—she could see a tiny seam gap in the metal, right in the middle of the shroud, and when she tugged at the lower half she swore she could feel it move slightly.

One nice touch, though, was the engraved full-color replica of Princess Celestia’s cutie mark on the left side of the barrel section, and Princess Luna’s on the right side. A similar engraving of Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark was also etched in on the rear of the receiver, where the manufacturer’s logo normally would have been. Sling wondered if these cosmetics had been added by the facility staff to acknowledge Twilight’s efforts to duplicate the powers of an alicorn, or for some other unfathomable reason.

The only break she had in the find was that the Alicorn’s Star’s case, despite its keypad being ruined beyond repair, was made of metal, and a cutting torch borrowed from Misty’s gear had the weapon freed of its prison within a couple of minutes. It didn’t even appear to have suffered any serious damage from being left in here unattended with no one to perform maintenance on it in nearly two centuries.

Once she had the Alicorn’s Star and its ammunition tucked into her gear belt she made a more detailed search of the pistol armory for any information or documentation on the Alicorn’s Star…and turned up pretty much everything else EXCEPT that. Her most curious find was a considerable cache of ammunition in just about every pistol caliber she could name, and several that she’d never seen or read about before. The largest stockpile belonged to a shortened 10mm cartridge variant and consisted of FMJs and hollow points in bullet weights of between 155 to 180 grains. The one can of shortened 10mm FMJ rounds she’d opened were of a flat-nose type, not something she was used to seeing in a semi-automatic since that type of FMJ didn’t always feed well. Probably helped reduce deflection if it hit bone, though. She had barely begun to sift through the dozens of climate-sealed weapon cases stacked up against the wall on the left side of the room when she heard Leon’s voice calling out her to from a distant quarter of the lab.

“Sling, firing range! Got some loot!”

She dropped her search of the gun cases and darted out of the room, banking right and charging for the lab’s firing range at a quick jog. Every second gone was one less moment in Misty’s life, and they needed to get a plan in motion in the next ten minutes.

She burst through the firing range door and managed to not freak out or swoon over the collection of treasures that Leon had procured from the rifle armory. Mostly ammo cans, with one popped open already to reveal pristine, brightly shining brass-cased .223 rounds with what appeared to be opaque plastic red tips atop the bullets. There were also a pair of short, strange looking weapons with what she would describe as having…donut grips, near the front of the weapon, underneath the barrel. A long, opaque plastic magazine sat atop the weapon in a horizontal position, with a military drab ballistic nylon sling harness wrapped around the weapon’s stock body at the rear, complete with a snap-in buckle attachment point. That last detail was enough to spark old memories of home and give her recognition of the strange weapons, if not the caliber these particular two fired. Then there was a large, black plastic case, sitting next to a pair of M-type rifles, with quad rail forends and what looked like a pair of hex bolts at the bottom rear of the forend. What little of the barrel nut she could see through the forend’s vent gaps was more puzzling than enlightening, as it was much longer and thicker than what she’d seen on other M-types. Maybe it was doubling as a heat sink?

…and then a stack of what looked like…optics cases? At least, that’s what she thought they were, judging almost solely by the image of a red circle with a crosshair in the center plastered on the sides of the cases. Four in total.

“Sweet haul, what kind of bullets are those?” she asked briskly, moving around him to get a better look at the pile of gun loot he had collected.

She snaked the topmost case off and popped it open as he answered—he went as far as to take a round out of the can and set it on the interior foam of the case while she pried the box-like optic out of its nest. “Was hoping you might have a clue. Never seen these before.”

She split her attention between the optic and the cartridge, though she only gave the bullet a passing glance once she’d studied the tip of it enough to surmise what it could have been. “What else would you expect in an R&D facility? This bullet could be useful, though. Looks like a polymer tipped round, probably to help initiate expansion on impact, without the risk of a clogged cavity like a traditional hollow point might suffer. Does the can say what bullet weight these are?”

“Says sixty-two-g-r-p-t-b, so I guess around sixty-two grains, and…wow, over thirty-two hundred feet per second? These are meant for people.”

Way too fast for that caliber, it’s gotta be overloaded. “Find any kind of documentation on those in that armory? Pressure specs would be good to have if we plan on using these beyond today.”

Leon’s left talon pulled a tattered, manila file folder out from under a couple of rifle magazines and tapped it into her workspace on the table. “Didn’t give it a good look when I found it, but there it is—”

She pulled the folder open and started going through the ten-page report inside as fast as her eyes could read it sensibly. First page was just an overview of the state of .223/5.56 ammo at the time of the war over two centuries ago, second page looked like…weird, a history of gunpowder propellants? It was the fourth page that had her desired information—

“Ah, there we are, bullet construction and pressure specs….wow, just like normal .223 rounds, must be using some special kind of propellant to achieve those velocities without a pressure spike. Bullet looks weird, there’s a cutaway picture of one in here. Solid lead core, no steel tip…looks like the plastic tip is meant to help initiate expansion. Weird thing is, the bottom half of the bullet has a thicker copper jacket that’s manabonded to the lead...”

“…that’s not what I wanted to hear,” Leon mumbled as he took a claw-sized helping of poly-tip rounds out of the ammo can and set them onto the table in a loose pile. “I’m getting a theory about why your .44 put one down for good with a headshot when you started cussing out the walls. Were you using those manaburst rounds of Rico’s by mistake?”

She silently cursed at herself for having made the same mistake with Grayhawk that she’d made with her 9-mil, and both in the same day—she’d only figured it out when she’d reloaded Grayhawk a few minutes ago and did a quick scrying spell on the three live cartridges left in the cylinder, and found a mana-charge imbedded inside one of the bullets. The foul swearing she’d unleashed at herself had caused her own ears to ring for a couple minutes, enough time for her to discern that a third of her .44 Mag rounds were similarly enchanted. Maybe some of them got mixed in with the regular .44s by mistake back at Rico’s stable when they were being packed. “Yeah, and I think I know what you’re getting at,” she confirmed angrily. “If these things are the result of an amplified zebra magic ritual, it’s possible that only magically empowered weapons or bullets will be capable of killing them permanently. The partially manabonded bullets might be an issue.”

“This re-arming plan isn’t working out well so far,” he growled, tapping a claw against the frame of one of the PDWs. “What about these SMGs here? Brought ‘em for you to look at, maybe you know more than me. I think I’ve seen them once or twice out in the wastes, but not in action. Not sure what caliber they are.”

Her magic went back to the boxy optical sight, flipping it about in search of a battery compartment and decided that the cylindrical portion of the sight base at the front was probably what she was looking for. A hard twist on the slotted cap on the left end confirmed her suspicions, though the battery compartment itself was empty. But at least it looked relatively pristine and in working order, for something over two hundred years old. “Had an old, broken one in the armory back home in the one-one-five. There was a small history file with it that called it a Personal Defense Weapon, Project 90-10. So far as I know the project explored several different caliber variants, but the Equestrian military went with a pony-friendly 10mm model to make use of its existing munitions stockpile. Cut the magazine capacity down to like, half of what it was supposed to be, and the early 10mm variant turned out to be a bitch to keep running. It wasn’t designed for the recoil and pressures the 10mm was putting out and they usually only had a service life of 5,000 rounds. The 90-10c revision fixed the durability problem. These two look like an alternative caliber prototype, might fire a .22 caliber bullet, but the magazines aren’t wide enough for a .223 or 5.56 and like every other damn gun in the prairie only a unicorn or a griffon could use it. Maybe something roughly the length of a 10mm?”

The griffon huffed lightly as he spun around and zipped towards the exit. “Don’t think we have time to go through the entire armory here for something I don’t even know the name of. I’ll take one more look around for some better .223s, but if I don’t find anything we’ll have to come up with a new plan in three minutes. Take one of the optics and get your rifle zeroed.”

She scoured the table for tools and any extraneous parts or components related to these new optical sights, and found that Leon had thought ahead and scrounged up two packs of small spark batteries for the pile of attachments he’d found. She threw one into the sight and closed it up, and started clicking buttons on the side until she saw the sight’s reticle flash on inside th—

Ooooh, it’s one of those managraphic reflex sights, her inner, silent voice cooed in awe as she watched the red circle with its center dot float about inside the sight’s viewing window. It appeared to be projecting out in front of the sight itself when she looked through it, though she knew otherwise. She’d have to bug Rally for those MEW tech magazines of hers later; at least two of them had some extensive articles on them and she’d only given them a once-over the other day.

Another day, she might have been ecstatic to find such a valuable piece of technology. But it was hard to be excited about anything when someone was slowing dying to a magical curse in the next room. With a frustrated huff she unslung her rifle from her body and quickly unloaded it so she could clamp the optic onto its topside rail, then turned her attention to the black rifles nearby. While they seemed to be newer-model M-series rifles, there were enough modifications done to them to suggest that significant engineering research and development had been done on these. Each rifle bore the symbol of a winged phoenix inside a circle of flame, the telltale mark of a Phoenix Arms gun. Add in the quad railed for ends and heavy barrel, and the weight balance was probably off, too far f—

…hunh, that’s actually pretty damned light, six…maybe seven pounds, she corrected herself the moment she lifted one up. She still had to put a second telekinesis spell on the forend to hold the thing up, but it wasn’t as bad as it usually was. The sixteen-inch barrel all but consigned the rifle to a life of combat within three hundred yards, but that was still pretty far out for her. The hex bolts on the forend mystified her, though.

Her magic pulled the adjustment tool for the optical sight from its case and floated it over to a bench rest that had been hastily set up in one of the firing lanes, complete with a rifle vice to secure her weapon into it. Given that Leon had thought ahead to have both sight and battery already gathered together when she’d answered his call, she wasn’t surprised to see that he’d also managed to set up a couple of targets on the firing range. Nothing fancy, just a bullseye paper target stapled to a target stand at the end of the firing range, which the black lettering on the floor beneath it proclaimed “25 M”. The hard part was getting a proper sight picture—the rifle vice was designed as a “universal” type, which meant that it didn’t really fit any one particular weapon all that well, and her backwards rifle with its rear-mounted magazine didn’t help matters any. She had to settle for clamping down the buttstock at the back and folding out the foregrip on the gun to stabilize it enough to keep it steady, and even then getting a proper eye alignment with the optical sight, even with its unlimited eye relief and generous viewing window, wasn’t easy. It took her roughly ten shots of her personal .223 supply before she could get the rounds to start hitting the bullseye, and another five shots to confirm that the sight’s zero was set and accurate for the distance.

Then came the fun part—test firing the Alicorn’s Star.

She set the rifle aside and pulled the machine rest off the bench, and drew the AS and studied the frame for a few moments to try and discern its controls. Cylinder latch release was where she was accustomed to seeing it, on the left side of the frame, though the small display screen on the back where the hammer normally would be was not. Neither was the sliding switch directly below it, which was currently set to the left, next to a red square. There was a green circle with a short line in the middle that went upward on the other side, though…maybe that was the power switc—

—the display screen lit up in a deep blue the moment the switch was popped to the right, and shortly afterward was filled with a “100%” in white digits. Directly below the percentage number was a “MODE 1” indicator…

Great, wonder what that’s about….

The sight picture, at least, was exceptionally quick to pick up once she lined up a shot on the target. And the trigger was a straight blade style, didn’t look like it had a lot of travel in it. She pressed it back with a light telekinetic touch, around five pounds, and that seemed to be enough to pull it fully rearward—

The report was quite loud for a MEW, a sizzling, electric-like POW! that had her grateful she’d had the sense to keep her horn ring’s sound suppression active. The shot was a short but dense violet bolt that set the target on fire and quickly reduced it to flittering ashes, though she was pretty sure that was only because it was made of paper and not because of some special enchanted property of the weapon itself. The second target was likewise almost instantly incinerated with the second shot, and Sling took note of the power percentage dropping down to “87%” before slowly building back up by roughly one percent every second. Assuming the cell was on a constant regeneration cycle, she assumed the weapon to be capable of firing between seventeen to twenty shots in quick succession, with a recharge time of about a minute and forty seconds.

An eternity in a gunfight. That had been the biggest knock on Breeder-type MEWs, the user had to space their shots out so as not to drain the battery too quickly, and they weren’t as powerful as a standard MEW using replaceable spark batteries. If that was all the Alicorn’s Star was meant to fix, then she judged the project to have been a colossal waste of resources.

Then she recalled the secondary barrel underneath, and started fiddling about the gun to see if there was some kind of button or switch she could push in an—

Ah, there we are, she noted with satisfaction when she found such a thing on the right side of the frame—a bright orange translucent button, currently dull, and pressed it down—

—the secondary barrel immediately clicked and popped open, extending out the sides and exposing the arcane emitter array within it with a sharp, electric chirping sound. At the same time, the indicator on the display screen changed from “MODE 1” to “MODE 2”, and the orange button was now glowing brightly.

She allowed a childish squeal to escape her throat as she pulled the trigger back and unleashed an intensely bright, orange-hot beam from the secondary barrel with a distinctive buzzing discharge, and on a whim pulled her aim leftward when she noticed that the percentage indicator was rapidly draining down from “90%”—

—the beam wasn’t an instantaneous burst, but a continuous stream, and when she pulled her aim left the beam cut through the target stand’s left arm as if it wasn’t even there at all. The beam continued to cut and melt its way through its environment for about three seconds, after which the emitter array shut down and folded back together under the main barrel. The glowing orange button likewise shut off, and the power percentage indicator flashed with a sharp red “0%”. It took a few seconds for it to start climbing up again, but when it did, it did so at half the rate it had been going before, at a rate of roughly one percent every two to three seconds.

The three-second stream had caused a lot of damage. The beam had cut through the backstop of the firing range and set the damage path alight with small flames, and the arm of the target stand had been partially melted by only a split-second’s worth of exposure to the beam itself.

Rally would go absolutely bonkers when she saw this thing—

A clattering of aluminum interrupted her observations, signaling the end of her work and inciting a tightening feeling inside her chest. As necessary as it was to get moving, she didn’t really want to…

“That was kickass,” Leon swooned with approval, dumping what looked like a pile of magazines and an ammo can onto the table. “Useless for today, though.”

Sling’s magic set itself to work pulling the second pile of empty magazines towards herself, and then began sorting through the ammunition in the can, relieved to see “62gr HP” on the side. “Maybe not. The batteries are marked “Breeder”, so I think they might be a variation of a breeder-type MEW. The primary fire mode is just like any other laser or plasma pistol, but it’s the secondary fire mode that’s got me giggling like Rally will when she sees it. It seems to put a pretty big strain on the spark battery though, the power indicator isn’t recharging nearly as fast as it was when I was just shooting normal shots. Might be why the gun was designed with a removeable battery in case the secondary fire mode had to be used more than once in a short time frame.”

“That’s a bit of a letdown.”

“It’s all we get,” she countered as she began streaming rounds out of the can like a water facet and pushing them down into a magazine. “But the beam mode should make quick work of Zulana. Might even be able to double as a cutting torch for the R&D wing’s front door, we don’t have time to go looking for explosives to blast our way in.”

Her bullpup rifle appeared on her right, being lowered onto the table, and then his footsteps returned to the firing line with one of the black rifles and a managraphic sight. “I guess we’ll find out in about ten minutes.”

Fate chose that moment to have Julaya intrude into the firing range to retrieve her for other preparations. “…you should speak with the misty pony, crazy one. She has been playing with the otherworldly toys of the Before and may have found something of use to you. But she does not look well.”

“Go check it out, I’ll get the black rifles zeroed,” Leon pushed almost immediately before she could come up with a reason to wait until she was done here. She’d barely started getting the magazines loaded!

No time to fight and argue over it, either.

She found Misty on the other end of the lab, inside a softly lit room marked simply “TECH” on its door. The room itself was designed with a much more clinical and sterile motif than the rest of the test lab—sharp white walls and ceiling, with a cool tile floor and several rows of island benches replete with all manner of high-tech tools and monitoring equipment. Misty had concerned herself with two sterilized, formerly-climate sealed wall safes that opened to reveal a pull-out drawer, and which contained about a dozen black tablet-like objects, separated in two rows of six via a slotted tray insert in the drawer. The slots themselves were cushioned with a velvet-lined interior, likely to prevent damage to anything socketed within them. Most of Misty’s attention was focused on a gray-colored computer terminal on a desk near the storage lockers, with a few papers scattered about her work space.

Misty, on the other hoof, was not quite as clean-looking. The bandages on her left hind leg had an ominous, large red stain in the center, and dried blood still creased the side of her thigh and gaskin. And her face, when the misty-haired pony turned to face her as she approached, was moist and matted below her bloodshot eyes, and her ears were almost permanently folded against her head. Given the fate she was looking at in the next two hours, she had every right to be upset.

And still, after crying herself dry, she’d found enough resolve and willpower to make use of herself, if only to take her mind off of her current condition. “…is the Alicorn’s Star in working order?” Misty asked with a slightly husky, hoarse voice.

“It looks good, physically,” she answered, drawing the Alicorn’s Star out and setting it down next the terminal. “It’s basically a MEW pistol, designed like a revolver, but with a dual-barrel arrangement and a kick-ass secondary mode that shoots this beam of pure death. Couldn’t find a cutting torch in the lab, so I had to use yours to get the gun out of its case, the keypad was ruined.”

