//------------------------------//
// Chapter 25 
// Story: Hegira: Rising Omega 
// by Guardian_Gryphon 
//------------------------------//

Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
December 13th, Gregorian Calendar

Celestia

There was a cruel and unnerving familiarity to those last moments before battle joined.

The sudden radio silence.  The sensation of cloud-laden air rushing over my wings, insulated even as they were by armor plates.

The shadows of Dragons, Gryphons, Ponies, and Human vehicles sliding through the murk as though they were Leviathan passing through the depths of the sea.

The terrible sickly sensation deep in my stomach, born of a horrid realization as to what came next.  What I had to do next.

I'd been in that place of death, and killing before.  So many times.

So often hoped I'd never be there again.

I knew we had arrived, at last.  I did not need the armor's heads up display, informative as it was, to know we were right on top of our target.  

I could feel the evil spewing forth, like plunging my horn into a toxic oily slick, even through all the layers of alloy and duracrete, and in spite of the magic deprived nature of the environment.

If it was this bad even here, how much worse would it be fighting on magically enriched soil?

There would be time for fear later.

The time had come for action.

What fear I had, I crushed into a tiny inky sphere, and secreted far, far behind the pool of light that was my reserve of magical power.  And of my hope.

The spell I had carefully worked out with Skye began to form almost of its own accord.  The expenditure of energy would be difficult for me, but the structure of the weave was far more elegant than it was complex.

We had decided to thread a message into the pulse.  A warning, simple and succinct. 

'Take cover.  This facility is about to be destroyed.'

Though it would only be received by Unicorns, and communication devices operating on certain frequencies, we hoped that those who heard it, and were subsequently free enough to heed it, would take the fifteen seconds I intended to give them to find shelter.

One of many worthwhile risks associated with our overall decision to attack with troops, rather than bomb the facility into oblivion from a safe, comfortable distance.

In war, that decision which is most right is rarely, if ever, comfortable.  And so often dangerous.

With that thought, I canted forward into a steep dive, and released the pulse of magic, its energies flying outwards at near light speed as a barely perceptible wave of faint golden air distortion.

"Initiate synchronized strike.  Time on target.  Five seconds;  Mark."

The words felt alien in my mouth, but familiar in concept.  Some spells required strange spoken components, and Human martial language was not unlike its own form of incantation.  A five second timer sprang into existence on the right side of my field of vision.

I could see, and hear the first volley, released by AI controlled systems.  Missiles first, to account for their flight time.  Hundreds of warheads ranging from the size of the end of my hoof, to half as long again as Taranis, flung from launch rails on Dragons' backs, and hardpoints on aircraft wings, and launchers clutched in Gryphons' claws.

If the PER had not been aware of us before, they certainly were now.  I began to build the weave for the second planned major expenditure of energy that would be asked of me that day.

As the timer neared zero, I dropped through the lowest layer of cloud, Fyrenn, Neyla, Alyra, Skye, and Taranis close behind.  

In the same instant, the world around us lit up with the tracers of railgun fire, and the cold crackling blue lances of particle beams.

The cacophony of luminescence bounced and flickered off the trails of missiles as the much faster forces of killing closed with the slower, heavier ones.

The timer reached zero.  I loosed my second spell.  The beam of pure destructive solar energy was slowed only by fractional air resistance, travelling shockingly close to the speed of light, and splitting the air with a sound like a tolling bell.

My plasmatic attack spell, the complement of missiles, and the hail of relatively 'smaller' weapons fire arrived within the same tenth second of time.  Like Gryphons, or Pegasi, Alicorns were more than capable of altered perceptions of time.

In fascinated horror, I watched as the destructive symphony pierced the enemy cloaking field, atomizing the delicate panels and gossamer fiber optic weave as if they themselves were merely illusions, and not substantial metal and plastic constructs.

The majority of the above ground portion of the PER's structure simply ceased to exist in an instant of searing heat, and light.  A fractional image of splintered warhead casings and railgun round slivers belching forth from dusted windows on cushions of fire, eerily shot through with the blue of particle energy, seared itself into my vision.  

We'd known that casualties would be high in the uppermost floors of the sprawling compound.  Satellite vision intelligence had also indicated that the majority of their anti-air weapons were secreted in these areas.

Some risks simply could not be practically taken, regardless of the death toll.  I had to bite back a stream of tears, repeating the mantra that had become as regular as my every breath silently to myself as we plummeted towards the dying light of the inferno I had unleashed.

