Holding your nose as a ghost was more of a superstitious practice for the imperceptible good it did. But in the presence of this disgustingly hot metal, it felt necessary. So Indigo did so despite knowing it wouldn’t work.
That was the least of their problems. They were outnumbered two to three up on the wall, not counting the predead. And their odds were about to get a lot worse. Red eyes were swarming toward the wall.
“Haha! We got you losers so outnumbered at this point.” Sonata smirked. “I bet you wish–”
A stream of fire rushed in Sonata’s direction.
“Ack!” Sonata spun out of the way, seeing the robotic alligator was headed right towards her. “Why is it coming for me?!”
“No wristband.” Aria held hers up. “Nothing is stopping it from attacking you. Looks like it’s angry at you.”
“But I didn’t do anything!” Sonata flailed her wings as if she needed them while the gatorbot chased her in circles.
“That also makes it angry.” Aria smiled. “But it’ll change its mind once these two do anything. That also pisses it off.”
Aria turned to Sugarcoat and Indigo who remained stationary for now, not wanting to draw the robot back to themselves. Sonata Dusk hesitated to fight back. She didn’t seem bright enough to realize that running away from it and attacking it was seen as equally aggressive to a robot.
“What do I do?! What do I do?!” Sonata yelled.
Sugarcoat tapped the ground, covering the entire surface of the wall with ice. That’d make it harder for any of the ghosts to get inside and cause problems. It must have been more an attempt to stop Wallflower from coming through the ground and possessing Sour Sweet.
Another sweep of her hoof and Sugarcoat created another five feet of ice, extending the height of the wall on the far side. Sometimes Indigo forgot how much ice a specter could generate in such a short period.
“That should give you some security,” Sugarcoat said to Sour Sweet. “Be careful if the ice cracks. Stay with Sour Sweet, I’m going after these two.”
Sugarcoat flicked her eyes down at the ghost side of the wall, down to where Lemon Zest should have been. The kid was always her favorite and Indigo knew that Zest was Sugarcoat’s priority in her heart, no matter what her head told her.
Indigo’s heart told her to go fight the banshees, rather than babysit some predead. But she was already injured. She’d hang back at least for now. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t want to see what her new boss had.
“Heh! I get you’re a specter but it’s a little optimistic to think you can beat all of us by yourself,” said Aria.
She turned back at the rest of her team, still fighting amongst themselves.
“Override!” Aria held up her wristband. “Terminate target.”
The alligator stopped chasing Sonata. It flailed violently as if trying to resist the order, but did manage to turn on Sugarcoat.
“Why did you wait so long to do that?!” Sonata shouted down at her.
Sugarcoat’s aura rippled, focusing on Sonata. Normally, an aura-based attack from a specter to another ghost would be devastating, likely ending the fight right there. Even Indigo felt a slight tremor just from the slight collateral damage. But the chains acted as a suit of armor. She had to give up on that immediately.
The robogator came in first, exhaling a stream of fire that melted through the ice on the ground and barreled towards Sugarcoat. Such an attack wasn’t nearly enough against a specter. Sugarcoat’s cone of cold snuffed out the fire and covered the robot in frost but wasn’t enough to put out its internal flames.
Sugarcoat braced herself and threw it straight up, high enough into the air that it became difficult to make out its form.
A sharp pillar of ice rose beneath where the robot fell. The very tip of the ice smashed into its neck, the force severing the head completely!
The body twitched a moment longer as the broken head’s fire went out. Then it ceased to function.
The banshees took her drawn attention to get in close, coming at her from either side, each throwing her own spear of ice at Sugarcoat.
Sugarcoat surrounded herself with a wall of ice, recovering the ground in the process. She appeared trapped only for a second. Then the walls of ice exploded outward into a thousand tiny pieces of frozen shrapnel.
Aria smashed threw it with her psychokinesis. Sonata tried the same but yelped as she got cut up a little. Indigo only managed to block being so far away.
Indigo found herself duly impressed by her boss. She’d seen that attack before! The ice shotgun was considered one of the harder fighting techniques for a ghost to learn. Indigo herself could maybe do that seventy percent of the time, but not reliably.
“Impressive!” Aria smiled, levitating thirty or so of the intercepted chunks of ice. “That move’s pretty hard to pull off, even for a specter. Guess I don’t have to hold back the advanced techniques against you. Have you seen this one before?”