Misty’s mouth uttered a soundless “Wow” as she briefly pawed at the large stainless revolver. “….the facility staff, or Zulana?”

“Might have been by accident, actually. Found what looks like old liquid stains on the mounting plate. My guess is that somebody spilled coffee all over it and shorted it out. Not sure why the Star was still here waiting for us two centuries later. The gun’s a clear threat to Zulana, but her leaving it right there for anyone to stumble onto doesn’t make any sense. It’d have been a much smarter move to simply take it for herself and keep it someplace that only she has access to…like the R&D wing. There’s a great deal about our little expedition today that’s not making sense.”

“The key cards we found…the last time we were here, you think?”

Sling’s stomach started getting a little cold. Misty sounded awfully tired, considering she’d only been bitten in the ass. Was the curse already taking hold? “Odd that you only found one specific level of cards and not the other two, right? Where did you find them?”

“…in the personnel resources wing, at the front of the complex,” Misty answered, though Sling had already suspected that much considering they hadn’t been able to access any other parts of the facility in their last visit. “They were scattered out across the first floor. One here, another there…usually somewhere where we’d find it if we looked around a couple of minutes. Never in open sight, though. Shit, it’s…it’s so obvious now, I wished we’d thought of it when we’d first found them. We were just too excited about having the chance to organize a proper expedition to this place that we never thought about things like traps and bait.”

“I very much doubt the ponies who used them would leave their only keys in and out of their workspaces lying around and off their person. Find anything about the Alicorn’s Star, other than what I’ve found out through ten seconds of test-firing?”

Misty finally forced herself to focus back on her work, but the slow pace of her magic dancing across the keyboard was anything but encouraging. “Nothing yet,” was the sad, but expected answer. “I…I doubt I’ll find anything by the time you leave.”

Oh shit, she’s got even less time than I think. “…you don’t sound too good. How do you feel right this second? Don’t dodge it, I need to know if I’ve got minutes or hours here.”

“…burning up,” Misty said pointedly. “And my…my head, it hurts, like a migraine from hell. Hard to focus on my work here.”

Shit shit shit— “Julie!! Get in here!!”

Misty’s forehooves rose and pressed down on her ears in pain. “Aaaaaooooww no screaming it makes it worse—”

The zebra’s hooves echoed throughout the lab as she raced over, but she was surprisingly gentle with her entrance into the tech room, and Sling began to suspect that Julaya had anticipated Misty’s condition going south this quickly. “Bad?”

“…maybe,” she admitted after a moment’s hesitation. Another closer look at Misty’s coat revealed a thin layer of sweat bleeding through the skin underneath. “She wasn’t like this five minutes ago, that’s for sure. Feverish, migraine…sounds like her breathing’s being affected too. She was trying to find some more information on the Alicorn’s Star, but she can’t work like this for long.”

“No, she will not,” Julaya promised, already pulling the ailing mare aside and leading her over to a lounge sofa nearby. “Rest here, misty pony. Don’t move.”

“…yeah, be lazy,” Misty gasped softly, apparently fighting through her headache to focus enough to speak. “…sounds good…”

Neither Sling or Julaya offered any further offense to her sensitive hearing, and quietly vacated the tech room. Only when the door had shuttered behind them did Julie dare speak of Misty’s condition out loud. “We must hurry. I had anticipated a short period of illness for the curse but the misty pony’s condition is already beyond what I had expected this soon.”

“…how long were you expecting?”

“I had given her ninety minutes, at the most,” Julaya murmured fearfully. “But she may have half that. Thirty minutes, at worst.”

Her cold stomach promptly iced over. “…it could take us a quarter hour just to fight our way out of this building!”

“Then we should stop playing around and just go,” Julie answered. “Every moment is precious now, we cannot spend Misty’s time scouring for more guns.”

Stop playing around and just go…how long has everyone waited to tell me that? “And what about you? Good as you are at fighting up close, these aren’t foes you want to get close to. And the fact that you weren’t using your sword back there when you could have, means that you’re afraid it might kill those things permanently and I don’t have a workable alternative for you.”

Julaya’s response was predictable, but the sharp edge of her words made her dwindling patience clear. “I will find something suitable, now let us go.”

“You kid, surely.”

Elly’s answer was to simply slap her binoculars into her body. “Look for yourself, then. Take all the time you want, I’m gettin’ sick of lookin’ at ‘em myself!”

Rally’s right leg hoof unlocked and reconfigured into a griffon claw, and she pulled the binoculars free of Elly’s magic and lifted them up to her eyes….and sure enough, beyond the eight-strong line six Runners and two of Rico’s crew firing their rifles was the object of their focused fire.

A hundred-strong horde of what looked like unkillable ghouls, oblivious to any wounds save headshots, and even that didn’t seem to stop them for very long. The horde stretched across the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, and was probably only a few feet deep, but their sheer numbers alone made it impossible to safely blast a hole through them.

And it didn’t escape her notice that the thin line of the living was gradually pacing backwards as the horde drew closer. They’d already moved the caravan back a few blocks to get some distance, but that didn’t seem to discourage the things from trying to get to them.

“…how long do you think it’ll take ‘em to get here?” BJ’s voice croaked fearfully. It also didn’t escape her notice that the colt made certain to plant himself either right next to her, or Elly, whenever one of them moved about any. She really couldn’t blame him, not after what he’d gone through in Trotpeka. Kite was freaking out in private in the back of a wagon…

“Maybe ten minutes, tops, if they don’t stop shooting,” she answered truthfully. “But they will, if only to keep from ruining their barrels. And I don’t have nearly enough juice in either of my two spark batteries for my laser rifle to make a difference.”

“…they’re still in there…”

Rally didn’t let the foul curse on her lips speak loudly, though anyone looking at her face could probably figure out what she’d been saying silently. “They’re not dead. Sling’s got a PipBuck, remember? They’ll know about any threats that get within its range. They’re probably sheltered up somewhere in the facility while they figure a way out.”

“We don’t know that—”

Elly, despite her initial terror from her previous sighting of the unholy monsters before them, still seemed more in-tune with BJ’s thoughts than even the colt was. “Beige, do you really think my mom’s gonna let a bunch of ghouls keep her away from us again? She was like…super depressed, worse than me, and then you and Kite turn out to be alive and now she’s actually kind of smiling and she and Kite were even snuggling this morning like…like…uh, would girlfriends be the right word? Or, ummm…”

“…oh gods, there’s a bunch of unkillable ghouls slowly clawing their way towards us and that’s your biggest worry?!”

“Her point, Blue,” Rally interjected, “is that Sling is happier than she’s been in a long time, and even from what little time I’ve been around her, I would think that she does not give up the things she loves without a fight. What do you think she wants to do, more than anything else, knowing that these things are probably marching up on us for a late morning snack?”

Her intention was to alleviate his fears about Sling’s fate, but when he spoke again, he managed to give her a new reason to be worried. “…oh, shit, she’s gonna blow the whole place up—”

“Quit cussin’!” Elly shouted back almost immediately. “And she’s not gonna do that again, not after last time!”

It was truly a sad, sad thing for a little filly to be able to count the number of times her only parent had blown things up in a fit of rage (even if she’d only been witness to one of them). “They did go in with enough guns and ammo to fight Runners for a couple of hours. Not sure how much that’ll help with the invincible ghouls, buuuut…”

“…I’m gonna go panic and freak out with Mom,” the colt despaired aloud as his hooves scraped against the asphalt in a one-eighty turn. “Have fun watching the walking dead.”

The firing line of ponies and griffons in the streets beyond grew ever closing, and a couple of them continued to fire into the wall of shambling ghouls while the rest reloaded their weapons for a…third time? Gods, that was like, ninety shots apiece? For a grand total of over seven hundred rounds?

And not one kill for all that effort?

“…he might actually have a good idea,” she admitted reluctantly. “A few hundred rounds across the eight of them and all they’ve done is kept the horde moving at a snail’s pace.”

“Seven hundred twenty and change,” Elly quipped nonchalantly, though she suspected the little thing was quite worried deep down inside. “…that’s a lotta bullets to be shooting for almost nothing. You think maybe laser guns would do better?”

“Definitely. Hard to come back from being turned into glowing ash. But we don’t have enough spark batteries for our two laser guns to kill them all.”

“…maybe if we just cut them down to a number we could manage to lure and trap somewhere, keep them in one place, without wasting so many bullets? Like…I dunno, ten maybe?”

“We still don’t have nearly enough spark batteries to do that, and the incineration effect is not guaranteed, it’s almost purely random,” she countered, even though she quickly found it difficult to come up with a viable alternative that didn’t involve them trying to flee from such a large group…and the dangers that would come from leaving them in the streets to roam about elsewhere and really fuck things up. “Still, it might give us some idea of what they might be vulnerable to, if physical trauma is useless. We really can’t let these things get out into the city proper. We might be seeing only a hundred or so out here, but there could be three times as many still inside the place. If they all escape, half of Withercha could be devoured before they could be stopped. If they even can be.”

“Okay, then, s-so I got mine with me,” Elly said with a slightly fearful stammer. Which was fine, anybody would be terrified of intentionally approaching a throng of hungry ghouls. “And all the batteries we got for it. What about yours?”

Rally’s right foreleg was already shifting the laser rifle off of her back and shoulder and across the front of her barrel, making sure to orient the barrel upward so that any accidental discharge wouldn’t hit anything but air or crumbling, ruined office buildings. “Just two batteries. Might get twenty shots apiece. The capacitor isn’t working at full efficiency, but it’s safe to shoot. Body shots will be good enough, don’t get fancy and try for the head, we’re only shooting them to see what effect it has on them.”

Elly’s laser pistol hummed to life with a sharp trill, its light diodes glowing with vibrant red and green hues. “…t-then we should probably just go before Kite gets the idea to come and drag us back to the wagon with her.”

Her right foreleg shifted back into a pony hoof just as she started jogging forward, and she focused onto a path on the right side of the street, where she would have a little room to squeeze into the firing line and start blasting hideous ghouls to ashes. It took a bit under forty seconds to reach them, and her horn ring’s magic had tingled and cast its enchantment upon her ears well before she reached them, muffling the gunshots to a hearing-safe level but still allowing everyone’s words to be heard amidst the gunfire—including, unfortunately, the constant, droning groans and moans of the ghouls as they sought to reach their intended meals.

And what she heard had her doubting that this hastily cooked plan was going to work in their favor.

“—ck their faces should be hamburger by now, what’s healing all the gunshot wounds—”

“—do these things even have brains to turn to mush—”

“—itballs I’m down to four mags already, we gotta split—”

Almost no wounds at all after all that shooting? She stopped a few yards short of the firing line and shifted her cyberleg into a griffon’s talon again, took hold of her laser rifle’s grip and shifted the stock into her chest as she settled her other leg underneath the forend and started zeroing in on a target with the green-dotted front sight post—

—the slight kick of the diverter discharge barely registered to her body, though the sharp, buzzing report of the laser discharge seemed a bit loud given the horn ring’s protective magic. Maybe lasers didn’t fire loudly enough to damage the ears? Eh, whatev, that wasn’t what she was shooting for, it was the damn invincible ghouls, and her first shot had glorious results. It didn’t vape the ghoul—so far as she could tell, they were all various shades of colorless gray, with most of them bearing no clothing or cutie marks but covered with horrendous wounds, so it was hard to discern one from the other. But the laser cooked through the ghoul’s flesh and bone and left a cauterized hole behind as it promptly fell flat on its face, the horn barely scraping over the pavement, and she quickly fired on a second pegasus ghoul that was right behind her initial target—

—shot two went a bit high, went into the nape of the neckline, but the body immediately shifted into a blinding hot orange glow, and for a moment allowed herself a short, evil laugh as the hideous mutant was incinerated and killed for good this time—

Raina’s voice robbed her of any joy she could have found in that small moment. “Dammit kid get back to the caravan, these things are—”

—as the glowing, burning ghoul began to cool down and scatter into a softly glowing ash pile, an outline of the thing still remained standing…or, at least, she thought it was the ghoul’s outline. It was a faint bluish color, almost neon-like in its vibrancy, and it bore none of the leg and torso wounds that had pockmarked its body not ten seconds ago. And it had a face—a lively one—that seemed almost confused, as if someone had just ripped a blindfold off of the thing’s face after a long trip in the dark.

And not two seconds later, the blue pony thing’s…aura? What was it exactly? Whatever it was, it was suddenly just…sucked up, like some giant vacuum cleaner had come along and went on a slurping spree. The thing’s form was stretched out and distorted until it was a thin, blue glowing line, and it was quickly being drawn away from the ghoul horde and towards…the Ministry facility?

Suddenly Raina wasn’t all that interested in yelling at her. “…what the actual f—“

Elly’s laser pistol joined in on the carnage, its report coming off with a sharper pop than her rifle. Its red bolt was a much shorter and compact thing than her laser rifle’s beam, but cut through her chosen target as easily as her laser rifle would have, if not better. This earth pony ghoul, too, dropped in place and stopped moving, followed quickly by a second ghoul to its left, and a third to its right, a unicorn—

—Elly’s third target was suddenly engulfed in flames, and when it flopped to its side the flames died out as quickly as they’d appeared, leaving a charred, burnt ghoul behind and filling the air with the putrid stench of melted flesh that had her promptly regretting her grand plan to test these seemingly invincible ghouls for weaknesses. The bluish, semi-transparent pony thing that stood where the ghoul had been two seconds earlier also got pulled away into either oblivion or whatever was drawing it towards the Ministry complex.

“…oh gross, I don’t think I could do that to a living person,” Elly gagged, trying not to barf all over the ground. “…please tell me these ghouls aren’t actually alive…”

“Not in any sense that we’d call ‘living’,” Rally deigned to answer, even as she focused on a third target herself. It was probably a bad idea to try, but she had to be sure…

A single shot was all it took to incinerate the unicorn ghoul—this one even wore a tattered lab coat with a red-striped clear plastic card on it—and…and it also left behind a glowing blue pony-thing, semi-transparent and looked like a…mare? Like the last two unidentified entities, it too was sucked up by a great invisible vacuum cleaner towards the ministry facility, vanishing into nothingness within a couple of seconds…

“…okay, what the hell? Bullets do next to nothing, but lasers actually put them down?” one of the Runners in the firing line shouted out over his gunfire. Their fancy new rings and necklaces might have been muffling the shots, but between the guns and the constant hungry moans of the things in front of them, the shouting was starting to become a tad necessary.

“The hell with that, I wanna know what those blue things are!” Raina shouted back, and she could hear the griffon’s rifle clacking about as she changed out the plastic waffle mags in it. Over eight hundred shots now?! “And where they’re going so fast!”

“…uhhh, I don’t think this is a good idea, Rally,” Elly squeaked fearfully, her laser pistol lowering towards the ground. “These guys should be full of holes and most of them look like they’ve never been shot. There’s something else goin’ on with these ghouls.”

Rally’s brain was already at work trying to figure out the reason why everyone else’s efforts were ultimately just wasted ammo while her laser rifle was turning them into ash and Elly’s laser pistol was dropping them with single chest shots. No glowing ones amongst the gray ghouls, they weren’t near any radioactive zones so they could rule out ambient environmental healing, ghouls actually thrived in radiation. And still, their wounds were closing up and their bodies coming back for more punishment. Bullets did nothing, but MEWs were—

…wait…

…MEW…Magical Energy Weapon….

…Magical…

“…oh, SHIT,” she hissed sharply, slinging her rifle over her back after snapping the safety back on. “Elly that’s enough shooting we’re making this worse!”

“Gladly, that burned flesh smell is making me sick!” the little filly shrieked, even as the sound of metal scratching across leather signified her compliance. “And quit cussin’!”

By the gods, you do jump my ass for that more than Sling would! “We’re leaving, maybe the rest of you thick-headed Runners would like to join us?! You’re just wasting ammo!!”

“For once, I’ll take orders from a kid!” someone screamed back, a deep-throated male voice, so probably one of the other griffons in the firing line. She didn’t really know these Runners, the only four she could recognize were Raina, Tack, Ada, and Leon, and Tack was still back with the caravan keeping it safe. “Toss some grenades into them, maybe we can slow them down a couple of minutes!”

Ah, crap, grenades, really loud and really not bringing back good memories! She cringed as she turned and darted back towards the caravan, mostly from a flare-up of pain from a right foreleg she no longer had when the first grenade went off about five seconds after she’d started running. It was weird sometimes, how that happened…

More unpleasant memories threatened to form in the near future when she saw Kite jumping out of one of the wagons as they came upon them, and she looked pissed. Almost as mad as Sling, actually. Then again, they had just run up to a horde of flesh-eating mutants and poked them with the proverbial stick in the form of a few laser blasts, so—

“What the HELL ARE YOU THINKING!?!” the scarred grape mare’s voice bored into their souls the moment she thought she was close enough to halt them with the sheer force of volume alone, and it kinda worked ‘cause she was skidding to a complete stop and Elly wound up crashing into her ass doing the same thing, and then the both of them were tumbling about until they ended up in a pile of twisted legs, tails, and manes at Kite’s hooves. Thankfully, their weapons were undamaged from the collision. “You just up and ran up to the deadliest ghouls on the planet and you started SHOOTING THEM!?! WH-GA—WWWHAAAT?!?! WHAT?! WERE?! YOU?! THINKING?!”