Everyone in that structure is an enemy, or enslaved by one.  Death is preferable to slavery.

"Arinna main, StrikeCon;  Break EMCON restriction.  Intelligence recommends dispersal pattern Sierra.  Standby confirmation from Arinna one-six."

The intelligence was referring to me.  The entire attack force had been designated Arinna, after the temple of a Hittite sun Goddess.  Some Human officer's idea of grim humor.  Our spear-tip group was Arinna one.  According to Human tactical radio convention, as the being in charge, I was Arinna one-six.

Human radio convention had been essential learning for me, given the amount of time I spent travelling with Human protective details, and military officers, when on Earth.  I'd never dreamt in my darkest nightmares that I would have cause to speak it myself on the battlefield.

The recommended dispersal pattern appeared in my tactical display.  I didn't need much time to see, and verify, that as always the Humans' artificial intelligence was remarkably tactically canny, and had selected a perfect series of deployment maneuvers.

"Arinna main, Arinna One-Six;  Confirmed.  Dispersal pattern sierra."

No sooner had the words left my muzzle, than I was forced to flare to make my landing.  The impact was nothing against the strength of my own legs, but it was dulled even further by the reactive inner layers of the Genesist armor.

The ground shook slightly from my own impact, duracrete fracturing under my hoof guards, then again in sequence as Fyrenn and Neyla arrived.  Skye and Alyra's touch-downs were much less massy, and therefore almost undetectable.

Then Taranis arrived.  The ground bucked and groaned, immense cracks spidering out from behind me where he had come down on just his hind legs, standing in bipedal orientation as both his kind, and the Gryphons, were so fond of doing when they wanted added reach, intimidation, or sightlines.

With a flick of telekinesis against a small control pad, I cycled my radio over to a setting that would reach every single receiver in the area, whether friend or foe, and summoned another tiny spark of magic to enhance the volume of my voice to levels that would be audible unaided to anyone within a mile.

"IN THE NAME OF THE POWER OF LIGHT, LIFE, THE EQUESTRIAN ROYAL THRONE, AND THE ALLIANCE OF WORLDS, WE ORDER YOU TO SURRENDER, OR DIE.  THIS IS YOUR FINAL AND ONLY WARNING."

Fyrenn visibly winced as he moved up to stand beside me, particle rifle levelled and sweeping the immediate area for threats.  He spared a half second's grimace in my direction, before his eyes returned to ferreting out every single dust mote, electrical fire, spark, and any other motion in our field of view.

"Could we *possibly* make any *more* noise?"

I summoned, and held, a much less intense version of my initial assault spell, inhaling to respond.  My first words were completely drowned out by the thunder of L-RAC fire as the EarthGov army vehicles picked, and annihilated, their first targets.

Fyrenn shrugged, and removed his carbine's safety.

"That answers that question."

Immense detonations touched off on the far side of the compound.  According to my heads up display, the L-RACs had wisely targeted anything left standing that might contain a defensive emplacement, or vehicles.

Distant roars heralded the dispensation of Dragons' breath as the ones who had been carrying the L-RACs, now free of their heavy burden, began to move through the flanking sides of the facility, relative to us, disgorging Human assault troopers in pairs as they went.

Taranis, Fyrenn, Neyla and I all caught sight of the first enemy at the same moment.  Neyla was fastest to the draw, letting fly with a shot that slammed into the opaque black surface of the Troll's helmet dead-center.

Fyrenn's shot was not far behind.  I didn't bother with my own spell;  Taranis disgorged a single fearsome bolt of white-hot, blue-fringed electrical energy from his own throat, the sound overpowering everything else in the area by a factor of ten.

While the Troll's armor had kept him alive in the face of the two carbine blasts, if only barely, Taranis' bolt instantly reduced the occupant inside to a fused mess of skin and bone, bypassing the suit's other defensive measures entirely, and completely overwhelming the insulating layer designed to protect against electrical discharge.

I could smell the full extent of the carnage, even at a range of fifty yards.  A depressingly familiar scent, though it had been over a millennium since I tasted it so strongly.  My desire to wretch the contents of my stomach onto the ground was no lessened than the day I'd first smelt death, but it was more an emotional reaction now than a physical one.  I controlled the impulse with disquieting effortlessness.

Another figure began to move through the dust and smoke at the fringe of the shattered building before us.  Fyrenn, Neyla, and Alyra trained their weapons, but mercifully saw the same thing I did, and held fire.