She made the thirty chunks, none bigger than a baseball, glow a bright blue before throwing them toward Sugarcoat. But instead of breaking into even smaller pieces, they grew until thirty spears were moving towards Sugarcoat. And she couldn’t simply go below ground to dodge!
Instead, Sugarcoat turned sideways, straightened up, lifted a foreleg, and brought an axe down to break only the spears that would have hit her.
More was coming. Indigo could see it in both of their eyes.
The spears behind Sugarcoat exploded into shrapnel and shot out, back the way they came. There must have been a thousand of them now, all generally pointed at Sugarcoat!
But the boss saw this coming. She pressed against the ground flung them into the air, up out of her way with telekinesis as they returned. And she made them glow and made them expand as Aria had. Maybe not into spears, but something like a small arrow.
She flipped in midair and brought the arrows crashing down around Aria. Instead of exploding, this time they expanded into a pile of ice that trapped Aria inside. She wouldn’t be able to leave her doll underneath that.
Sonata made a ‘gah’ sound and moved back an inch. Sugarcoat spun around and threw the weight of her aura into a telekinetic punch, one that slammed into Sonata’s gut, throwing her bouncing off the ice wall.
“Actually, I have seen that one before.” Sugarcoat turned back to Aria and tapped her glasses.
She watched Aria, frozen in a pile of ice for a moment longer.
“Careful. She can break out of there,” Sugarcoat warned Indigo. “It’ll shatter like mine did when she does.”
Not finished, she turned her attention to the other side of the wall.
Sugarcoat formed three more pillars of ice and exploded them scattershot down at the robots below. Destructive hail pelted the incoming robot army, but it was only enough to destroy the more worn-out robots. The remainder got a few harsh dings but carried on.
She threatened a second barrage, raising a second round of ice. Sonata was back on her again with an ice blade in tow. Sugarcoat tried firing off the hail and blowing Sonata back with a psychokinetic wave at the same time. The former worked, but Sonata turned her back and fired her ice blade at Sour Sweet.
Launching it like that gave her the forward momentum to merely be stopped by Sugarcoats blow. Indigo slammed it to the side. A move like that from what seemed like an idiot was enough to catch Sugarcoat off guard. Sonata did a flip. As her hind legs came down, a miniature glacier came crashing down on Sugarcoat’s head, slamming the specter between it and the enchanted floor.
These two were a good deal above average! Two-on-one wasn’t usually enough to match a specter.
“I might have to help her out for a second,” Indigo whispered to Sour Sweet. If it was between the two of them.
“It’s so cold.” Sour Sweet’s eyes were staring forward blankly.
Indigo smelled her. She was dangerously cold. Sometimes Indigo forgot how much all this ice magic brought down the temperature. It may very well have been ten to twenty below zero up here.
She was going to die if Indigo didn’t find a way to warm her up a little. Getting her inside wouldn’t be enough. Indigo could smell one source of heat – the most disgusting one. Though the robot was dead, flames still bellowed out of its neck.
Indigo looked up at the fight. Sugarcoat was bruised up now, but had Sonata Dusk pinned. She took the opportunity to shadow step over to the robot.
And of course, that was when Wallflower Blush showed up, poking her stupid head over the wall to try and get at Sour Sweet.
“You.” Sugarcoat switched her attention to Wallflower immediately.
Sugarcoated threw Sonata Dusk into the air and sent her hard into the wall a second time with another telekinetic punch. Then she resorted directly to another aura attack. Without the chains to protect her, Wallflower was immediately crushed by the overwhelming weight of a specter’s aura.
Wallflower’s jaw clenched, small amounts of ectoplasm dripping out. Her eyes peeled out in different directions and her body trembled. She was completely stunned.
Indigo rushed back to Sour Sweet’s side, placing the flaming wreckage a safe distance from her.
“What happened to Zest?” Sugarcoat’s voice remained calm, but Indigo could feel the ire in her aura.
When a specter went this hard against a ghost with a weak will, it was basically mind control. Wallflower would be forced to answer her questions. This kind of thing was a hard line to cross.
Being around a pony who could alter your emotions whenever they felt like was intimidating enough. A specter only needed to play this card a couple of times to destroy their reputation and any trust they built up.
“Yo, Sugarcoat!” Indigo called out to her, placing the fire next to Sour Sweet. “Maybe we can not go there?”
Sugarcoat pressed the attack anyway.
“Zest is.” Wallflower struggled to regain control of her eyes, to focus on anything. “The one that looks like a black knight is… he’s the persona. She’s… it’s going after her.”