Despite the ring on her horn granting her hearing protection, she was fairly certain her ears were starting to ring softly from the sheer force of will Kite was visibly overflowing with, and she made a note to consider herself lucky that Sling didn’t yell this loudly when she was mad at her. “…eeeeeeeeeeeye was thinking…kill one? Maybe two? See what happens, maybe…find…a weakness?”

Elly had barely managed to get her head out from beneath her belly when Kite’s screaming blasted back at them, and the little filly actually tried to hide back under there. “Oh, GREAT PLAN HOW DID THAT WORK OUT YOU COULD HAVE GOTTEN YOURSELVES KILLED AND THEN WHAT WOULD SLING DO—”

“Holy halibut she’s madder than mom,” Elly whispered through her body, somehow. “…oh, crap, maybe not, mom’s gonna literally explode when she finds out what we just did—”

“So if you’re finished screaming, maybe I can tell you and the Runners catching up to us what I just learned? ‘Cause these aren’t ghouls.”

“Really!?” Kite’s voice roared across the street, oblivious to the presence of Ada as the massive griffon glided in on them from her previously hidden perch several hundred yards away. Probably decided there was no reason for two snipers to stay on overwatch when the enemy couldn’t be killed. “They walk like ghouls, they moan like ghouls gods I can hear the bastards from here—”

“Quit cussin’,” Elly’s weak voice protested, but to no avail. Kite just went on like she’d not even spoken (and probably for the best)—

“—they got the same damn singular desire to zero in on the closest meal of fresh meat they can sense I don’t know if they go by sight or smell or SOUND or whatever—”

“Damn, Kite, maybe give the kid a few seconds to explain before you murder her eardrums?” Ada’s voice shouted back in her defense (FINALLY someone did), even as a chorus of hooves and paws were rapidly closing in on them from the street behind her. “Those things were regenerating from head shots in less than a minute and there’s no radiation zones for a ghoul to soak in. She might actually be right if it’s what I think it is.”

“Ditto, let the smart one speak,” Raina chimed in next. “…well, the one smarter than El-Tee.”

“…fine,” Kite seethed deeply, though her fiery, angry eyes promised nothing more than that. “Out with it.”

“I think there’s some magic involved,” Rally said over the grunts and gasps Elly squeaked as the filly squirmed and twisted herself free of this rather compromising tangle of limbs and hair. “The only weapons that had any lasting effect were my rifle and Elly’s pistol, while eight hundred and change of bullets did nothing. Their bodies should have looked like raw, chewed up hamburger after all that shooting and there were hardly more than a few bloody holes in their faces, and I swear a couple of them were getting smaller by the second. And the term MEW stands for Magical Energy Weapon—”

Elly’s left hind leg finally worked itself free and allowed her to start scooting herself out from under Rally’s body, though when she did finally pull herself up onto her own four hooves again she just opted to splay herself out across Rally’s torso and take a breather from all her hard work—

“So only magically powered or enchanted weapons and munitions will put them down permanently?” Ada finished succinctly. “…well, that actually makes more sense than what I was thinking.”

“You seriously didn’t think every one of those things had a soul jar, did you?” Raina shot back with a touch of whining in her voice.

“I did until three of them bit the dust permanently and we saw….whatever that blue speck was.”

Kite’s anger started to subside a little bit. “See what?”

“Hard to say,” Rally answered, rolling herself upright with her legs tucked in, and let Elly keep using her as a body pillow for the moment. “There was this…it looked like a pony, but all transparent and bluish and glowing. I want to say it was an echo of their magic, but they looked…surprised, like someone had taken a blindfold off of them. And now that I hear the word soul jar, it gets me wondering if we saw an echo of the ghoul’s remaining life force, before it got sucked away. But I’m just guessing here. I have no fuuuurreeeaking clue what could have made those ghouls—”

Shit caught that one real close—

“But at least now we know what we need to kill them, so let’s just break out all the MEWs in the wagon an—”

“No, no, see, that’s what we shouldn’t do. If that…that blue echo, or whatever it is, if it’s at all connected to what caused this then killing those ghouls may be the last thing we should do. We don’t know how those things were created, how they’re regenerating from head shots several times over, or even if there’s some kind of top-secret technology in that facility empowering them all. For all we know killing some of them might make the rest of them too strong to kill even WITH MEWs.”

“When kids start making more sense of things than you, you know you got left behind in the brains department,” Raina mumbled in a deflated tone. “Okay, so we can’t kill them, and all we’re doing with normal bullets is keeping the horde from moving more than a few feet per second. We don’t have enough ammo to keep them back for more than ten minutes, at best, and they’d be almost on top of us by the time we ran dry anyway. Grenades seemed to have messed them over pretty good, but we don’t have a lot of those. What’s left?”

“….we could try to make a sink hole in the street with the explosives we do have,” one of the Runners—a pegasus pony, of all creatures—suggested, though most of his attention was focused on the horde of ghouls they’d obliterated with grenades. They didn’t seem to be regenerating just yet…

“We don’t have enough explosives for a hole big enough to hold a hundred plus ghouls,” Tack shot him down. “We just used up half of the grenades we had on us, and we’d need about twenty more pounds of plastique than we actually have on hoof.”

“…maybe some of you could fly in there, try and find out what’s causing this and blow it up,” Elly’s voice creaked. “I mean, those turrets were all lit up earlier and now they’re…kinda not. So maybe they won’t shoot at you.”

“Misty’s party is in the best position to be doing that, if they’re able,” Tack countered. “We should focus on keeping those ghouls contained without getting killed in the process.”

“The ‘if they’re able’ part is what’s got me worried! What if they need help?” Elly pushed on with a pleading voice. “We haven’t heard any gunfire from that facility, they might have gotten trapped in one of the buildings when these things got out. Didn’t Mom say something about leaving you guys an access card in case someone needed to go in after them?”

“…she did,” Ada sighed deeply. “And the squirt’s not entirely wrong either. If they need help, they need it now, and we won’t know that until we send someone in to find out what went wrong in there. At the very least we should make sure we don’t have two separate groups completely unaware of what the other is doing.”

“That doesn’t help us deal with the ghouls five blocks up the street,” Tack reminded them all with a slightly terse inflection in his voice…and he had a point too. “We need to figure out how we’re going to pin them down to one area without using up all of our ammo and explosives, and within three minutes. I think those gray bastards are starting to get some of their freaking limbs back.”

“Maybe lure them into one of these buildings along the street,” Ada said out, mainly just to hear her idea in actual words. Sometimes things that sounded good in her head were a lot more trouble once she got to talking about it and thinking it over more. “Block the entrances once they’re inside aaand no that’s a lot more work than we got people or time for—”

“Whoa, wait, did they just…stop?” Elly intruded into the conversation, and Rally had to kinda shift her neck and torso around so she could turn her head back up the street, an….

…and, sure enough, it seemed as though most of the ghouls, judging by her binoculars, had managed to recover from the grenade blasts in enough of one piece to resume their blind drive towards new food sources…and then just stopped, and stared out blankly into space. If only their deathly moaning had ceased along with their cold march…

A question formed on Rally’s lips and sprang forth. “…when was the last time ghouls stopped their dinner rush to stand there and zone out?”

In the end, they had only managed to load eight rifle magazines, for a total of 120 rounds apiece. But true to her word, Julie made do with the first object she deemed solid enough to serve as a melee weapon—a few lengths of rebar they found in a small storage closet seemingly dedicated to construction materials, perhaps leftovers from construction that they’d never figured out what to do with. She took several pieces in the event that she decided to use one as a stabbing implement and wound up losing it, all tied together on her back with some paracord from a spool they found in the same closet. A few layers of bandaging wrapped around her forelegs, salvaged from a wall-mounted first aid kit, would keep the spiral ribbing on the rebar from hurting her.

Getting Julie her rebar cost her a magazine from the service rifle and about five minutes of Misty’s remaining time. The hollow point rounds worked wonders on the gray bastards, put them down for a good minute or longer, but there were quite a lot of them now that they knew there was fresh meat to be had. That so many of them had been ignored by her E.F.S. when they were making their initial journey into the building astounded her, and she was glad now that she had not allowed herself to grow dependent on her PipBuck like so many of her former security co-workers in the stable had. Instead, however, she had grown too dependent on firearms to deal with her enemies, and the ease with which Julie made use of her borrowed rebar to swat and crack the skulls of the zomponies made her feel like an amateur. The zebra had no inherent unicorn magic, only her bare hooves and limbs…

…and she made the stable pony feel like a spoiled, insignificant speck.

“…my god, does this piss you off that much?” she muttered after Julie’s tenth “kill”—a swift and sudden stab of her rebar into the skull of a zompony that tried to climb over an overturned desk propped up against the inside of the doorway into an office. Perhaps somebody had tried to build a barricade against the shambling undead and failed to completely seal the room off.

Julie barely flinched as the rebar turned the zompony’s eye into a bloody mess of viscera that Sling had to look away from, lest her early lunch decided it was time to come back up. “Greatly,” the zebra answered with a light grunt, waiting until her prey had collapsed over the desk and stopped moving before yanking her rebar back out. How could she grip that thing so well with the inside of her legs and pastern? “Having to deal with the aftermath of such a careless use of necromancy is quite irritating. I imagine you fare no better, having little skill with blades or your bare hooves to fall back on when your guns run out of bullets.”

Godsdamn how do you read me so well? “This isn’t really the time to discuss the skillsets I lack.” A glance at a nearby wall placard with various nameplates bolted onto it indicated that the primary security armory was somewhere ahead of them, though she expected that direction to change at least twice before they actually found it. The next direction might be to their left…

“Then we can discuss how to improve them,” the zebra’s sensual voice answered, causing Sling to groan in despair. Maybe she should have had Leon take point instead of guarding their rear. “Perhaps a minor training regimen each day. The little tail of light seems enthusiastic enough when I teach her things, so I can make it a parent-child class of two.”

“Is everyone looking to have a hoof and claw in how my daughter is raised?” she growled at no one, just before the holographic optic on her rifle settled onto a zompony’s head for a quick shot.

“Is that not what stables had schools for?” Julaya cackled. “We are simply…replacing the school’s lessons with ones more suited to her environment.”

Two more zomponies joined her kill count when they came out into the hallway from the corner at the end, and she could see a placard on the wall denoting the direction to the security wing lobby—to the left, as she’d expected. “I’d rather have her learn how to cure some rampant disease or invent a technique for removing mana radiation from afflicted areas without having to wait several centuries for it to decay on its own. Something that will make a difference for decades to come.”

“She may do that in time, but for now it would be best if she learned skills that would ensure she survived long enough to do so. You could stand to learn some of these things with her. Think of it as an additional bonding experience!”

When they reached the turn into the next hall, she started scouring every name plaque attached to a door when they drew close enough to be able to read it in the glow of her light spell. “Can you think of something that might help our odds of survival today?”

Julaya’s sensual tone returned in force, and she realized she may have made a mistake when she agreed to keep their conversation focused on anything but their actual goal, in case the master of these zomponies’ could hear and see through them through some unexplained telepathic link. “Would Kite’s warm embrace and company in bed suffice? Or perhaps you desire something more carnal than she is willing to provide? I would be happy to offer such a thing.”

“Of course you would,” she muttered softly enough that the zebra didn’t hear it—or she pretended not to. “Look, we’re nowhere near the intimate phase and she wouldn’t indulge me even if I tried.”

Godsdamn her she had to have that uncanny and unnerving ability to be able to read her mind or the things she left unsaid, and all of this while they were shooting and stabbing undead in the face! “She desires a soulmate, and believes you may be such a thing. She also knows your ostracized life in your stable has not given you a good grasp of healthy relationships. She does not want to taint your deepening friendship with heated passions, however much the two of you may desire such a thing. Not until she is certain she would have a happily ever after.”

“So why are you so cavalier about it, then?”

“Me? I have little doubt that I would enjoy a life at your side, but I am not thinking about that. I am thinking that you very much need to get laid and I happen to enjoy such things as a pastime, so I would happily indulge those carnal desires you have kept suppressed for so long.”

“Finally somebody has the guts to say that out loud,” Leon’s voice grumbled from behind, just before he took a couple of shots at a target.

“If the walking dead don’t end you, I might,” she promised with an evil sneer.

“You sure about that?”

“For the fourth time, YES,” Rally yelled back, her attention still focused on the horde of invincible ghouls just milling around the streets like insects. They hadn’t come any further down the road, but they hadn’t gone back where they’d come from either. “Clear plastic, red stripe down one end just like the yellow cards Rico was handing out. She said they’d need a red one to get into the R&D building and the last ghoul I dusted had one on his lab coat, and the coat didn’t burn up with him so it’s still intact! We gotta go get it!”

“Get it how?” Tack pushed back. “We tossed five grenades into the group when we cut and run, there could be pieces of it scattered all over!”

“Grenades blow up and out,” Ada countered smoothly, her backwards rifle pointed towards the horde. She’d swapped out her previous barrel for a longer, thicker one with a bipod attached to it, and was using the hood of a burned-out car as a firing platform She didn’t think the gun would get a kill shot six hundred yards out, but she was itching to see if it could and the situation ironically gave her the best possible conditions to find out. “That mob had already moved forward a few meters when you broke contact and tossed the ‘nades into them. That’d be enough distance to minimize the damage to the card. Not to mention all the ghouls that absorbed most of the blasts. The biggest problem is putting sixty plus of those bastards down to give us enough time to sift through the bodies for the card. Eight rifles firing into the horde couldn’t even push them into a full stop.”

“What about a bunch of bullets really, really fast?” Elly called out. “Like…machine guns, or something? Or do we even have any?”

That filly is getting quite an education in weaponry and tactics, Ada smiled inside. “We got two stowed in the wagons. Light machine guns, belt-fed 5.56s. Three magazines apiece, two two-hundred round box mags and four nylon cloth bag mags of a hundred rounds. But we only have one spare barrel to do a barrel change with, so after the initial barrage we’re only going to get one and a half mags worth of short controlled bursts out of one of them. We’ll need to cut down as many as we can right off, and pray we can find the card in less than a minute after the first ghoul goes down. These aren’t precision weapons either, once the barrels heat up accuracy goes to shit, those things are pretty old. Machine guns weren’t on our shopping list with Rico’s people…maybe should change that next time.”

“If they’re that old, maybe we could do something so we wouldn’t be shooting so many bullets. I bet some of them would go chasing after a snack if it got close enough. Somebody could sneak around behind them through the alleys, or the next street over, and when they draw them out far enough, you shoot what’s left so somebody can grab the card.”

Okay, scratch that, the kid just had a good education period. Lucky stable folk. “Risky as hell, but I’ve heard worse ideas,” Tack murmured even as Ada’s unconscious brain had finally worked out the six hundred-yard trajectory for a .223 match round. She didn’t have much hope for a head shot, not with the center dot on the 4x optic pretty much covering the target at this range. Might still be able to get the bullet on the body, at least. She was thinking maybe pull her point aim down a bit more than she usually would; the reticule was designed around a twenty-inch barrel with a one-in-nine inch twist, so a longer barrel would probably give the shot a bit more range. And there wasn’t much wind so she had that going for her…

When she made her best guess on her hold her claw pressed back on the trigger, being careful not to pull it too far back and end up with a full-auto burst instead, and her patience was rewarded with a carefully aimed single shot that took about three-quarters of a second to find its way into a ghoul’s torso. She couldn’t see the exact point of impact, but she could see the thing shudder slightly from the hit. Had her target been a living, breathing creature, that hit would have probably taken out a lung, put them out of the fight…in theory, anyway.

So, targeted body shots at six hundred yards would be fairly easy with some patience, though at that distance a .22-caliber anything would be hard pressed to be any better than a nine-mil was at twenty-five paces, and any amount of wind would play hell on the windage adjustment. One of many reasons why she preferred a larger-caliber weapon for any distance shooting past three hundred yards. “Any volunteers to be the bait—”

The ghouls finally grew tired of standing in the street, swaying pointlessly, for the horde began to stroll forward again, putting a kink into the plan before they could even finish setting it up.

Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have taken that shot. “…ahhh, shit, now they’re hungry again,” Ada whined lightly. “Tack, Junas, get those MGs, load ‘em with the two hundred round mags, and see if any of Rico’s crew is willing to provide more suppressing fire once we run the MGs out. Lena, Rusty, Sea Wind, help me set up a firing position with some of these junked cars in the street. We’ll need the extra height for the MGs to get headshots without sending rounds over the horde. Last call for volunteers for the bait job!”

“Not a bait job anymore,” Raina said, though she didn’t sound all that happy about it. “Let them get a ways down the road, I’ll swing around from the alley and find that card now that the little horde is interested in dinner again. Just hold your fire until I’m clear, okay?! I said I was sorry about that MRE prank the other day!”