The shape was distinctly equine, taking on a pallid sickly green color as it passed out of the worst of the occluding debris cloud.  The mare's coat should have been a beautiful forest green, but it was caked with duracrete dust.  And dried blood.

My breath caught sharply as the Pegasus closed to within ten yards.  Fyrenn moved his carbine into a position that said 'come no further' without the need for spoken words.  The mare halted abruptly, and coughed, with great hacking heaves that disgorged tiny flecks of blood, and of cement from her muzzle.

I winced reflexively.  The contaminants that survivors were even now breathing, pressed under thousands of tons of rubble, or engulfed in smoke, and dust clouds...

At last, the mare managed to speak.  I could see a terror in her eyes, and hear a pain in her voice, that gave me all but total certainty;  She was fully in control of her body.  Or at least her speech.

"Mmmm...  My...  My Mistress...  Has sent me to you with a message."

I wanted to go to her.  To trade the killing magic I held at the ready in my horn for healing magic.  To sooth her fears, and her injuries alike.  I wanted it so badly that I took an unbidden step forward.  Fyrenn quickly splayed out one wing to stop me.

I hated it, but I knew he was right.  Just because the mare was being allowed to speak of her own accord, it did not mean her body was her own in its entirety.

After another coughing fit, the green mare spoke again.  With each new word, my heart sank further.  My pulse raced.  I felt almost feverish.

"The Nightmare, Queen of all that exists, ruler of the Dispossessed...  Demands your surrender.  She asks that I...  That I tell you that none shall live who do not serve.  If you seek to save the lives of any, whether potential servant, or host, then you should tell them to lay down their arms."

As the last sentence was forced out, agonizingly slowly, as if the mare's words were being spoken by her own will, but dictated to her from afar, more Ponies staggered up from the nearest sections of rubble, dragging their burned, bleeding, sometimes broken bodies forward into a semicircle around us.

The Gryphons began to sweep the semicircle with their weapons, and I could feel Skye prepare a variety of defensive and offensive spells, while Taranis began to muster lightning in the back of his throat, and spread his armored wings out to provide protection in a two hundred degree circle behind and beside us.

The Pegasus sucked in a sharp breath, as if the voice in her head had just said something she could scarcely cope with.  I saw tears forming in the corners of her eyes.  And I knew what would come next with a deeply sickening twist down in my gut.

I inhaled sharply as well, and turned my eyes to catch Skye's as we both felt a sudden upwelling of magic all around us, as if coming from thousands and thousands of low level point sources in front of, and beneath us.

"My mistress bids you witness this...  Demonstration...  Of her power.  And her resolve.  To only those who serve is the gift of life granted."

I pushed past Fyrenn's wing, panic rising in every nerve, and magic bubbling up with it.  But there was nothing to be done.  And I knew it.  The mare gasped out just two more words, this time from her own heart, before the stroke fell.

"I'm sorry!"

The final word was her final cogent breath.  The green Pegasus dropped, instantly, as if a puppet on strings that had suddenly been severed.  All around the semicircle of battered Ponies, the same thing happened, each dropping simultaneously, and with the same look of abject horror.

They all convulsed on the ground, screaming incoherently as I galloped towards the green mare across the loose gravel of shattered pavement.

By the time I reached her, she had drawn her last ragged, tortured breath, eyes wide open, tongue severed clean through from the severity of her convulsions, blood pouring from internal wounds out through her muzzle in great ugly gouts.

The ghostly figure of her captor Wisp rose slowly from her skull, leering down at me with unbridled malevolence.  It was slowly, but steadily joined by its brethren, until a great cloud of themes surrounded me.  

I hear Skye's horn speak out in tandem with the Gryphons' carbines, firing off three spells for each coordinated grouping of three particle shots.  Wherever the combined magic and electromagnetic energy landed, a Wisp blinked out of existence, slain outright.

Though the group made quick work of the cloud of enemies, they persisted long enough to speak a last message, all in perfect synchronization, their words echoing with a strong hint of the Nightmare's own distinct voice.

"Look upon your works, mighty Alicorn.  And despair.  The reclamation of what is rightfully ours will come...  And you are hopeless to stop it.  Know this, in your defeat...  You are responsible for the deaths of those who now lie here.  And for the deaths of those of you who will soon join them.  If you survive?  Learn this lesson well;  No host, nor servant, is irreplaceable.  I will kill them before I let you free them."

As the last Wisp vanished in a haze of thaumatic, and particle energy, I felt the ground below my hooves rumble with pent up energy of a rather different kind.

I barely had time to conjure a shield large enough to hold our entire group, before the Earth split open, bucking and heaving around our small island of calm, as the fire of an immense fuel air explosion rippled up from beneath the ground.

It felt as if the torrent of energy went on forever, but in reality I knew it was only a hoof full of seconds.  I dropped my shield as the last of the heat, and pressure finally receded, a weariness entering my chest as the weave of magic was released.

My heads up display began to fill with red, and voices poured into my earpiece.  I immediately knew that the damage to our forces could have been much, much worse.  By initial count, only a few dozen were dead.  A hundred or so injured to varying degrees from minor, to critical.

I collapsed numbly to the ground, cradling the dead Pegasus in my forehooves and fighting hard to beat back the twin spectres of panic, and nigh on suicidal despair.

Fyrenn stepped smoothly into the gap.  

"Strikecon, Arinna one-five;  Sound withdrawal.  Dispatch medical support package and cue up forensics.  Prepare a secondary follow-on force to secure site."

I suspected I had seen almost as much death as he had, if only because of how long I'd lived, and the horror of the wars long past I'd partaken of.  But like a true warrior, there was some part of him, and of Neyla, Alyra, and Taranis too, that could function completely normally even in the midst of such evils.

I had far less strength to stomach what I had just seen.  This was no clash of equally equipped armies.  It wasn't even the last desperate stand of an alliance against Chaos and Discord.

It was blatant mass murder to prove a point.

I rose slowly, and began to shake my head as Skye moved to stand next to me.  Words tumbled softly from my mouth almost unbidden.  I felt so numb.

"She...  Killed them...  All of them...  Even the ones who were already too far gone under their control...  Just to deny the few who could have been saved their freedom.  How can any being with the capacity to think...  To feel...  Stoop to something like this?!"

A torrent of emotions filled the young Unicorn's eyes.  Sadness.  Confusion, though less than my own.  Empathy.

Any attempt at a response from Skye was cut short by the sound of an enormous thunderclap.  At first I thought Taranis must have spied an enemy, and loosed his fateful lightning once more.

But as my head whipped upwards to the sound's source, I could immediately see that it was no Dragon that had made the sound.

An immense black angular shape filled the sky above our heads, its outline accented in lurid violet and blue glowing strips of light.

I looked back down to see Skye's face contort from panic, through to rage, and finally an accepting, gritted frustration that spilled over into her voice as she spoke very, very un-Ponylike words.

"Ah goddammit.  Here we go again with *this* shit."





Hutch

I knew what I was looking at on the CIC's central holotank.  I could even see the subpixels of the holographic projection in ways I'd never imagined possible.  But somehow the menacing jagged shape itself seemed more far fetched than the way I could see the hint of stutter from the emitters' refresh rate.

"Holy shit.  It's a trap."

Brendt always did have a gift for understatement.  I grit my beak so hard that I could hear my jaw squealing in protest.

In return, Brendt offered me an expression that clearly said 'you do the honors.'

With pleasure.

My talons flew over the central holotank's control panel, and in the blink of an eye I was talking to the Gryphon I needed.  Our man in the sky with the contingency.  

No one in either EarthGov GMCC, or JRSF Centcom had been stupid enough to think we wouldn't face potentially dire scenarios on-mission.  

I was just glad that Celestia had gotten them to agree to jointly do something meaningful about the possibility of a trap, rather than give in to partisan bickering about 'optics' or some shit like that.

It had cost Genesis their last antimatter torpedo;  An agreement to decommission the damn thing today, as in *today,* not tomorrow or next week, or next month.

But it had gotten us an orbital particle weapons platform.  An orbital weapons platform that we could actually use, without provoking open warfare.

"Mister McBride;  The word is given.  SatVision is uplinking targeting data now.  Start poking holes at your earliest convenience.  Danger-close."

The Gryphon on the vidlink nodded, and turned to confer with his EarthGov Airforce counterpart on the Shenzhou's bridge.  After a five second hushed conversation, they spoke out in sequence.

"Computer, unlock master arm safety.  McBride, Genesis echo two five eight zulu."

"Computer, I concur.  Williams, EAF sigma four green niner five epsilon."

I tapped my earpiece to cycle my comm connection before speaking again, listening to both Shenzhou's reports and Arinna's at the same time.

"Arinna Main, Central.  Break.  Break.  Take cover immediately.  Repeat;  Take cover positions.  Orbital fire support is inbound.  Ten seconds."