“You’d better be,” Ada threatened sharply. “You kids go back with Vineyard to the wagons, and if I see either of you running around out here again you’ll wish you were dealing with Sling instead!”

She was pretty sure she just dropped a couple of places on Elly’s Cool-Person-List, considering that little gasped “Wha?” that followed her as she took off on all fours with her impromptu moving crew. Better that the kid fume at her now, that it might make Sling’s imminent explosion of motherly fury a little easier to take when she came back. Or maybe Kite was trying her best to be the really scary and angry one so that Sling would look better and calmer later. Hard to say, really. Not that it mattered much right then. Vineyard actually liked a good scrap and she was going to miss out on this one.

“Those two on the left, two blocks out!” Lena called out, even going so far as to mark said cars with a quick light marker spell. If not for her desert camouflaged combat armor, the unicorn’s gray stone coat would have had her blending in with the asphalt and concrete buildings enough that she would have been hard to spot at a distance. “I saw them up close a few minutes ago, the engine hoods are still in one piece! Best shooting position we’ll get for the MGs for your massed headshot volley!”

“Good enough!” Ada replied, and just like that the four of them zeroed in on Lena’s find without another word or even a hint of complaint. This was the thing about people and friends that Vergil never seemed to grasp—that it was a hell of a lot easier and more efficient if people got along all the time so that when the time came, everybody had each other’s backs and didn’t nitpick or fight over a plan that they might not totally agree with. She doubted that even half of her crew liked the idea of burning up two-thirds of their machine gun ammo—and their difficult-to-replace belt links—in about forty seconds’ worth of shooting on foes that couldn’t be killed with bullets. But Misty’s party needed that blue key card, and probably needed it right now, and this was the only way of getting the bastards thinned out enough for one of them to risk their life finding it with a reasonable chance of success. They were going to be a little closer to the horde than she wanted, though…but at least at that distance everyone else could pitch in with their rifles with a good chance of landing meaningful headshots. Might be why Lena pointed out those particular wrecks.

Teamwork. It came through for them every time they needed it to. Vergil didn’t get it. She was starting to wonder if they even needed him, as hard as he was pushing them to focus on amassing caps over good will and friends in distant places.

Questions for later. Questions for now—could she even fly over the Ministry complex’s walls without getting dusted? The turrets looked offline, but they could easily come right back up and fry her before she could turn around and get out of range. Ma—

“Uhhh, I just had second thoughts about rushing into that place, anybody got an idea for how we get the card to Misty’s group?” she called out suddenly, right as they reached their destination and began pushing the junked, rusted-out cars across the pavement. The harsh, screeching complaints of ancient metals scraping across the pavement might have been a lot less tolerable if not for the enchanted necklace dampening the sounds. “I’m not sure those turrets will stay offline for long!”

“Send one of those mutts in with it?” Lena yelled back over the screeching metal. “Unless you’re afraid they’ll just get gobbled up by those ghouls?”

“I am, actually,” Ada grunted as the rotted-out wheel rim got caught in a crack on the street, forcing her to physically lift the car up long enough for Lena to push it out. “And they’re not our dogs to send out into harm’s way. El-Tee’s not gonna send ‘em anywhere near this place, and I wouldn’t either!”

She didn’t hear an alternative until they’d mashed the cars together and set up their rifles and magazines for the volley fire. “Maybe you could tag them with the fifty-cal rifle we got in the wagons,” Rusty suggested as he switched out the barrel on his bullpup with a twenty-four-inch, bipod-equipped barrel. “We found a few AP rounds while you were gone, managed to get it zeroed to a hundred meters with two shots.”

“Shit, seriously? I don’t care how good this spiffy new jewelry is at protecting our hearing, I hate firing that thing!”

“It’s either that or take a chance that the things won’t dust you when you get inside their firing range. Pick one.”

He was right. She knew it.

She hated it.

“…fine. I’ll take ‘em out, you guys focus on the walking dead. But I can only take out the turrets covering the front of the facility, so we’ll have to send a couple folks with the key card through the front door. Guess how fun that’s gonna be.”

“We’ll figure that out once we got time to, get moving—”

Ada had turned about and started dashing back towards the wagons about the time the words “got time” left Rusty’s beak, having already made up her mind about who the first volunteer would be—herself. Part of her wanted to stay with the caravan and make sure the kids wouldn’t get hurt, but she knew Rico would pull her wagons out the moment she thought it was necessary, so that part would be taken care of no matter what. The part of her volunteering herself to leap into the maw of darkness was the part that didn’t want her better half to fight against these things without her.

She reached the caravans thirty seconds later, passing by Tack, Junas, and two of Rico’s crew racing in the opposite direction to join the roadblock team. Her world was now a blurry vision of activity as she raced to get everything she needed in as few movements and motions as possible. Put the twenty-inch barrel back in her bullpup (she had to unload the gun and lock the charging handle back to do it first), find that damn fifty and the one ammo can they’d marked that had the rounds for it, they only had like twelve or thirteen of them so they couldn’t afford to waste any—

“What’s got you so excited?” Rico quipped gently, her binoculars focused on her team at the impromptu roadblock.

The attempt at conversation forced her to slow her actions down, and she was only mildly embarrassed to find out that she had also managed to grab ahold of Kite’s tail in her zeal to wrest the “.50 cal” marked ammo can from the back of the cargo wagon. Kite was not amused in the slightest, but said nothing.

“Need to take out MEW turrets so we can go in the front door,” she gasped between heavy breaths, barely realizing that she’d been winded out from her hard run. That wasn’t going to do her sharpshooting any favors. “One of those things had a red key card on its body when Rally dusted it, we need to get it to Misty’s party, find out what the hell’s behind all this and stop it in the next ten minutes.”

“…because if you don’t, in eleven to twelve minutes we’ll all be ghoul chow?”

Okay, got the gun, got the ammo… “My guys will be. Everyone back here will have about three extra minutes, maybe more if those things stop to feast on our corpses first. Either way, you get the hell out of here and don’t look back.”

“And leave everyone out there behind?”

It wasn’t the thing that the heroes in stories did…which was probably why they were only stories. With a few final huffs she hoisted the ammo can in one claw, grabbed the fifty-cal rifle by its carrying handle with the other, and hopped back out of the wagon and flared her wings open for a quick flight. “If we can’t stop this in ten minutes, we’ll probably be dead in ten and a half. Save who’s left.”

She could hear Kite yelling something at her back as she took off into the air, working her wings hard to conjure up enough altitude to make it to her intended destination. Probably something about scaring the daylights out of the kids with that kind of talk, but whatever. It wasn’t like she wanted everyone to be torn apart and eaten alive in front of each other, but she had to be cold-hearted about these things. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. And worst-case scenario, was that they failed to stop these things and everyone nearby would be dead if they didn’t high-tail out of town first chance they got.

Best case scenario? Sling did her “kill everything I hate” thing and became that hero in the story they needed. Or heroine. Or stressed-out mare who sorely needed to get laid. Really, sometimes that sort of soul could be meaner than a raider.

Now, though? Right now I gotta set up the fifty for at least four half-mile shots after lugging the heavy bitch up in the air with me and then take those shots in thirty seconds! But it was either that or risk being incinerated by MEW turrets. She didn’t want to be incinerated here. If she was going to die, that would probably be the fastest way, though. Instant cremation, a second of or two of insanely unimaginable pain, and that would be it. Probably wouldn’t even see it coming. An—

Sidetracking, dumbass, focus on the now!

Focus became easier when she landed on her target building, on the left side of the street. It was the tallest intact structure from that point on to the facility itself, so she had an unobstructed view of the four MEW turrets that stood watch over the main entrance. The .50 anti-material rifle was a beast in of itself—almost thirty pounds empty, magazine fed, and fitted with a muzzle brake that could blow out eardrums if someone was stupid enough to stand near it without all the hearing protection they could muster. This one was fairly old, and while the barrel was still good, the action wasn’t always cooperative. She’d be lucky if she only had to clear one jam this time around. The one magazine they had for it had lost all of its finish and was basically just bare steel, and the magazine spring was pretty weak and didn’t like being compressed too tightly. Mostly for that reason, they only loaded the mag with three rounds, and even then it didn’t always work right.

But the attached bipod was stable and secure, and the scope was a godsend find they’d scrounged up in an old armory a few years ago. Some finish wear on the adjustment knobs, and little nicks and scratches on the scope body, but the thing always tracked accurately when they tested its zero and the lenses only had a couple of small scratches that couldn’t even been seen when she looked through it. She was secretly hoping this rifle would bite the dust soon so she could claim the scope for herself instead of waiting another three months for Rico to build hers and get it to her.

The ammo can had thirteen rounds in it—true to Rusty’s word, a quick grab inside fished up five black-tipped AP rounds alongside two standard ball rounds, of which three APs were hurriedly loaded into the magazine. A quick slap and tug to get it in the mag well, rack the handle on the bolt—

—the loud, chunky CLANK! that followed, despite her distaste for the rifle itself, never failed to excite her in ways no inanimate object should excite a lady. The AP rounds would punch through the MEW turrets and hopefully damage enough of the internals to render them inoperable, or at least incapable of firing. At this distance, even with the scope, she couldn’t quite place where the tiny sensor lenses were on the things, so hitting the main body would have to suffice.

The street lit up with the rapid rattatatatatatatatat! of two belt-fed LMGs, with short pauses likely indicating aim correction after recoil had drifted them off-target. She hoped that meant that Raina had gotten the key card. Dispersed within the machine bursts were the far less impressive pops of carefully aimed rifle fire. A second reach inside the ammo can produced a pair of old, but serviceable ear muffs designed for a griffon, and she quickly stuck the thing on and touched the enchanted sapphire of her necklace.

First target was to the right of the main gate. Rusty said they’d zeroed it to meters, not yards, which made enough of a difference that she was going to be a little generous with her hold until she could verify it. Brace the stock up against her shoulder, use her left talon to reach under it and hold it there while she settled in for the shot. She also wasn’t sure about the exact trajectory of an AP round. The tungsten tip added a little weight to the front, made it behave differently from a normal .50-caliber ball round in flight. When she had the holdover she would have used for an FMJ round, she adjusted it a tad upward, took a breath—

—the recoil was as bad as she remembered, even with a muzzle brake and nearly thirty pounds of weight on the gun, but thankfully the ear muffs and the enchanted necklace kept the muzzle blast from thumping her hearing. She had to fight the rifle back down on target to inspect the damage from the shot, and was pleased to see a shower of continuously falling out from the hole she’d put in the thing. At the distance she was shooting, she couldn’t see the impact hole through the scope, so it was hard to tell if she’d put the bullet where she intended it, but she did get a good hit, and that was what mattered more.

She repeated the process with the first of the two gate turrets, with slightly different results. No shower of sparks to indicate a power supply unit hit, and as she’d expected, the empty casing got caught in the ejection port on its way out. The bolt cycle did feel a bit sluggish on that shot. Her right talon came up and ripped the bolt back, holding it there while she awkwardly knocked the casing out of the way, and then let it go once she’d confirmed with a visual check that the last round was still snug inside the magazine. Target three, the second gate turret, same hold, and maybe a touch more apprehension on the recoil, she hated shooting this thing—

—the third shot hit her shoulder hard, like a hammer had slammed into it at melee range, with much the same results as her second target. Thankfully, the shell ejected, though the magazine follower didn’t lock the bolt open. Expected, it was pretty old. She took the mag out and loaded one more AP round, reloaded and tried to ignore the giddy feelings the CLANK! gave her as she zeroed in on her las—

—the last turret in the line came to life, a bright red light on the top shining like a beacon of death as the barrel swung towards her. Calm was the answer, not panic, though even as she settled back into the rifle she couldn’t help but feel a little terror at the fact that these things could even get a sensor lock on her at this range. They were going to have to get some hard data on the effective range of these things in the future—

—her last shot ripped through the turret hard enough to kill the light on it, just as it had finished its rotation and oriented its barrel in her general direction. None of the turrets on the left perimeter wall were turning towards her, either. Maybe they weren’t turned on, or maybe they had a limited cone of rotation and couldn’t turn her way even if their controller wanted them to. Important thing was that they weren’t an immediate threat, and that she could finally stop shooting that damn fifty.

She set the rifle aside, took up her bullpup and peered down over the edge of the rooftop, curious about why she no longer heard machine gun fire—

—oh, wow, that actually worked better than I thought it would, she remarked cheerfully upon the sight of…shit, dozens of ghouls, she wasn’t sure about the exact number. But where there had once been a throng of the things shambling down the street, shoulder-to-shoulder and stretching across the entire road, now lay only a string of grayish bodies strewn about like confetti. The peace and quiet might not last very long, but for the moment those damn things were stopped cold.

“Dude, that actually worked!” she shouted down at Rusty’s party.

“Didn’t it?!” Rusty shouted back up. “Raina’s got the card, she’s flashing it at me right now…along with a really rude sign, maybe a few rounds got too close—”

Sure enough, a flick of her gaze to her left showed that Raina was indeed in possession of that stupid piece of plastic, as she was leaning out into view of the street from the cover of an alley not far from a few piles of faintly glowing ash a few dozen yards away from the main horde. She had the card in her right talon, tucked in-between an upright middle claw and the index and ring claw curled inward—

“YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO WAIT UNTIL I WAS CLEAR YOU BLIND JACKASSES I THINK MY ARMOR TOOK A COUPLE ROUNDS—”

“Oh shit, she was still out there when we opened up,” Tack’s voice hissed, and his tone turned more terrified as it sank in more fully. “Oh, shit, she’s adding me to her ‘kill-list’ in her head already—”

“Then you can let her kick your ass or come with me into an ancient pony government agency building full of invincible, flesh-eating ghouls!” Ada shouted down at him as she set the fifty-cal aside on the rooftop and slung her bullpup rifle off of her back and into her talons. Gods did her shoulder ache from that damn thing. Silver lining—her sinuses had been cleared out by the muzzle blast!

Surprisingly, however, Tack didn’t immediately accept her not-entirely-generous offer of salvation. “Damn, tough choice there.”

“If you go in there, she may let you make it up to her later,” Lena suggested sweetly.

“…okay, building of unkillable monsters it is.”

How are boys so easy to manipulate like that... “Then get moving, those things will wake up in about twenty seconds!” Ada shouted, taking flight once more and gliding down towards the street. Her intended landing point was right past Raina, who looked ready to try and take Tack’s life the instant he zipped by her.

And she did try. Maybe fifteen seconds after she’d landed, she heard the pony yelping in surprise as he sped by her, and when she turned to see how badly the attempt went she saw the lithe griffon female pouncing after Tack as he tried to worm his way around her—

“Get back here you team-killing asshole—”

“We couldn’t see you through all those ghouls, girl, we didn’t mean it—”

Do not have time for this! “Raina, give him the card and get back to Rusty’s position! Keep those things back as long as you can!”

“Maybe I should kill him right now, I might not get to later!” the sour griffon screamed back, closing in on her prey.

“If we make it out of this, I’ll make it up to you later however you want, I swear!” Tack begged in turn.

Raina stopped in her tracks almost instantly, and after a moment’s contemplation she uncoiled herself from her low crouch. “However I want?”

“Yes, he will! The card!” Ada shrieked back. “We got friends in trouble in there, we don’t have time for this bullshit!”

Raina’s right talon flicked the card in Tack’s direction, which he pulled down into his combat vest with a tug of magic. “I want a good preening on my wings. The kind that gets me riled up for a good rutting, because that’ll be next.”

“It’ll be the best preening you’ve ever had!” he promised with a nervous, terrified smile.

“It better be.”

Ada’s patience had run out. By the time Tack had worked out the general plan for his reconciliation, she had grabbed hold of the back of his camouflaged armor and started to drag him along with her towards the MoAS complex. “I’m gonna string the both of you up by your tails if this shit goes any further south!”

“If the ghouls don’t kill me, she might!” he defended himself, wresting himself out of her grip before falling into a hard gallop beside her. “I’m just stacking the odds of surviving to tomorrow in my favor!”

“Then turn your brain back on and focus on the now!”

She thought he heard a quiet “eep!” out of him, but she wasn’t sure, and he didn’t say anything else for the rest of the run to the facility gate. She thought it odd that the two patrol ‘bots that had stopped Sling and Julie had yet to appear again, particularly with all the gunfire in the streets outside their patrol route. She’d been half-thinking that maybe Misty’s party had shut down most of the security systems but had turned the turrets back on to try and help fight the unkillable ghouls…

…but she didn’t really believe it. Sling wasn’t an idiot, it wouldn’t have taken more than one or two kills for her to realize she shouldn’t be doing that, particularly if Julie had any insight into the why of it. If they had gained control of the security systems, the MEW turrets would never have flipped back on in the first place. Something about the entire affair didn’t feel right, and that usually meant there was a trap or an ambush lying in wait. Where or how a facility full of unkillable gray ghouls would be setting up a trap for intruders, she couldn’t fathom just yet.

…but I’ll find out in a minute, she ended her musings, coming to a screeching halt before she could crash into the reception desk. To her left, the lengthy, debilitated hallway was curiously devoid of threats, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. Probably attracted to the gunfire further inside the complex.

That still left a question or three unanswered. “Nothing to shoot at? Where’d all the ones outside come from?”

“Maybe a gate on the left side of the perimeter wall,” Tack’s voice suggested softly. She had another, far scarier theory, but she wasn’t ready to air it out just yet. “What’s the play?”

“Quick and quiet, don’t shoot until you have to,” Ada decided for them. “I’ll take point, you watch our six, we won’t waste time with the doors and rooms along the way.”

She heard one of Tack’s hooves tap the floor, and then she raised herself up on her hind legs, waited for her sense of balance to correct itself in relation to her “unnatural” standing position, and then starting stalking forward with her bullpup rifle held low, ready to snap up and take a quick potshot at the first target that presented itself. Normally they wouldn’t go past a room without making sure there wasn’t anybody inside ready to shoot at them through the wall, but these things didn’t use guns, they just sort of…stumbled blindly forward, like zompony monsters from old horror novels. At the worst, they would have the cliché timing ability to appear right as they crossed a door or window and grab at them, so they would have to be quick with the head shot.

This didn’t happen until they rounded the corner at the end of the hall, and had made it halfway up the next hallway to take a left turn towards a side fire exit. A single ghoul groaned hungrily as it shuffled its way into her path maybe three seconds away from her, coming out of an office that still had its window pane intact. The thing was missing an ear and a quarter of its skin on the left half of its face, and about three chunks of flesh from its torso and front limbs, and a bit more flew off the side of its head when she put a round in it anooooOOOAAAA—

—oooly shit I think this dude’s gnads got torn off! she shrieked inside, the inside of her own haunches quivering uncomfortably at the sight of ragged flesh where the stallion’s equipment should have been when her head shot caused the ghoul to drop onto its side in the hall. But perhaps more importantly, the gunshot meant ‘quick and quiet’ was no longer quiet, so there was no harm in talking out loud now. “Tack do not look this guy over you will squeal like a girl,” she warned the unicorn behind her, but—

—but of course warning somebody not to look at something usually just made them want to do it out of spite. “Oh come on, it can’t be that baaaAAAAAAAAAT the hell his…his EVERYTHING got ripped off holy shit biscuits I’d kill myself if that happened to me—”

“Told you not to look, dumbass,” she sighed. Threat gone, move forward, almost to the turn—

“You know that just means somebody’s gonna want to look anyways!” he whined at her backside. “And I have to make sure he doesn’t get back up to bite my junk off!”

“…okay, I’ll give you that one. Fire exit just ahead, get ready.”

There wasn’t a need to lay out the plan here—the person on point would open the door, sweep for threats as they followed the door’s direction and checked behind the door while the second person zipped out and covered their back. And this was where the bullpup really came in handy, much more so than the old service rifle she’d been using. With such a short weapon she could hold it close, almost like a big pistol, shoulder it and just keep it steady on one arm while she opened the door. This one swung out to the left, so she stepped out and started swinging along with it—

—she had a brief glimpse of the courtyard and the threats waiting within it, and she did not like what she saw. A thing stream of gray ghouls were leaking out of the administration wing on the left side of the courtyard, and some of them had already taken notice of her and slowly turned their hungry desires towards her. She had the brief pleasure of watching two of them stumble to the ground after being shot in the head, but there were already too many for her liking. She snapped around the door, checked the space behind it for threats and finding none—

—Tack’s hooves clomped to a stop two seconds after stepping outside into the courtyard—

“Clear on this side!” she called out when he’d stopped, spinning back around towards the courtyard interior, and now she saw an additional three gray ghouls joining the first two for a quick nap. The gunfire was definitely coming from the other side of the courtyard, probably from right outside the security wing. Sounded like two guns, Leo hadn’t taken an M-pattern rifle with him, but it was possible they had found additional weapons and ammo inside the security wing to fight with.

“Shit, now getting strangled to death by Raina looks like a good idea,” Tack mumbled at the sight of the thirty-plus ghouls they could count from their position.

“But that’s not the Raina you came here to impress,” she reminded her libido-motivated comrade. “The Raina you’re trying to survive to get to will let you hump her if you do a good job of preening her wings.”

“…yes, that is a much better way of looking at this, thanks—”

—three more gray ghouls in the conga line streaming out of administration stumbled and fell in about a second’s time, just as a lone stray one oozed into view around the corner of the personnel wing’s outer wall—

—a pistol shot from the courtyard felled this one too, just as she was about to put a round in its head herself, and now Ada knew for sure that Sling was still alive. She didn’t know very many souls in the wasteland that could shoot a pistol that well. She stalked forward carefully, keeping an eye on both the corner wall and the courtyard in front of her, at least until she’d cleared the wall and could view the courtyard in its entirety—

“Oh, hell no,” she blurted suddenly, stopping cold at the sheer number of targets flooding towards the security wing. Leon and Sling were a few yards out in front of the security wing’s entrance, which was shut tight behind them and leaving them with either no escape from the horde in front of them, or protecting them from a surprise attack from another horde inside security. They had likely appropriated their M-type rifles from within security, and Leon was using his to good effect with headshots on just about every ghoul he took aim at. Sling had a little more trouble—even with a weapon sling wrapped around her body to help her carry and steady the weapon during aiming, she could tell the stable pony was still not used to handling a rifle with a forward-heavy balance and seemed to hate using her PipBuck's S.A.T.S. mode at all, and she’d miss about one head shot for every two successful hits, hence the 9mm pistol she’d had out in another spell field. Poor Julie was stuck behind the two—without a gun, she was forced to make do with what looked like several lengths of rebar, and at the moment was busy whacking the skulls of zomponies that were working their way around their friends to attack their prey from the side.

A hundred-plus ghouls were too much for three souls. She doubted she and Tack would make enough of a difference to beat the things back, but they could probably cut a path to them long enough to get a combat plan together. Get inside R&D and find the source of all of this shit, and blow it up.

“Come at them from their left, stay out of their fire zone while we blast our way in,” Tack stated sharply. No longer the laid-back, friendly pony looking forward to a pleasant evening, he was now (finally!) putting his focus into his work, and he could be deadly efficient with it when he put his mind to it. She didn’t expect that attitude to last, but at least now he wouldn’t be playing around with his life truly in danger.

They started their approach just as Sling had reloaded her rifle. Ada picked out a section of ghouls in the horde with the thinnest ranks and started popping heads, and Tack joined in right behind her—

—but the fresh gunfire seemed to attract the attention of part of the horde, for most of the ghouls in their targeted section stopped clamoring for Leon and Sling and turned their attention to the newcomers, as did the string of ghouls filing out of the administration wing—

—Sling stopped shooting and slung her stolen rifle low across her chest, muttering something to the effect of “Eff this”, and her horn began to glow with an intensely bright shimmer of indigo—

No no no no not magic you stupid crazy pony no n—

—a bright, purple-hued sparkling ball of mana quickly formed into existence in front of the mare, then morphed into a solid, building-size slab that stretched out roughly twenty-five yards in width—

—and which the ghouls seemed unable to pass through, as they crammed up against it in a futile attempt to reach their meals—

—with what appeared to be a great surge of mental effort, Sling’s mana-wall surged forward, shoving the horde back and away from them towards the fountain in the center of the courtyard. A few broken and weathered benches were ripped up from the ground and crumpled into pieces in the process, but in a few seconds Ada and Tack had a clear path to their friends and they wasted no time with the opportunity presented to them. A four-second dash brought them all back together—

“Why the hell didn’t you do that when we stepped outside?!” Leon yelled at the stable mare, who by that point had sagged to her knees in exhaustion and was digging into her gear for something to alleviate her condition.

“I literally just came up with that spell, do you see what it just did to me?” Sling heaved back in heavy breaths. “Shit where’s that stim shot Rico loaned me for a test drive—”

Oh, god, those things, Ada bemoaned, but nonetheless found her talons digging into the pouches littered across Sling’s armor to help find the blasted thing. “Don’t get dependent on those. They’re okay for extreme emergencies, but the withdrawal symptoms if you get addicted to the shit will make you wish for death. You might be better off practicing your magic so it doesn’t tire you out to use it in big surges like that.”

Sling found the stim shot first, on her right side, and she jabbed the three-needle device into her neck and hissed in pain as the pneumatic piston jabbed into her bloodstream and pumped it full of the stimulant. “That doesn’t happen overnight.”

“Then you’d better get started on that practice real damn soon—”

“Forget magic practice, what are you two even doing in here?” the mare spat back suddenly. With a final deep breath, she forced herself back up to her hooves, no longer short of air or energy. Hell, she was starting to look like she could sprint for three miles…

Tack answered in the way Ada expected him to. He pulled that red key card out and presented it to the angry mare as if it were a prize. “We have this!”

The expected response—joy and gratitude, for a start—did not manifest. In fact, she seemed more alarmed by the key card than by the hundred or so gray ghouls she’d just shoved away. “…no way in hell that just strolled out on its own like that. I think you got baited.”

“Baited? With the one thing you need to get access to the most secure part of the facili—”

He stopped mid-sentence as it finally dawned on him how incredibly convenient it was that the one access card they just happened to need would somehow miraculously stroll out into the open to be picked up and carried back inside. Too convenient.

“…what the hell is going on in here?”

“We’ll find out in about five minutes,” Sling growled at the card as she snatched out of Tack’s grasp. “How many of them got out?”

“Too many to stop,” Ada answered grimly.

The unkillable ghouls were getting closer.

She’d been watching the Runners shoot them for a couple of minutes, but they didn’t use their machine guns again, and they were struggling to keep them put down. There were enough of them that by the time they got down to like, twenty targets, some of the ones they’d shot would start getting back up and just come at them again. And of course the Runners had to reload, and they did it in a way that meant somebody had a loaded gun to cover their friends with while they reloaded. But they didn’t have unlimited ammo, and they would run out very soon.

Running more ammo to them wouldn’t work. That would be…what, fifty, sixty magazines somebody would have to carry all at once? And the unkillable ghouls were already pretty close to the Runners. Pretty soon they’d stop shooting and just run right back here, if they weren’t about to already—

Oooo, called it, they’re giving up, Light Tail thought sadly, watching the Runners through her binoculars as they suddenly got up, grabbed their two machine guns, and started running back towards the caravan.

“We’re doomed,” her voice announced casually. “The Runners stopped shooting.”

“Probably coming back for fresh guns and ammo,” Rico tried to reassure her, and she actually sounded pretty calm, whatever else she might be feeling. “Cit, get the caravan ready to move—”

“We’ve been ready, just give th—”

But Citrus didn’t get to finish, and the wasteland gods (big jerks that they were) thought it would be funny if some of the brahmin had something to scare them into breaking out of their harnesses and taking off without the big cargo wagons they were attached to.

The sucky thing, was that the something wound up being a few of those unkillable ghouls that had been sneaky and just walked around the block to get to them from an alley nearby. The mutant cows didn’t like that very much, and the moment those things started groaning and shuffling within earshot of everyone, the brahmin’s quiet moos turned into very loud and frightened animalistic shrieks as they started jumping and twisting inside their yokes and harnesses and tearing them apart with frightening ease. Her wagon rattled and shook for all of two seconds until the beasts attached to it broke free of their pony-made shackles, and judging by all the sounds of cracking wood going on outside, a lot of the brahmin were having pretty good luck doing the same thing. A few seconds later, most of them were shrieking and baying and doing just about anything they could to get away from here.

“Shit get those brahmin back here—” Rico started yelling out, jumping out of the wagon even as she started shooting at the gray ghouls with her pistol.

“And do what with them?!” someone further up the caravan shouted back angrily. Sounded like a stallion. “They shattered the yokes, we don't even have time to get the crates of replacements out to put together!”

Rico just started swearing and cussing a lot, like Mom would when she got really stressed out, but she wasn’t gonna say anything this time. She had a good reason to be stressed. Ten wagons and the ponies in them were suddenly stranded and on hoof, and if a few of those things had decided to be quiet and sneaky and get around to them from the side, there could very well be a lot more of them doing the same thing. They might have even been sleeping and hiding all around them the whole time, though why they would choose now to suddenly wake up didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Didn’t really matter. If they didn’t leave now, they never would.

“Everybody, take what you can pick up and carry in ten seconds, we’re leaving—” Rico shouted out loud, though Light Tail didn’t need to hear that. Kite’s paranoia where ghouls were concerned had her insist that they all keep their traveling saddles and guns and stuff on them in case they had to suddenly bolt out on hoof, and now she was glad that she’d listened despite getting three earfuls from her about siccing her pups on Raina earlier. She stowed the binoculars away and jumped out of the wagon, took a quick look around to see where those gray ghouls were coming from and how ma—

“Oh horse apples,” her mouth sputtered. She wished she didn’t have to look and just let someone else tell her what they saw, so she could just imagine it and not know for sure how close those awful things really were. It wasn’t a few, as she’d hoped but feared would not be the case.

There were dozens. Mostly in the alleys to their left an…

...and to their right?! Luna’s stars how could they have been so stupid and just watched that big horde in front of them and never thought to look to their sides too?! They were probably beh—

—the terrified shrieks of frightened brahmin gave way to one beast in particular beginning to scream in fear and agony right when that thought hit her, and she couldn’t help but look behind the caravan—

Yup. A pack of those gray ghouls had somehow managed to sneak around behind them despite the fact that there was a sniper somewhere high up and further behind them that should have seen them coming long before now, unless he’d decided to join everybody down here once Ada had flown down aaaand yeah that was probably how those things had gotten so close without them knowing it. It didn’t do anything to comfort that one brahmin that lagged behind its friends, though. While most of them had managed to escape the hungry lunges of the ghouls, one straggler did not, and a few of the ghouls had latched onto it and started…

…oh gods, no, not now, not this, it was just like what happened to Kite, she fell off the bridge, and then those things got to her an—

Rally’s body leapt out of the wagon and dropped down in front of her, blocking her view of the poor brahmin’s fate. She could just barely see her cyberleg lifting up and pulling her .357 out of its holster, an—

—Rally’s gun boomed once, and the beast’s screams of pain abruptly stopped, though she wasn’t sure the sound of tearing flesh and goopy blood and gore was much better. Those…those ghouls, they were eating the brahmin and for a few seconds they were doing it while it was still alive what was even the point of something so horrible and gross?!

“Eeeugh,” Rally quipped squeamishly. “Uhh, don’t look that way Elly.”

“…good shot,” she replied timidly. “…at least it’s not suffering anymore…”

A brief, distant memory of a dark cave and a flaming, giant pony-killing ant flashed back into her eyes, the screaming bug illuminated by the split-second muzzle flash of a scarred, battered 9mm in her telekinetic grip—

“We’ll be next if we can’t make a hole to escape through,” Kite howled fearfully as she jumped out of the wagon to join them, though the way her new shotgun was shaking about in her magic it didn’t seem like she would be all that good at helping them do that. “They’re fewer of them on the right, take them out—”

Rally’s leg swiped over to their right and started blasting away at the ghouls, dropping one with each shot. El-Tee likewise got her 9mm out, though it wasn’t the old one she’d been using up until recently. It was the same model, though, and looked really nice with the dulled stainless look on it that Rico called a “silver chrome”, if chrome could be silver or something. Gold trigger, really bright green gems for sights, and it didn’t rattle or look scuffed up and broken.

And, she quickly discovered with the first shot, it was a lot easier to hit with. Or maybe those two weeks on the road, when Ada made her shoot a hundred rounds of .38 Special in the morning and again in the evening when they’d stopped for the day, had helped make her better at shooting. Either way, the poor ghoul she shot fell to the ground. She’d have felt a lot worse about it if it hadn’t been invincible, but after seeing what they had done to that poor brahmin she wasn’t so sure about that.

She shot the next one she could get a clear bead on, in the head, and it too fell and lay still. So did the next one after that, and the next, an—

—BJ’s gun joined in on the shooting, but when she looked behind her to see what he was shooting at, she realized that their position was a lot more precarious than she’d thought. Those things were getting across the sidewalk already, and even though he was getting good head shots he couldn’t stop them all by himself, he needed help—

—she jogged away from Rally and got up right beside BJ, and just started shooting the closest ghoul she could see and he jumped a little when she showed up—

All throughout the caravan, gunshots started sounding out, but the hungry cries of the ghouls never wavered or stopped. The only thing that gave her comfort was that Kite popped up beside her and started shooting ghouls too, and her shotgun’s deep, chest-thumping booms made for a very effective damper to the constant ghoulish moans and groans and whatever. It was a pretty neat shotgun, really, it had this metal sleeve on the barrel with lots of holes and some kind of clamp device on the muzzle end that enclosed the barrel and magazine tube, and really good sights on the receiver and the end of the barrel an—

—and the big muzzle flash that shot out when she fired it made her pistol look like a toy cap gun, but it was turning ghoul heads into very bloody and disgusting chunks of chewed-up meat, and would probably keep the ghouls down for a good minute or three. It was hard to decide if she was comforted or grossed out.

Then she looked up to see Kite’s face, and the comforting feelings vanished. She’d expected a firm face, or at least a good attempt to hide fear, but Kite’s face torn between gleeful and terrified, and her wild eyes kept darting from one ghoul to another really fast. She was either grinning in sick delight at blasting ghoul heads, or forcing herself to smile to avoid screaming or crying or…or something. She didn’t look all right.