Aston raised an eye crest, and leaned forward from the other side of the holotank with a predatory grin.

"Time to break out the big stick again.  This oughta surprise 'em."





Taranis

Though the Princess was making a good effort to hide her exhaustion, I could not only see it in the way the fringes of her mane dimmed...  I could smell it on her.  Taste it on my tongue as I flicked it briefly to sample the air.

Nonetheless, her shield seemed as strong as ever.  I resisted the urge to spread my wings as well to provide a fallback.  If the Wisp vessel above us fired with sufficient energy to break an Alicorn's shield, then the armor on my wings would do little good as anything but a gesture to frighten the others, and break Celestia's resolve.

I could not hear the whine of the vessel's main weapon the way the Gryphons and Ponies clearly could, judging by the way they held their ears.  Instead, I felt its energy as a thrum in my bones, especially the leading edges of my wings.

And I could taste the acrid smell of air turning to superheated plasma.

My heat sensing pits told me that the amount of thermal energy alone building at the vessel's bow was enough to rival a small nuclear warhead.

The realization did very little to change my emotional state.  We would either survive, or we would not.  No particular feeling either way would change that.  Our chances were less than optimistic, but likely much higher than our enemy might be given to believe.

As the old EarthGov Marine saying more or less goes;  I have been known to do more with far less.

A small tritone sounded in my ear, followed by a tonal countdown, as the StrikeCon AI on the North Carolina ticked off the seconds to the impact of the Shenzhou's particle weapons in F-sharp.

As the final note sounded, I heard Skye mutter aloud to herself.

"Boom."

I would not have said it aloud myself with royalty present, but I could not resist a small grin as I shared the sentiment.  

Wholeheartedly.

Skye Writer was a very peculiar Pony.  I could immediately understand why she seemed so comfortable travelling with Gryphons.

Ice blue light streaked down through the clouds in a five meter wide column of modulated pulses, striking the Wisp vessel dead center with a cacophonous roar, and flashes that would have blinded any Humans looking on directly, as gigawatts of particle energy met up with electromagnetic deflection fields.

The first barrage did not fully penetrate the Wisp's shielding mechanisms.  

But the second one did.

A mere four seconds later an identical column of pulsed energy to the first struck like Zeus' own bolts, piercing the Wisp vessel fully amidships.  The flare of the vessel's weapon winked out instantly, and an explosion rocked the bow of the ship as the device failed to safely dump its titanic energies before its containment systems failed spectacularly.

A final thinner, shorter, less energized pulse from the Shenzhou struck one last time in the exact same location as the first two blasts, splitting the ship fully in half, without unnecessarily bombarding the ground immediately beneath.

While the front half of the vessel keeled over and began half falling, half tepidly gliding towards an inevitable impact less than five kliks away, the stern section held fast in the air, as a strange reverse-glow effect began to surround it, sucking in light like a singularity.

As we watched in awe-struck silence, the ragged, torn, but still functional rear of the vessel vanished abruptly in a flash of magenta and white light, leaving behind a short thunderclap as air rushed to fill the vacated space.

All eyes in the group, my own included, shifted back to track the bow section as it slammed into the long-dead petrified canopy of the rainforest, plowing up a half kilometer of desiccated tree, rock, and dead gray soil, before finally coming to rest in a cloud of ash and smoke.

Celestia held her shield for another heartbeat, then at least released the magic, inhaling a ragged exhausted breath that betrayed her ebbing energy.

I stretched out a wing to cover her, and fixed her with a glare that I hoped would lend my words an air of authority.

"You must depart the battlefield.  There is nothing more you can do here."

The expression she gave me took me fully aback.  Never before had I seen a Pony muzzle twisted with quite so much cold, dark, unashamed hatred, and fury.  Rage on a cosmic scale.

With the rage came energy, and her mane flared brightly, suddenly changing from its usually pastel hues, to a roiling white-hot color, fringed with streamers of gold, and orange, like a coronal mass ejection.

As she spoke at last, gritting out every word over clenched teeth with a polyphonic quality that spoke to immense volumes of magic building inside her, she fixed her eyes on the column of smoke billowing from the remains of the Wisp ship.  And the  distant black swarming dots of its occupants as they rose to prepare for battle.

"Oh?  Isn't there?!"

I suppressed a reflexive shiver, and inhaled deeply, summoning my own special brand of destructive energy to ready-state in the back of my throat.  The warmth of the electrical energy was a familiar comfort.