She was probably as far from all right as a pony could be without actually breaking down into a useless, blubbering mess of a life form. Bad. Very, very bad. Had to do something to help her, but what? One wrong word or action and she might lose it completely—

“Uh, Kite, I know th—”

Kite didn’t lose it, but she clearly wasn’t expecting an attempt at conversation in the middle of a fight with ghouls that wouldn’t die. Her short, high-pitched shriek was almost as loud as her shotgun, and it jerked up high and missed her target completely—

“Aaaaaeeeee—”

“Whoa, wait, bad idea sorry Kite!” she tried to apologize quickly—after taking a couple shots at a ghoul that was about to make it past a street light that had somehow managed to stay upright and intact through the centuries. “I just saw you kinda freaking out and thought—”

“No no no it’s fine it’s fine!” the jittery mare fired back in quick clips as a stream of red shotgun shells was fed into her gun. “…okay, actually, it’s terrible, I’m shooting unkillable monsters with my son and a little girl and I’m surrounded and I’m trying not to think about the last time this many were this close to me and oh gods I want to go back to yesterday and stay there forever—”

Ggggggaaaaaah mistake mistake now Kite’s freaking out for real! “Uuuhhh Rico! Raina! Anybody with a working brain, really, Kite’s losing it and she’s supposed to be looking out for us little kids here an—”

She though the darkening pall falling over them was just panic, despair, and gloominess settling in on everybody as the horde of monster-pony things closed in to gobble them up, but as she stopped shooting at ghouls and turned towards Kite to slap her in the face and wake her up she got a good look at something hovering above that Ministry place down the road…and then she wanted to join Kite in the freaking-the-heck-out party.

The gray skies had finally decided to take on another color. Part of the sky above the Ministry place, it was…wrong. It had come apart, and the individual pieces of cloud were stretching out into thick strands, like…like tentacles or goopy slime, and it was all mixing together in a swirling pattern before it started expanding. At first it was a dull pink, but as the cloud strands morphed together it shifted into a darker, more sinister shade of dark pathos blue, and when it started growing it did so with…with tentacles? It was hard to explain, but the sky was not behaving like the sky. It was behaving like something more organic and liquid an—

—and ghouls are closing in for a snack while you’re being scared by the sky, silly filly! —

—she whipped her attention—and her gun—back on the ghouls, had those bright green sights settling on what looked like a pegasus, and…and then she stopped.

Because the ghoul had stopped. All of them had, actually. And their eyes, they weren’t pale and milky and cloudy anymore, they had…they were glowing some pale, deathly blue light. The fusillade of gunfire that had been going off around her quickly leveled off and then quit altogether, and not because everybody was running out of bullets.

Because the bullets had stopped working.

“—ck they went from unkillable to completely immune to all manner of violence in two seconds—”

“Holy shit the wounds are closing up faster than they got made—”

“What’d they all stop fo—”

“Fuck-mothering Sisters, what the hell is the sky doing?” Raina’s voice trembled in barely contained terror, and Light Tail kind of wanted to smack Raina for that kind of talk against the Princess Sisters, but she could do that later. If there was a later.

And of course now that someone had pointed it out with crude language, every living creature in the street was staring up at the frightening sky and muttering their own little freak-outs, an—

—and the quiet, but high-pitched whines of her pups brought the gravity of their plight down on her. She’d forgotten all about the little fuzz balls, she was so used to them being within ten feet of her, and being all defensive of her against everyone that wasn’t Mom or Kite or some other friendly pony or griffon. They growled at a Union major like they wanted to bite the crap out of her, and they did bite the crap out of that bad pony she’d shot in the knee when all those Pythons started shooting up the diner weeks ago, and they usually weren’t afraid of something as harmless as the sky. But now Max and Mona were whining and scared of the things going on around them and they normally didn’t do that, and that was her big clue that there was something…unnatural, about all of this. She wasn’t going to say supernatural, or paranormal, even if it probably was.

But this wasn’t something that bullets and lasers and explosions were going to solve.

“W-what the fu--….w-what is going on here?” Rally’s voice asked out loud, though she had to have known that not one soul here would have that answer. “Why did they stop?”

Gaaaaokay uhhh…look, look around, see what else changed, Light Tail forced herself into action, tearing herself away from the now-glowing eye ghouls who had stopped for the moment. Look around, and…okay, so they were kinda surrounded on three sides, to the left, right, and behind, and while they kinda had an open route forward to the facility, that horde in the street was back on their hooves and slowly shambling over to them, probably to complete the circle of death around them. Nobody else seemed to be hurt, Rico had like…thirty ponies to her crew across two caravans? She wasn’t sure. Important thing was, nobody was dead, just that one poor brahmin that didn’t get away in time (and those stupid and freaky ghouls were still eating it!). The Runners were pouring water canteens over the barrels of their rifles, watching the steam rise up and grimacing at the sight. She wasn’t sure that was a good way to cool a hot gun down. Waste of good water too.

The sky was doing weird, creepy, and horror-novel like things, and it was centered above the Ministry place…so something inside the Ministry place was probably behind all of this. The ghouls became completely invincible about the time that the sky started doing its own weird thing, all three of these events happening in extremely close timing to each other, it wasn’t a coincidence. There was even that short time where the ghouls in the street just stopped and stared at them, or at nothing, and they stayed that way for a few minutes before they started moving again, and she didn’t think it was because Ada tried to use one for target practice. She would go so far as to say it wasn’t just something doing it…

…but maybe someone?

“…maybe somebody was here before us? Might have messed with something they shouldn’t have and now we got all these problems?”

“Without a security card? The ‘bots would have locked the place down—”

“Help me…”

Light Tail’s left ear flicked slightly, almost not believing that she’d heard anything but her own thoughts. “Di-did anybody else hear that?”

“…god, I was hoping it was just me,” Rally cried softly, and while she felt slightly better knowing she wasn’t going crazy, it didn’t really help any. “First monster ghouls, now ghosts?”

“Not a ghost…help me…”

Okay, okay, brave face, or at least one that didn’t look like she was scared to death (even if she was). “Sooo, uh, you…wanna come out and talk? Or something?”

A faint, shimmering see-through pony figure began to come together in the middle of the street, not too terribly far from her. The figure started life as an outline of dim light, but quickly took on enough features to become an image of a creature in its own right. Four legs, a tail, then a mane, and then the whole thing stopped being a see-through image and started solidifying, gaining a grayish coat with black stripes, and this odd little set of three earrings in the right ear…

And when she heard that voice again, the zebra-thing’s mouth moved and parted in tune with the words. “Help me…”

Kite’s shotgun, Rally’s .357, and at least three other pistols and two rifles all opened up on this zebra-image thingy before it could finish speaking, but the bullets just went straight through as though it weren’t even really there. Even so, the zebra thing’s face went from scared to annoyed the instant the guns started going off, and once everybody realized they were just wasting ammo they stopped. That was still like, two seconds of shooting wasted, and she couldn’t believe they even thought it would work, did they not even see how it just appeared in the first place?!

“Ugh, really?” she heard herself groaning. “No wonder you all suck at making friends, you shoot them before they can even say ‘hi’!”

“I didn’t shoot,” Rico countered in protest. “I know an image projection spell when I see it. Never thought I’d see a zebra using it, though.”

“Not…projection,” the zebra’s image pleaded wistfully. “Everything…wrong. Help me!”

Help? Is…is she stuck inside? “H-help? How? What’s happening?”

“The spell…losing control. Can’t control it. Companions inside, stirring them up—"

A shimmering wave of air began to fly down the street at them, like a heat mirage, but when it washed over them the sky above went pitch black. In the wave’s wake, glowing, smoke-like structures and objects sprouted from the street all around them like plants, and she recognized a great deal of them. Desks, chairs, doors, hallways, and somewhere in the middle of the whole mess were three pony-like figures and two griffons running in place. The objects around them would move past them, then fade out as they came closer to Light Tail’s position as new objects popped to life out in front of them. After a few moments, the running ponies and griffons grew more detailed and life-like and sported armor, guns, and even cutie marks, or what passed for cutie marks on a zebra—she could see the tribal-like pattern on one of them and instantly recognized it as Julaya. Mom’s cutie mark was so familiar that it was like seeing her own face in the mirror. Ada, she recognized simply by her size, as she was a pretty big griffon, and there was Leon right behind her, and that other pony that went with Ada…Tack, that was his name…

…but when she looked around to see how everybody else was reacting to the weird light show that had just been conjured up, she found herself dumbstruck into near-terror by the other change in the environment.

Or rather, the ghouls. They still stood at the sidewalks, forming a circle of unstoppable death around them, but now there were pale blue outlines of ponies superimposed on them. It was a grisly sight, seeing a mutilated ghoul and the image of a pony occupying the same space. With the pale blue faces right on top of the ghoul’s, it became almost a sick game of discovering what parts of the ghoul’s face were filled in by the pony….

…and all of the pony things were…sad…grieving…scared….

…and she swore she could hear them whispering in the hollow wind that was beginning to breeze through. Or that could have been everybody else around her scared out of their wits by what was going on…

“…oh, fuck, me,” Rico gasped in horror, her body walking backward until it awkwardly bumped into Light Tail’s body and almost bowled her over. “Oh no no no no not this not this oh god we’re fu—”

Light Tail spun around and slapped Rico’s left ear before she could drop that curse a second time in five seconds, though she had to jump up really high to do it. “Quit cussin’ and tell me what’s got you freaking out like Kite all of a sudden!”

“It’s soul magic,” Rico blurted, she must have been really freaked out to not even yell at her for hitting her ear like that. “It’s soul magic on a level I have never thought possible. These aren’t ghouls, they’re honest-to-Luna zomponies.”

“…wait, you mean like, zomponies as in the monsters from those weird horror-action novels my mom likes, or—”

“Zomponies as in actual undead slaves raised by a zebra ritual, which is what all those stupid books took the idea from,” Rico answered fearfully. “Only these zomponies aren’t raised from a virus or a space plague and these are a lot stronger than they should be. Their very souls are enslaved and bound to their corpses to serve as thralls, and bullets to the head don’t kill them like they should. There may be no way of killing them without making this zebra witch stronger than she already is.”

…oh…

….oh, god.

Oh gods that was even more horrible than if they’d just been turned into monsters by a flu bug or something equally silly! Endless torment, even in death, never allowed to truly die when it would have been a mercy to them…to be forced to watch as their bodies murdered without cause…

If there was a creature on this world that would make her want to start cussing it out herself, this zebra witch enchantress was coming really, really close to making her do it. She almost did, actually. Turned on this…thing, gloating at them through her projection or whatever she called, as if having all of these dead bodies and their tortured souls do what she wanted was something to be proud of and be recognized for, and the first word that threatened to come out of her mouth was the one that she slapped Rico’s ear over, even, she was just so…so mad at this pathetic creature, this monster! That…that…th—

“That’s messed up,” Blue Jay mumbled in his usual, casual how’s-the-weather tone, strolling up to Light Tail’s side to stare at this zebra creature. “Like, supremely, I bet even slavers would piss on you for this, and they enslave anybody they can catch like it’s a game. What’s the point?”

The zebra image glared down at them as if they were her next victims. “No point now! Help me! Set them free!”

Light Tail felt the hairs of her coat along her spine rise up in terror and her haunches quivering. She didn’t know very much about magic, but the word “soul” being a part of it spelled out what they were looking at. The souls of these zomponies were…it was like they were still tied to their bodies by some invisible rope. And this talking zebra ghost…was she responsible for it, and asking them to fix her mistake? She didn’t really deserve the help, not for something this…this evil, but the trapped souls around them…

“…we can’t,” she piped in softly. “…we can’t even get through these things to help. But there’s some of us inside that could, if they knew where to go.”

“Elly, what the hell are you doing—"

The zebra ghost faded away from the world, though the rest of the projected imagery of the inside of the facility remained, leaving them free to witness the coming spectacle. She had a funny feeling those ghouls wouldn’t move in for the kill for a few more minutes…but that didn’t make their wailing, haunting cries of despair any easier to listen to.

“I hope I pointed the zebra witch to the only help she’ll ever get.”

She hadn’t expected the route to her foe to be so directly laid out before her once they’d gotten through the R&D wing’s lobby.

The halls in this place were much more sensible than the security wing—aside from the main central hall that explicitly spelled out at the end “RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SECTION 1”, there two more hallways at the left and right sides of the floor that ran parallel to the main hall. There were no side hallways or twisting turns of any kind, and a bright, deathly blue glow managed to pierce through the opaque windows that lined the wall of the R&D section.

They charged right for it. She wasn’t sure if they shut the entrance to the R&D wing before they did, but if they couldn’t stop her soon, it wouldn’t really matter in the end anyway—

—the instant she broke through the windows with a light mana burst sphere and dashed through the empty pane, she found herself face to face with a tendril-laced, blue-shaded transparent form of what looked like a zebra mare with surprisingly well defined features. Her eyes in particular were almost lifelike…

A short burst of gunfire from behind her ripped through the zebra image, but the bullets simply passed through it as though it were air, and the zebra-image’s face instantly fell upon itself in disappointment. “…seven.”

Though the words were spoken with an echo and seemed to come from within her own head, Sling almost instinctively understood them to have come from this…whatever she was staring at. And the first question to spring from her lips was…

“…seven?”

“That is how many times someone has shot me in the face when I appeared before them like this,” the zebra-image responded sullenly. “After the fifth time I stopped showing myself outside the facility and hoped that one might be brave enough to enter, where I could communicate more clearly. That was…so long ago. So long.”

“So you’re Zulana?”

“…yes. We must hurry. I have stalled the horde outside, but I cannot hold them for long. Your friends are in grave danger.”

“Wait a sec, stable pony, we could be waltzing into a trap—” Ada began to protest, only to be cut and dismissed.

“What went wrong with your spell, Zulana?” Julie’s icy tone asked.

“I will explain, but you must come with me now! The thralls are no longer affected by bullets! When I lose control of the horde, I will not be able to stop them again and they have your friends outside surrounded!”

“Surrounded?!” Sling shouted, a tinge of unearthly fear in her voice. Kite would be almost certainly losing it out there, facing something like this. “How?”

Zulana’s ghostly image did not wait for her to agree to its request and simply began jogging further into the corridors of the research wing, forcing her to follow it. “Others outside the facility were affected by my ritual when the balefire bomb exploded, so long ago. Its backlash amplified the spell far beyond my intentions. I have managed to contain them to this small area, but until today none of them were ever permanently destroyed by MEW technology.”

“Yeah, we saw that!” Tack roared at the ghostly zebra’s wake. “Rally and Elly didn’t drop more than three before they figured it out—”

“They WHAT?!” Sling burst out angrily. “Oh my god Kite you had ONE SUNDAMNED JOB--”

“Oh shit,” Ada’s soft voice squeaked before she raised her volume. “Uhh, I think they kinda scooted up to the fight before she even knew they had taken off—”

“Bite their heads off later, if there is one!” Leon cut in sharply. “Focus on making sure you get that chance! Keep talking, ghost mare!”

“The children did not make a noticeable impact on the thralls, but the security ‘bots inside the facility have been steadily felling them throughout the administration wing since they were awakened,” Zulana’s ghost continued as it made an unnatural ninety-degree turn to the left when it reached a T-section split. “The only way to stop them now is to destroy the totem maintaining and channeling the spell, and you will need magic to do it.”

“So you had the sense to anchor the ritual to a physical object, at least,” Julie murmured. “Little comfort to those you murdered.”

“I did not intend to kill hundreds!” Zulana’s ghost wailed, zipping again to the right at the next T-split, and from here Sling could see that the new hallway led directly towards an open security door, its entrance ringed by black-and-yellow caution markings and the words “PRIMARY LAB” plastered on the floor and above the doorway. That eerie, deathly blue glow that permeated the entire area was at its strongest within that lab, almost to the point of being passable as a room light…

She was surprised, however, by how bare the lab itself actually was. Aside from an old, dusty desk in the back and several statis tubes embedded into the wall beside it, there was no other discernable or noteworthy features that would even mark the room’s purpose.

The pile of bodies scattered around an intricately-carved wooden totem in the center of the lab, instead, would have made one surmise that this room’s purpose was anything but what it was supposed to be. So far as she could tell, there were ten corpses in total—just as Julie had said, each body had been placed in the center of a glowing rune etched into the floor, and the totem itself shimmered and pulsed with the deathly blue energy coursing through the runes and bodies. Atop the totem itself was a perfectly preserved body of a dull gray-coated mare, her black mane and tail carefully cropped and curled so as not to spill over the edge. Her face, facing towards them, seemed oddly peaceful, as if in a deep slumber, and Sling’s first impression of her was that of a photo still of a famed cellist from the time of Equestria That Was.

“…all right, what’s this?”

Zulana’s ghost paused as it reached the totem, a left foreleg gently scraping at it in longing desire. “…this, is what my folly led me to. This is…was, Dark Times. Her original name is lost to time. She performed a very dangerous mission for Princess Luna early in her reign, one that required her to fake her demise and assume a new life. I know only that she requested her new form reflect that of a famous cello player, though she never said why. A great deal of magic was involved in her transformation, and it was irreversible.”

Leon’s patience, shortened considerably by the dangers to his life today, began to run out. “Yeah, fascinating shit, does this story go anywhere!?”

Zulana’s ghost stayed at the totem, its head tilting upward at the body up top. “They killed her. The day the world ended…they killed her…”

Sling didn’t need any more information from there. It was frighteningly easy to piece it together, particularly when she considered she might have done the same thing if their positions had been reversed. “…you weren’t trying to murder everyone with that spell, you were trying to resurrect her.”

The ghost’s sad wail would haunt her for months afterward. “…they thought her a traitor, and myself the spy that had turned her against Equestria…me, the zebra marked for death by her own kind for taking a pony lover and aiding the Princess Sisters. They poisoned her morning tea, and she died right here as she was preparing for the day’s demonstration of the facility’s top project. I would not have even known who to blame if one of them had not been so cruel as to taunt me with his complicity in the murder as the poison slew her in my hooves. He was the first I claimed for my ritual.”

“And the rest of your victims?” Julie’s voice sneered at the ghost. “Did you claim them at random out of maddened grief?”

“It was a simple affair to peer into his soul and sift through his memories, once I had prepared the totem and inscribed the runes for the ritual into the floor. From there, a unicorn who had witnessed the murderer’s confession agreed to mimic Dark Time’s voice via a cantrip spell and lure the other conspirators into the lab. I had told him I would keep her killers bound until he could return with agents from the Ministry of Morale office in the heart of the city. And I was not technically lying.”

“So how did your attempt at a resurrection end up turning everyone here into undead cannibals?”

The ghost’s withers sagged considerably, its head hanging low out of guilt. “My entire plan was guesswork. The totem itself was inscribed with the ritual runes for the curse of thrall. I thought it necessary in order to channel the souls into Dark Time’s body and restore her. The rune circle surrounding the totem was my own design. I used symbols intended to represent life and renewal, but I was desperate when I made the circle and did not think it through entirely. I do not understand how they are interacting with the totem, if at all. As the totem drew the murderers’ souls into it, a balefire bomb exploded in the city, and the magical backlash wave from it…I could not have foreseen such an event ever occurring at the exact moment the totem began channeling souls through it. Had the bomb not gone off at that moment, the spell would have only affected those lying on the runes. But the backlash spread its energies well beyond this room and bound my soul to the spell in the process. Almost everyone within this building died from the…”death wave”, as I have come to call my sin, myself included. My body was spared the curse of thrall, as I had been the one to cast the spell, but my soul is anchored to the totem and its magic. Shortly after, the others rose as the undead and overwhelmed the rest of the facility. The only souls to escape the effects of the ritual were in the security and testing wing. By the time I was able to exert any control over the zomponies, only a few survivors remained. I had the thralls capture them alive and bring them here, to be placed in stasis. Given what was happening to the world, it was the only way to save their lives and protect them from the radiation that followed. They had been fortunate that the security wing was designed as a temporary shelter from the fallout of a megaspell blast, if only briefly.”

“Not much of a mercy,” Sling noted bitterly. “How is your lover’s body still perfectly preserved when the victims of your ritual look like the rest of the zompony horde?”

“I do not know, and I no longer care. I only care about ending this spell’s hold over the horde and freeing their souls from their torment. My own soul will likely be utterly destroyed in the process and sending me to a true oblivion, but for what I have done I deserve no less. The survival of your friends outside is paramount to you, yes?”

“What about anyone who might’ve been bitten in the last fifteen minutes? If we were to destroy this totem and the spell with it, would the curse be lifted?”

“I know of the one you speak of,” Zulana’s ghost—or perhaps, soul—answered, finally turning about to face them again. “Though she is not taken yet, the spell’s curse allows me to hear her thoughts as she suffers and slowly dies. If my totem is destroyed before the curse takes her, then yes, she will survive. But her despair weakens her resolve, and she is slipping further away with every passing moment. You must act quickly or she will be lost. And some of the horde in the courtyard have made their way into this building. They will be here soon, and many of the interior security doors ceased working decades ago. There is no way to block them out.”

Translation—stop wasting your time and starting blowing shit up. “Leo, Tack, set up a barricade in the hall, I don’t care what you rip apart to do it,” Ada’s voice barked almost immediately. “I think I can hear the damn things even from here.”

“We cannot just blow it up with a bomb or gunfire, the magic in the totem protects it from physical harm,” Julie muttered as she began scouring over the object in question, even as the boys bolted off to carry out Ada’s orders. “A powerful combat spell, perhaps, but the crazy pony weakens herself when she casts one in anger, perhaps the Alicorn’s Star—”

“You have DT’s project with you?” Zulana gasped in surprise. “Does it work? Some idiot in the test lab spilled coffee all over the case and ruined the keypad the morning of the mega spell event, I feared it might have also seeped into the weapon.”

Oh, wow, I was actually right?! “Doesn’t seem to have been affected by anything. Case was hermetically sealed for two centuries, it’s like it rolled fresh off an assembly line. A quick test fire showed no issues with either firing mode.”

A muffled chorus of rifle fire from the hallway began thumping through the walls of the lab, but they paid little attention to it beyond the fact that it meant the boys had not had time to even implement Ada's barricade suggestion. “Yes, yes, the Sun Stream matrix, that could work if it were focused into the totem’s ley lines—”

“Wait, what is this?” Julie interrupted as she reared up and practically stuck her nose into the body atop the totem. Her attention was drawn to a necklace with a silver oak leaf dangling from its chain.

The ghost/soul of Zulana seemed almost confused by the question’s relevance to their predicament. “It…it is her old rank insignia, from her previous life. It was the only thing from that time that she had left, and she treasured it as a reminder of her service. She never took it off…not even when we made love.”

“Could have done without that,” Ada mumbled with a light retching of her tongue.

Julie was not nearly so disgusted. “Did you ever do anything to the necklace? Or to her? In bed even? Do not be shy in answering, it may be important.”

The absurdity of asking the lingering soul of a long-deceased zebra for dirty tales of its old sex life almost made the situation tolerable. “…we…did sometimes dabble in magic potions and spells, when the mood struck us. I remember the last time we were together when I used a combination of a potion and a mixed zebra-pony spell that seemed to…heighten her experience of that encounter. I used her necklace as a focal point for the spell portion. It was always quite open to enchantments. She even allowed me to use it as practice for a phylactery fo…cuuuuuss….”

Whatever Zulana was—a ghost, a soul with no body—it seemed strange for an ethereal, incorporeal being to even have the capacity for memories, or to have trouble remembering things when there was no physical brain to work with. But hearing its words trail off into silence as realization and shock seeped into it, and it trotted (trotted!) back to the totem and reared up beside Julie to inspect the necklace itself—

“…I am a moron of the highest order known to sentient life,” Zulana howled in despair. “I know what happened now. Her necklace…the phylactery experiment, mother of all fu—”

“What’s a phylactery?” Sling butted in. It sounded very important to what was going on—

“It is an item used in olden times of magic as a…container, of sorts, for a living being’s soul,” Julaya replied calmly, her left hoof poking at the necklace’s oak leaf. “My people used soul jars, but others who practiced dark magics and necromancy in the time of Celestia would use any items that could absorb and retain magic. In necromantic arts, a phylactery would contain the soul of a powerful undead creature. So long as the phylactery was not destroyed, the undead would be nigh unkillable.”

“I never removed the enchantment after I had placed it,” Zulana continued—though her pawing at the necklace and the body that wore it was a bit more disturbing than her faint, echo of a voice. “Had I not been so overwhelmed with grief and anger, I would have remembered it. Her body…it grew cold, but never stiff. Her bodily functions did not cease and soil her corpse. The enchantment was designed to store her soul if she were to be gravely injured, but I had not counted on poisoning to be considered an injury by the spell. By the gods, everything I have done…for nothing?!”

“I would not say for nothing, careless one,” Julie forced herself to say calmly, titling the oak leaf about to reveal a small, bright blue glow covering its underside. “The phylactery enchantment will tell you if it is near a body it is capable of being placed into, and it appears your lover has healed from the poison. This totem you meant to revive her with via murder may have, in fact, been channeling the souls of your victims and using them to repair her body. Now that the work is done, destroying the totem may free her from her slumber. In a sense, you may have succeeded in your intent to restore her to life…at the cost of everyone else around you.”

The heavy guilt and shame that seeped into Zulana’s face and slumped shoulders was almost palpable…for a ghost/soul thing. “I…I had not meant such a thing,” she cried to the floor. “Only her murderers were to pay the price…she would never forgive me for either outcome, regardless, so perhaps it is a blessing that my physical body did not survive.”

"So when we destroy this totem…you go with it?”

“…yes. My soul is bound to the totem, and the spell. It is the only reason I still exist in this form, and can control the thralls to any extent. My ultimate death will be a fitting punishment for the crimes I have committed here. I will show you the ley lines within the totem, a direct stream from the Sun Matrix may be enough—”

“Not yet,” Julaya cut in, dashing towards the desk at the back of the room and rummaging through its drawers for something—which turned out to be some kind of mortar and pestle set, a small brush, and what looked like a cased set of half-empty vials of various colored liquids she couldn’t identify. “I need to add some amplification runes to the circle. We will not have a balefire bomb explosion to enhance the effect of the curse's destruction. The runes will suffice if I make enough of them.”

Leon and Tack came crashing back into the lab right then, and only at that moment did Sling realize that their shooting had stopped seconds ago. “…how bad is it out there—”

The boys had tried to slam the doors shut behind them and bar them, but had only managed to shutter them with their physical bodies when their pursuers began colliding with the doors, all but preventing them from moving away. “…do you have a bad scale that goes below zero?” Tack gasped as he struggled against the increasing weight and strength pushing against the doors. “’Cause the only thing bullets are good for now would be to put us out of our misery before they eat us.”

“No no no no no, need more time than this,” Julie murmured hurriedly, sorting through the vials and plucking out a blue vial and a green one to pour into the mortar bowl. “Need more time, can’t draw the runes in less than a minute, need two at the least—”

“We don’t have even ninety seconds,” Ada countered regretfully. “Shitballs we should never have come here…”

Leon and Tack must have felt they were about to lose the battle at the gate, for they jumped away from the doors and let them crash open rather than be crushed beneath the undead as they began to pour in. And right off, they could all see a major difference in their appearance. Now each zompony had what appeared to be an opaque form of a pony’s body overlapping the actual walking corpse, almost like a second skin. It was an eerily disturbing sight—a hungry, predatory and lifeless glare from the corpse, mixed in with what looked like a crying, wailing face of a pony horrified at what was happening before them.

She didn’t even bother shooting at any of them. If Leon and Tack’s efforts had been wasted, there was no reason to assume she’d have any better luck, even with Grayhawk, and she wasn’t about to make things even worse with manaburst rounds or the Alicorn’s Star. Maybe a barrier spell, but…no, they’d just go around it, she couldn’t make it more than twenty-five yards across and Julie said she needed at least two minutes, not one, shit what else could she—

--other blue-shaded, semi-transparent pony figures began to warp into existence around her—behind her, beside her, a couple in front, and what looked like an ever-encroaching field of wailing, crying ponies in front of her slowly stumbling towards her, and faint whispers slithering into her ears—

“…whoa, Mom?!” El-Tee’s voice shrieked in surprise from her left, and when she shot her gaze in that direction, she could see a filly-sized pony…ghost, or soul form replica of her daughter standing beside her, looking up at her with wide-eyed shock. “When did you learn to do this?!”

Oh Sisters no, I don’t want to kill anybody anymore!

“I’ve lost control,” Zulana cried shamefully. “All I can do now is give you the chance to say good-bye…”

Shit shit shit shit shit no no no no not like this no—

Noooooo my gods noooo not a child Celestia Luna help me I don’t want to see this!

“…good-bye? Who sa—”

“Light Tail, if any of you can get out of there do it right now!”

By the sun she looks like my little girl I can’t take it anymore somebody let me out of this nightmare!

“…leave?” the filly asked, somewhat confused by the request as she stared out at everything around her. “How? We’re surrounded, and all these zompony things are crying and wailing and I think I can hear some of them saying words even. They’re all just so…so sad, like they don’t want to do this…”

No, baby, not like this PLEASE RUN! “Light Tail I’m not joking get out of there!!”

How I wish they could get out of there—

Light Tail’s face froze in mid-thought. “…wait…we can kinda hear them…and I think they just heard you, so…that means—”

—and then her little girl’s face just lit up with a wide, gleeful smile and even wider eyes of joy, as if a great and brilliant prank plan had just formed into her brain. The only thing missing from the sight was a little musical ping sound to go along with it. “Idea! They’re sad and crying and stuff, what if we did something to cheer them up?!”

Oh my gods of all the times she can choose to be her empathic self she picks NOW?! “No, honey, do—”

Light Tail’s body stood up and took a few strong steps forward, and she thought she could see her daughter’s horn begin shimmering and distorting in the process. And then the little one took in a deep breath, cleared her throat out noisily…

…and did the last thing she could have expected of anyone facing down the hungry undead.

“A griffon tar is a soaring soul—”

Never mind that the strange, ghostly images of what looked like Sling Shot, Ada, Leon, Tack, and Julaya had popped up amidst their numbers, that the ghouls (or zomponies) encircling them and closing in had these bluish-shaded outlines of pony bodies superimposed over the corpses. Never mind that the apparition of Sling Shot was having a conversation with Light Tail about the very horrors in front of them and begging her little girl to try and flee when all hope was lost. Never mind that Julaya’s apparition was huddled near a totem with the corpses of ten zomponies collected around it and an eleventh body curled up into a sleeping position atop the carved wood construct, muttering something about needing more time for runes.

Light Tail’s response to her imminent and extremely gruesome, gory death was to suck in her gut, step out ahead of the group…and sing.

Of all the outrageous shit she could remember in her short fourteen years of life, she had never seen anything like what was happening today…and had never seen anyone decide that the appropriate response was to break into cheerful song in a misguided attempt to soothe the souls of the damned.

And yet as the filly’s words began echoing across the streets, aided slightly by the use of a sound amplification spell that she had learned during the two week journey to the Runners’ base camp, as her little high-pitched angelic voice began filling and overwhelming the soft, echoing wails of the dead, she couldn’t help but notice that the horde of hungry undead mutants stopped in their tracks…

…and though the corpses simply stood there, swaying and eyeing their meals, the ghostly pony outline forms all cocked their heads towards the singing filly, as though they were just as surprised as the rest of them to see and hear such a thing…

…and she swore she could almost hear them talking on the frail, gentle breeze passing through.

…wait, is that—

Oh my gods I haven’t heard a child’s singing in so long—

Sweet Celestia is she singing to us, that’s so adorable—

“—soul, as free as a mountain bird—”

She thought she could feel her jaw dropping open in shock that such a thing would even work, but she was growing increasingly numb to the absurdity of her day so far, and so all she could do was stare at this little filly, and then back at the hungry mutant ghouls, and wonder what had gone so wrong with her life that she would find herself witness to such a sight as this.

“—his energetic fist should be ready to resist—”

“What. The. FUCK.”

She was going to have to have a word or four with Rally, if they survived this.

But against all odds (except maybe the unseen godly deity that decided that this would work), her precious daughter and her endless empathy for the suffering of others had yet again found a way to do with words what couldn’t be accomplished with violence. The moment her little night light’s voice began to sing to the undead monsters coming to eat her alive, they all just…stopped. In this lab room, and the streets outside where Light Tail and all the other stood, the walking dead just came to a dead stop, and the poor souls still tethered to their bodies stopping crying and sobbing, and seemed to just…explode with what looked like surprise, and joy, and happy tears, at the sight of a child from the living world trying to soothe their anguish with a song.

And in a damning, dawning moment of clarity, she realized that Light Tail’s song might have been the first truly happy thing they had seen or heard since their deaths nearly two centuries ago. By the gods, she could almost feel the child’s love for life even now…

It was that lofty, tangible love of life that nearly drowned her out to the world, were it not for the simultaneous absurdity that a singing child could bring a horde of undead to a stop in two seconds when bullets to the head did nothing.

“—resist, a dictatorial word—”

Light Tail’s voice briefly broke from the song, amusingly whispering to her mother in a conspiratorial tone in an effort to go unheard by the monsters staring her down—

“C’mon mom back me up here.”

She almost snorted a laugh out of her nose. Surrounded, facing death by dead cannibals and would probably live through enough of it to see them rip her legs off, pull her chest cavity open, and pull her guts out to start snacking on them, and she was being asked to join her little girl in an impromptu singing practice session on Hilda and Mulligan songs.

And by the gods did it seem to be working. The zomponies stopped, and the trapped souls were enamored with the song and anxious to hear more.

“His nose should pant—” Light Tail began the chorus a split second later, and Sling’s thoughts strayed back to afternoons of another lifetime, when mother and daughter sat huddled around a table, reading and practicing this very song in an effort to cure the child’s lingering speech impediments—

“—and his beak should curl,” she sang as Light Tail’s voice faded, and right on cue, her child picked up the next line—

“His cheeks should flame—”

“And his wings unfurl—”

“His feathers should heave—”

“And his heart should glow—”

Aaaaaand—

Just like those distant afternoons, mother and child joined together for the final line of the first chorus, their voices timed together perfectly through practice and a growing, private enjoyment of the moment—

“And his fist be ever ready for a knockdown blow—”

“…uh, Ada?”