I exchanged a slightly concerned, but otherwise confirmatory glance with Fyrenn.  He cycled his carbine back to full power, and I spoke in a low, chuckling rumble.

"Very well then.  They can replace hosts...  But not the parasites themselves.  Let us remind them that they too are mortal."





Seething black rage, tinged with yellow-green frustration sang across the void like voltage on high tension wires, aggressively enough that it manifested visually in the central Void-chamber of the command ship.  

Nightmare watched the drive section of the returning assault hiveship reintegrate in the frigid blue winter sky above her as reports on the damage began to filter in over the void.

The entire front half of the ship was missing.  And with it, a third of the ship's not insubstantial crew of attack platforms, all assembled painstakingly from increasingly rare and difficult to access Equine bones.

"How did this HAPPEN?!  VERIFY THE LOCATION OF THE SHENZHOU!"

A hundred thousand voices, jolted by the severity of Nightmare's tone and emotional impetus, set feverishly to work, snapping into organized working clusters to merge their mental power and tackle dozens of questions and lines of inquiry simultaneously.

Not for the first time, but certainly in the most intense fashion to date, Nightmare's rage at the inability to use the ships' full potential exploded like an overpressure wave into the Void.  

The Forgeworld's cursed defenses, unknown to the vast majority of its inhabitants, were still very much active.  

Any attempt to move a Hiveship more than three of its own lengths above the cloud layer, and the automated particle beams, each capable of incinerating entire moons with one short blast, would fire without warning, or hesitation.

And that was just the beams afforded by the edge platforms.  The main array in Lunaris could cook off the outer layers of a gas giant in less time than it took to form the thought.  And Solaris' primary weapon could simply erase that same gas giant as if it had never been there in the first place.

They had been built and programmed for just such an eventuality, before raw Chaos and Discord robbed the Forgeworld's inhabitants of all their hard-won knowledge.  With that loss had come, at last, opportunity.

And in that window of opportunity, it had been a miracle to find even five lesser Hive ships still intact, or near enough to it, resting in their long forgotten impact craters.

The vessels could instantaneously traject anywhere within half a million relative Terran kilometers.  Far enough to move seamlessly between worlds, but not nearly far enough to evade the orbital defenses of either Humans, nor the Foregeworld.

And the Forerunner defenses were nothing at all to be trifled with. Pitiful compared to what they had once been, before they had burned off the magic of their new homeworld.

But still enough sting to make it impossible to take the high ground in Terran orbit.

Sounds, images, EM waveforms, and spoken words began to fill the Nightmare's mind as her working clusters began to return useful data.

"Our access to SatVision is unchanged.  Telemetry indicates the Shenzhou is holding a low altitude patrol pattern at previous location."

"Triangulation indicates the blasts originated in a geosynchronous low orbit."

"There is a discrepancy between the Human SatVision telemetry, and our own readings---"

The Nightmare seized violently on the thread relating to the telemetric discrepancy.  So violently in fact, that the action very nearly damaged the minds of the Wisps working on the information as her own impetus overwhelmed them, and forced their equations and postulations through to conclusion.

A low gray-violet rumble of anger coursed through the void, accompanying Nightmare's every word with streaks of white-magenta lightning.

"They knew we were accessing their feed.  They fed us a loop of false data!  They must have found one of our infiltrators inside Central Command..."

It took only the simplest of lookup queries to determine which possessed Ponies in the JRSF CentCom might have been compromised, versus the ones who were still demonstrably safe.

And it took only a single command spell to not only terminate the life functions of the hosts, but also to sever the connections of the Wisps in question, and activate their own autonomic self-termination.

No loose ends.

A dozen pinpricks of light, and their accompanying voices, vanished abruptly from the void.

The situation was still salvageable.  The expression on the hated Solar Avatar's face had told Nightmare all she needed to know about the value proposition of losing the PER headquarters, and everyone inside it.

The damage that had done to Celestia's spirit was absolutely unquantifiably priceless.

Originally, the plan had been to glass the entire region with the Hive ship's main weapon, sparing Celestia and those closest to her.  Both to afford the chance to take her as a host later, but also to allow her to take back her grief, and sorrow, and fear, to taint and drag down all who might cross her path.

But according to the last images that Nightmare's messengers had seen on-site, three of The Six were there with the Solar Avatar.

Celestia had seemed so exhausted...  So broken...  Doubtless soon she would turn to an unfettered rage as well.

Perhaps there was a value proposition that could account for the loss of another Hive ship.  Particularly given how few Wisps had actually perished thanks to the swift reaction of the vessel's control cluster.