Her numb, dumbstruck body could only provide a vague, grunting response to Tack’s question. “…ya.”

“…are they singing?”

“…ya.”

“…why is it working, Ada?”

She finally found enough breath and sense of mind to speak a full sentence. “Beats the shit outta me dude.”

Now that Sling was joining her daughter in her insanity, the two had begun to sing together in perfect sync—the high-pitched voice of the little girl providing an amusing and oh-so-cute touch to the more adult, grown-up deeper voice of the mare. She had never known that Sling’s voice could sound so nice and cheerful and happy and just damned good at singing in general…

…or that such a thing would somehow, against all the odds of the wasteland, manage to bring the swarm of moaning cannibal ghouls to a standstill and turning the wailing cries in the wind into happy little shrieks of joy and happiness at the sight of it.

“His nose should pant and his beak should curl—”

“I’ve gone nuts,” Blue Jay’s voice muttered numbly, his body as still as a rock at the events unfolding before him. “Totally and truly nuts, she’s driven me that crazy.”

“—his cheeks should flame and his wings unfurl—”

Oh! My! Gods! They sound so cute together!

They must be related! Sisters?

That’s the love of a parent and child I can FEEL IT!

“—his feathers should heave and his heart should glow—”

The only words Kite could bring herself to say were not for her little boy’s ears, so she kept them to herself and offered only a pitiful explanation for what they were hearing. “Or we’re dead.”

“—and his fist be ever ready for a knockdown blow!”

Even with her thoughts focused on the singing, on the love and unbridled joy that her years of efforts to correct her daughter’s speech issues had not only borne fruit, but turned out to be saving a lot of lives today, she could still make out—just barely—Julaya’s hasty efforts to paint her additions to the totem’s rune circle, and a quick glance back over her shoulder gave her a rather unflattering view of the zebra’s backside. But she could see a couple of additional runes added to the rune circle, just outside the outer ring, with thick, solid lines connecting it to the original pattern, and Julie’s head snapped back as she carefully cradled the mortar’s handle atop her snout and mouthed off silently, a little longer.

…yeah, a bit longer. I think we can handle that…

Rather than wait for Light Tail to start the second part, she decided to do it herself. She was somewhat curious if El-Tee would do that silly “act it out” bit in the second chorus she used to do when she was like, eight years old—

“His eyes should flash with an inborn fire, his brow with scorn be wrung—”

Ooooh gods that mare sounds good did she teach the filly to sing?!

Oh sweet Celestia, the souls of these zomponies were even starting to look as happy as they sounded! “He never should bow down to a domineering frown—”

As she expected, Light Tail decided to join in on this part—

“Or the tang of a tyrant’s tongue!”

She must have, the two are in sync like they’ve done this a thousand times!

Sweet Luna it makes me think of my little ones, it’s heartbreaking and sweet all at once!

If you think that’s nice, wait ‘till Light Tail starts getting too into it.

She looked down at El-Tee, just to see what the little one would do with her singing parts once she got to them—

“His paw should stamp—”

Right on cue, Light Tail’s eyes narrowed into an angry glare as she picked up on her part of the chorus—

“And his throat should growl—”

Celestia’s teats she’s gonna act it out this is so cute! “His tail should swish—”

And just as she expected, Light Tail put on an exaggerated scowl on her facial expression. “—and his face should scowl—”

She wanted to laugh, she really did. But that would ruin the song, and perhaps its hold on the undead horde, so she just forced herself to smile gleefully at her child’s antics. “—his talons should flash—”

And Light Tail huffed and puffed and stuck her little chest out in a very prideful gesture. “—and his breast protrude—”

Oh gods how she wanted to laugh, and couldn’t. She could be unintentionally cute and endearing and it was simply adorable!

As was the timing at which they could sing together. “—and this should be his customary attitude—”

Hahahaha do you see that little girl that’s so cute—

She is just absolutely precious—

“His paw should stamp and his throat should growl, his tail should swish and his face should scowl—”

She felt a subtle tap upon her left side, where she’d holstered the Alicorn’s Star, and almost looked to see who it was when she heard Leon whispering, “Get ready.”

“—his talons should flash and his breast protrude, and this should be his customary attitude!”

“Done!!” Julie’s voice screamed, her hooves quickly pattering away from the totem, likely expecting an immediate reaction to her cue.

Wouldn’t do to disappoint her.

Sling spun about to face the totem, her eyes drawn to the ghostly Zulana’s foreleg seemingly placed upon the totem, and though no words were spoken, she somehow instinctively believed the disembodied soul to be directly marking the spot to be exposed to the Alicorn Star’s Sun Stream shot. She barely even registered that she’d drawn the ancient weapon, only that she had it held out before her, it’s small display screen reading “MODE 2, 100%” and the weapon’s bright arcane gem sight rods centering in on the ghostly forehoof as the gun’s emitter array unlocked and sprang out into a firing position.

She pressed the trigger back and held the gun into a death grip to keep its MEW stream on target. One second into the stream, the targeted spot began to glow bright red, almost like the oft-described morning sun that she had never seen. Two seconds in, and that same, bright red glow had spread throughout the entire totem, lines and lines of intersecting energy…and embedded with what she thought were bright pink mists of…of something, that seemed to radiate from her own horn, as if it were being drawn towards the totem—

At three seconds into the stream the bright, red glowing energy turned into a vibrant purple as the pink mist touched upon the totem, and then that same, bright purple glow rushed outward and swiftly overtook her body. It hit her in the horn first, and then rapidly spread throughout the rest of her body, overwhelming her senses to the point that she had to shut her eyes to block out the light.

Oh Luna, is it over? Are we free?

H-honey, is that you? Are you the light I’m following?

Sweet moonlight and sun, it’s like every weight is lifting away—

“…thank you…”

She was not prepared for what followed. A dizzying, intense flood of thoughts and emotions began pumping through her brain and, seemingly, her very blood vessels. She could barely describe what was happening to her, beyond the intensity of it. She felt a crushing despair and anguish, and then unbridled joy and cheer for the simple act of living. An equally strong desire to release herself and her feelings came after, and then came…love? Love for her daughter, love of guns and magic, love for…Kite? An intense sense of pity and sorrow for Rally and Blue Jay’s lives, and a desire to better them in any way she could manage, and an equally intense pride in Light Tail for being the empathic, caring, loving soul that she was.

She could discern small tidbits of other feelings and emotions in between. A fleeting touch of horror and rage, then a stream of relief, and then a hot flash of lust at the thought of Julaya, for reasons she suspected to be due mostly because of her eyes and the way Kite had done her mane—

—her body began to shake violently in a quick rocking motion, and then her eyes blinked—

—wait, didn’t I shut them a few seconds ago—

“—ing, wake up dammit, this is getting scary!” Ada’s voice shouted down at her, and as her eyes blinked again her vision suddenly popped back in with vibrant, colorful images of a very large griffon and her forearms shaking her body in an effort to rouse her from a deep sleep she didn’t remember entering.

“…wake up?” Sling heard herself mumble. She didn’t feel tired, or sleepy, or…or anything like that. She felt great. Like she could stand up and fly above the clouds on nothing but wishes and good feelings! She wanted to get up and run, she wanted to bounce off of the wall like a little filly, she wanted to find Kite and throw her to the floor and just make mad love to her right there in front of everyooooooooone wait what?!

“You’ve been out for hours, you bat-shit crazy pony!” Ada half-laughed at her, even in her great concern over her state of being, and that was when she noticed that Ada had stripped off almost all of her combat gear and weaponry, and that they weren’t in the lab anymore being approached by an undead unkillable horde…and then Sling began to notice that all of her combat gear and armor had been pulled off of her as well…and…and were they in some kind of administrative office? There were a couple of bookshelves, and it felt like she was lying on an old couch and there was a desk with a broken terminal on it to her left and pots with dead, wilted plants and trees in the corners of the room—

“…what do you mean ‘out’? I just blasted that damn totem like, ten seconds ago or something!”

“Yeah, Julie and Rico said you might have experienced that magical discharge wave differently, being as you were the one setting it off and the gun’s laser stream was still connected to the totem when it went off, which meant the magic went and flowed right into your brain through your horn,” Ada replied, pulling her arms away now that the bat-shit crazy pony was awake and confused as hell. “Damn thing spread out for blocks, it felt amazing! The first couple of hours seemed to pass by in a few minutes—”

“Did it work?” Sling blurted in the next instant. As interesting as that might have been to hear if Ada was feeling some of the things that she was, she was more interested in whether or not they were going to die in the next few minutes.

“Did it work? Did it WORK!? Girl, those zomponies turned into dust the moment that magical wave hit them! All of them! I don’t understand what Julie did or how it worked, I just know that it worked and we’re all good and safe in the administration wing! Got the brahmin hitched back to the wagons and moved them into the courtyard, Rico and her crew have spent the last three hours going through the place for all the loot they can haul off! Found some good shit too, guns, ammo, meds, Kite even found the medical clinic in the security wing and everything in there’s intact! We can pretty much set up an emergency surgery unit in the safehouse we’re moving to tomorrow, she could take care of anything! Disease, physical impairment, combat injuries, deep surgery, she’s freaking out like Rally!”

Everyone seems to be! “…wow. And the kids, they’re all fine now?”

“Y’know that reminds me, what the hell possesses Light Tail to do the crazy stuff she does?! She like, outright SANG to those things, and it WORKED! She’s Light Tail the Zompony Soothsayer now!!”

Oh gods, that’s going to drive her crazy. “Hero worship of my little girl? Really?”

“For saving all our asses with the craziest idea I never would have thought of? Hell yeah! Any other questions, I’m totally WIRED right now!”

She had a hundred of them, really. What happened to the soul of Zulana, for one, but she had a sinking, depressing feeling that the vague, faint “thank you” she heard from her was her final words as she passed on to either oblivion or to whatever awaited a soul after death. Which brought her, ironically, to the reason that any of this happened at all…

“…the body, on the totem. Zulana was trying to resurrect it, what happened to the body after the totem was destroyed?”

“Oh, her!” Ada quipped excitedly, hopping aside to give Sling a view of what lay on the other side of the room…a gray-coated mare, with black mane and tail, sleeping soundlessly, and with what looked like an active, steady rate of breathing. Her cutie mark was a simple musical record, adorned with a song note in the lower left section of it. It took Sling a couple of moments to remind herself that this wasn’t the mare’s natural born appearance…

“The totem didn’t explode, or anything crazy like that,” Ada continued, watching the sleeping mare along with her. “The way Julie and Rico explained it, we more or less just destroyed the magic within it in a way neither of them can explain to me to where I could make sense of it. I just know that it worked, and that this mare’s vital signs shot up right afterward when Julie snagged her off of the totem and took a pulse. Kite thinks she might be in her early twenties and that she could be out for another day or two, and she’ll be in for an extremely rude awakening when she comes to. There were a few stasis pods in the lab too, but only two of them had live ones in them. The rest all failed over the last couple of centuries. Total of…five bodies. Too decayed to even tell if they were mares or stallions. Rico’s crew got the live ones out of their pods safely, one unicorn mare and one pegasus stallion. They’ll all probably go back with her caravan. Today’s been totally nuts, almost seems like the rest of my life’s going to be pretty tame compared to this.”

“You realize you just ensured the wasteland gods will go to great trouble to make you wish you’d never said that, right?”

“…aww, dammit…”

She stared at this sleeping relic of Equestria That Was for perhaps a few moments longer than was appropriate when the sight of her sparked a new, panicked question that honestly should have been one of the first ones out of her mouth. “Oh, Luna, Misty! Did she make it?!”

Ada’s light sigh was the first less-than-happy gesture in the last two minutes—or perhaps, the last few hours, if she really had been knocked out that long. “She’s alive, but she’s not in great shape. Kite’s pretty sure she’ll survive, but Rico wants to get her back home as quickly as possible regardless, and I don’t blame her. The plan, at present, is for them to haul everything that we need to our safehouse and be back at our main camp by nightfall tomorrow, and then back on the road home the day after.”

“Safehouse?”

“We’ll explain everything tomorrow morning,” Ada assured her. “Kite’s got your sleeping space set up. Two halls over, third door on the left, marked “Litmus Cloud”.”

“Sleep? I feel like I could run laps around the whole damn town.”

“That’s where Kite wanted you to go when you came to. Probably wants to check you over, make sure that magical wave lash or whatever didn’t mess you up too bad. Better safe than sorry.”

Hunh…well, that would actually be a pretty good idea, now that she thought about it. “…yeah. Would suck if I woke up in the morning with an extra tail or a third eye from all this.”

“Wouldn’t it?” Ada’s voice taunted back at her as she showed herself out of the office. A quick look around her showed her to be in the middle of a hallway with several other offices within it, and she opted to go left until she could turn a corner and went right. Ada said two halls down, but not which way that ‘down’ was, so she’d have to guess and she probably should have asked her what she meant first but oh well.

Compared to the rest of the facility, it seemed as though the administrative wing had sustained the least damage, or they had simply chosen a section that was in the best shape for their sleeping space today. The homely, tan-colored walls and oak doors were quite pleasing in appearance and did a great deal to calm down a number of her raging and swirling emotions, though she still felt an unexplainable and urgent desire to find Kite and…do things. She didn’t even feel like fighting it this time, either. She hoped this “safehouse” would measure up décor-wise.

When she passed by the second hallway, she hooked a right and spotted Rally literally hopping her way down the same hallway, giggling and squealing all the while—

“You sound pleased with yourself,” she made the mistake of saying in greeting to the teen, at which point Rally simply hopped about one hundred and eighty degrees with a huge, tooth-filled grin on her face—

“Oh sweet Luna’s cheeks you have no idea!!” she laughed/giggled. “Rico found a few rooms stuffed full of all kinds of tech and I am just so JAZZED! We got most of it sorted and catalogued, but she told me to leave the rest to her and just get some sleep but I’m not going to get any sleep like this so I asked Kite if she had any sedatives or something and she just slapped with this delayed sleep spell that’ll drain all the energy from my body in about twenty minutes so I gotta get ready for bed so Bu-EEEEEEEEEYYEE—”

Without skipping a beat, she turned back around and continued on her merry way until she reached the end of the hall, and then started hopping left and disappeared around the corner.

Kite’s voice squeaked behind her a moment afterward, but somehow Sling didn’t jump up from the suddenness of it. “…oh Celestia I hope that spell kicks in faster.”

“Is everyone like that?”

Kite’s body slipped past and nudged her to follow her along as she made her way towards what looked like the third door on the left, with the name plate next to the door marked “Litmus Cloud”. “More or less, but the effect is lingering on some much longer than others. Except BJ, of course. He’s looking at everyone like we’ve lost our minds. The moment he found a spot in here to hole up in and hide from us he zipped in and hasn’t come out since. Said Light Tail’s song to the undead was all the crazy he could stand to take today and didn’t want any more of it.”

“No shit,” Sling murmured absently. Now that she had what she wanted—Kite within grabbing distance—it had become something of a fight to keep in control until they could get behind that door and shut it behind them. She hadn’t realized she had already made up her mind what to do…

…only that she no longer cared to hold back.

“More worried about you, really,” Kite went on, her magic wrapping around the door knob and twisting it open and oh gods why she did find the mere act of her walking through the door so attractive? “How do you feel right now?”

“…hungry,” Sling replied as she hurried after her prey, her left hind leg pushing the door shut behind her. This particular office was a bit bare. Just a desk with a bookshelf on one side and an old couch on the right, with most of her gear piled up on the desk and two sleeping bags rolled out and opened up to create a crude and not-very-comforting mattress of sorts. The two pillows and wool and fleece blankets thrown upon them were much more promising in terms of comfort, but that was for later.

The sleeping bags would do.

“Figured as much, you’ve been out pretty much the entire afternoon and half the evening,” Kite said, turning towards the desk as her magic began to poke at her saddlebags, perhaps for one of her Stable rations or an MRE. “We’ll get you fed, then I’ll start the examination. I’m not an expert on magical exposures like this, but—”

It took her about that long to put up five sound suppression fields—one on each wall, plus the door—and by luck or happenstance Kite had allowed herself to venture close to the improvised mattress on the floor, and that’s when Sling pounced on her pretty mare and tackled her to the ground—

"Hey OOOOF what the hell is wrong with yoooOUUUUUU—” was as far as Kite’s shout of rage went before she was attacked with a deep, lustful kiss that killed the scarred mare's telekinesis spell and left her capable of only protesting by pushing Sling’s head away with a hoof to break the kiss. “Whoa whoa what the hell Sling?!”

“I’m not hungry for food,” Sling’s husky voice heaved, no longer able to restrain herself as went back on the offensive. “I want you.”

“Wait are you serio—” were Kite’s last coherent words of the night before Sling ended them with another kiss and pinned her partner to the floor with her body weight.

Neither of them ever got back up.