If the Void could take possession of the Solar Avatar now...  Rather than wait...  And if three of The Six could be slain at the same time?

At that point, victory would be assured.  The strike on Canterlot could be moved up by months. 

The silvery violet note of assurance blossomed in Nightmare's will within the Void, as she disseminated new instructions to the swarm of combat platforms in Amazonia.

"Make whatever sacrifice is necessary.  Commit all forces still on-site;  Bring me the Solar Avatar.  Kill the rest."





Fyrenn

Arinna was visibly diminished, but not dishearteningly so.  Twenty three dead at final count was a shockingly low toll, considering the scale of the weapon the PER had set off in service of their self-destruct protocol.

Another thirty were too injured to continue fighting, but out of our total numbers, that wasn't an intractable slice.

The Wisps had blown their opportunity too early, in my opinion.  Had we gotten embroiled in a door-to-door firefight trying to secure the facility's lower levels, we would have all been crushed, pulped, or incinerated in the blast, with far fewer exceptions.

Then again, if we'd discovered the weapon itself, we might have disarmed it.  Both the PER and HLF knew, by direct experience from intimately painful defeat, that JRSF had the best EoD training, and techs in the world.  Probably in history.

Centuries of Human experience, AI simulation, and the biological advantages of Equestrians, made it much harder to build a bomb that we couldn't easily shut off, given even a few minutes.

And worse, there were the solid chances that someone might insert a shotgun data-capture AI into an important system, and that it might get and transmit vital information before the trap was sprung.

Risks and rewards.  Opportunities, traps, plays, and counter-plays.  

In fairness, the Wisps fully believed the Shenzhou was still parked at Lucapa.  Exactly as we'd wanted them to.  We'd taken immense pains and precautions to keep the ship's movement a secret from all but a dozen people in total.

From that perspective, the idea of sending in a Hive Spire to finish us off rather than wait for us to get dug into the facility, with all the risks that carried, made much more sense.  They believed Shenzhou was grounded by an inescapable cage of political razor wire.

We could set traps just as cleverly as they could, apparently.

We'd certainly never dreamt that they would murder useful servitors en masse just to ensure the few who might have been freed would die instead.  It made a twisted, sick kind of sense;  They were setting a precedent of total unbound warfare, with the goal of demoralizing us.

It wasn't even just about the present.  It was just as much about laying down an indellible historical record.  An ironclad guarantee inked on history's pages in blood.  No host shall escape and live.  Life can only be bought with absolute service.

Live a slave, or die in agony.

I knew exactly which choice I'd make if it came down to it.  And it was not going to be the life of a slave.

Not that I'd get a choice, in all likelihood.  If The Nightmare was as old as she claimed to be, and appeared to be, then she knew my kind well.  She knew that surrender was off the table for my kind, wholesale, when it came to an enemy like her.  To terms like hers.

We would fight to the last fledgeling and new hatched chick.  And our fledglings would spill more blood than the fully equipped and trained adults of most races.

As the formation pulled together into a sharp wedge, with Arinna one at its tip, and Celestia at the very end of the wedge, I exchanged a concerned silent look, first with Neyla, then Skye, then Alyra, and finally Taranis.

No one opened mouth or beak, but we all silently agreed;  Celestia would need protection as much from her own rage now, as anything else.

Her mane still glowed with a Hell-like fire that cast her armored visage in a lurid, devilish relief.

I wondered at first, then posited with growing surety;  This must be what red-lining looks like for an Alicorn.

We'd all seen Celestia perform feats that could barely be matched by Nuclear weapon systems, if that.  All on a relatively even emotional keel.  

Now she was so far beyond 'angry,' that you had to get deep, deep into the Shakesperian florid synonyms to have any hope of encapsulating just how downright pissed she was.

Maybe Nightmare's real mistake had been killing two dozen of Celestia's Ponies right in front of her, in the most brutal way she could.

Human myth has a lot of good wisdom in it about not provoking sleeping Dragons.  Even a few wise warnings about the folly of Gryphons raised to ire.

But perhaps they should have built at least a few monuments to the folly of an Alicorn driven to desperation.  Something very big, and very long lasting.  Like the warning spires above nuclear waste dumps, except ten times bigger, and twenty times more frightening.

That might encapsulate the tenth part of the appropriate fear and trembling.

And then of course, we had four Dragons with us.  And a significant number of Gryphons, and Ponies, both of whom had just seen much the same thing Celestia had.  I wagered internally that there would be more than a few Ponies who were finally going to learn the meaning of blood lust today.

As we sped towards the Hive Spire crash site, the writhing column of black armored shapes above it began to spool out into a series of tentacle-like spike formations, rushing out to meet us in a clash that was probably going to flatten whatever trees were still standing anywhere within five miles.

I wished dearly for my sword.  But wishing would do little to change facts.  Neyla had lent me one of her blades, and I took some solace in the idea of having a piece of her right there in one claw.  And of us reuniting the pair of blades in her claws after the battle.

I'd debated sending Alyra back with the evacuation transports...  But ultimately wondered 'to what end?'

If we lost this battle, the end would only come that much sooner.  No one was going to survive if we lost the war.  And no one was going to escape the bloodshed.

She was old enough to fight.  Both in spirit, and by the convention of Gryphon kind.  And she was skilled enough with Human weapon systems to make up for any gaps in her blade skills, growing as they were by the day.

If we were going to die?  We would die as a family.

Giving in to a deep seated primal urge, I let out the most ear-piercing war keen that I could force out without compromising my ability to maintain a breakneck flight pace.  Almost immediately the others in the group took up the call.

As Taranis' roar joined our chorus, the rest of the Arinna noticed, and promptly joined in.  The sound was so loud, that it actually seemed to ever so slightly stagger the column of Wisps as they rushed towards us in concentric vortex shapes, split into smaller spike formations.

Celestia chose that moment to fire the first shot.

Without the risk of hitting innocent targets, she was free to unload the entirety of her fury as an all out assault.  The expanding cloud of plasma blew outwards from her horn like a shock-front ahead of an explosion, taking on a concussive dome shape rather than the lance she had used before to penetrate the facility's armor.

I knew the brightness compensators in the Humans' helmets would have to go to almost a hundred percent just to cope.  

I had the benefit of Gryphon eyes, and could watch in glorious detail as the blast wave of roughly fifteen million degrees celsius magical energy and plasmatic gasses turned Wisp bone, armor, and even their ethereal forms themselves, into smears of darker energy, like sunspots.

A solid one quarter of the enemy simply vanished in the wake of the assault.  It took me several relative seconds of decelerated time to realize that Celestia herself was screaming.  A war cry so loud that it matched the volume, decibel for decibel, of the entire Arinna group.

Except that the sound coming out of her muzzle was something more akin to the sound I imagine a sun would make right before it goes supernova.  It was deep, polyphonic, and tortured.   Like the screams of the damned from all eternity, concentrated into one single point.


I was almost too slack-jawed to begin firing my particle carbine.  Almost.

With a shiver than went down to my bones, I shook off the eerie, haunting feeling that the sound of celestia's war cry rooted in my chest, and I began to select and pick off initial targets.

And then Taranis let out his breath.

I'd never seen a blue Dragon fire their breath weapon completely without reservation before.  Indeed, I'd only ever seen the power used twice before in the first place.

It was as though Taranis was competing with Celestia to be entered into the dictionary beside the word 'apocalyptic.'

I'd seen bad electrical storms before, both Terran and Equestrian.  My concept of lightning was instantly reshaped in its entirety.

Jagged forks spewed forth with a sound like a standing wave of thunder that just would not stop.  The bolts split, and then split again, and again, and again, dividing into intricate fractal patterns that sought out enemy forms with frightening alacrity and purpose, shooting through them, and then onwards in an attempt to find grounding.

Then all at once, Skye fired something I could only describe as a magical laser blast.  The blue beam did for Taranis what his own magic would normally do in Equestria, where the more enriched environment would allow his thaumatic lightning to easily find ground without a physical connection to the soil.

The lance of light changed the very charge of the air around it, creating a tunnel down which the lightning could flow to ground after each and every bolt had rejoined at its apex.

There was an almighty 'CRACK,' and I could briefly see the skeletal bones of every Wisp Taranis' breath was touching right through their armor.  And then the bones melted, and fused to the armor, and the Wisps simply fell out of the sky, leaving behind their ethereal forms.

Or at least, some of them did.  Taranis' breath was not nearly as effective at killing the parasites themselves as Celestia's magical plasma, but it certainly didn't leave them all unscathed.  A quick count told me that his breath had killed almost twenty percent of the targets he hit, outright.

By my count, processed in decelerated time through the achingly sharp resolution of my perfect vision, that still left almost a thousand Wisps for our force of just two hundred.

Perfect.

It would be an even fight.