Sugarcoat looked below, finding the robot in question immediately.
“And your plan?” She demanded.
Wallflower struggled a bit harder against this one, but she wouldn’t have been able to hold out for long.
“Dammit Sugarcoat!” Indigo shouted at her. She wasn’t going to watch this much longer.
Sugarcoat spared a look at Indigo. Then, regaining herself with a sigh, she let Wallflower go.
Even released, Wallflower remained stunned, drooling ectoplasm as she tried to regain control.
Aria at last came bursting out of the ice, launching hail in every direction. Indigo could only throw herself in front of Sour Sweet to block it.
“Are you okay?” Indigo turned back to her.
“I think I’m feeling just a little bit…” Sour Sweet fell onto her side.
“Dammit!”
“Wallflower!” Aria called out to her. “Take your mark!”
Aria charged straight for Indigo. She glanced from Wallflower to Aria, deciding to go for the latter. She went to punch but was a minute too late! Aria tackled her and Wallflower jumped down to possess Sour Sweet a second later.
Indigo bucked Aria off and pulled her hoof back, ready to punch Wallflower as she stood back up, now in control of Sour Sweet’s body.
“You can’t hit me!” Wallflower threw her forelegs out. It was Sour Sweet’s voice that came out. “If you attack, she’s going to die.”
Indigo had to restrain herself.
Wallflower really pushed it right then! She rushed forward and punched Indigo in the face. Possessing a body like that, she could do it. And Indigo just had to greet her teeth and take it. At least she punched like a little colt.
She felt the wall shake. A volley of strikes hit the wall! The robots were already here! Two of three of them were already at the edge of the wall, clawing their way on top. Indigo had no idea where to strike. There were too many targets now.
The hatch leading into the base opened, and a stallion
“Lieutenant! We restored the phone line. The colonel wants to speak to you!” He called out, seemingly ignoring everything else that was going on.
Wallflower nodded and ran in his direction!
“She’s possessed!” Indigo called out. “Don’t listen to her!”
The stallion smiled at her as Wallflower ran past and back inside.
He… he was on their side, wasn’t he?!
Indigo could beat the crap out of that stallion, at least! She charged at him only for Sonata Dusk to come in from the side, intercepting.
The blow sent Indigo over to the predead half of the city, a place she’d never expected to actually be. And then Sonata lunged onto Indigo.
Where the heck was Juniper?! What was taking her so long?!
Indigo turned invisible, but that only did so much when she was already grappled. Sonata shot down towards the ground, a blade pressed against Indigo’s neck. And a wall of ice formed behind Indigo as the two of them neared the pavement of the predead city.
Sugarcoat watched Indigo get swept away as the robots crashed into the wall. All she could do was hope Indigo could escape. Phantoms were good at slipping away. There was some chance there.
The best she could do to help was to keep the robots off. Sugarcoat braced herself and put all of her energy into creating two barriers. One extending the one on top of the wall and one near the bottom.
Both barriers of ice glowed brightly as Sugarcoat poured magic into them. They took heavy poundings from guns, rockets, fire, and claws. They would shatter in a moment if Sugarcoat didn’t keep blasting energy into them.
Aria looked her over, knowing her position was great.
“It looks like I have you.” Aria smiled. “Let’s see.”
Aria created a spear of ice and shot it forward, stabbing through Sugarcoat’s wither. Sugarcoat winced as it pierced her but kept focus.
Sugarcoat looked back at the wall. There was no way she could hold off against this kind of firepower and fight Aria. She either had to let the robots through or protect herself. She had a difficult decision to make.
Aria created ten more spears, all pointed at Sugarcoat.
“I admit, you’re a better fighter than I thought,” said Aria. “But if you’re struggling against me, you never really had a chance. Maybe it’s better if you just die now rather than drag things out, hm?”
Something grabbed one of Aria’s spears, turned it, and stabbed it through her doll’s neck while off guard. Aria’s eyes widened briefly as another ghost came in, slamming her to the ground, shattering ice weapons over her repeatedly while screaming.
Lemon Zest?!
Zest wasn’t anywhere near ready to fight somepony at this level! Sugarcoat never should have even involved her in this mission, to begin with!
Zest got a couple of good blows in, then suddenly Aria’s telekinesis flared up and threw her to the side.
“Are you trying to fight me?” Aria tilted her head, a look of absolute disdain across her face. “You’re not even a real ghost yet. I can tell you’re just a freaking worm friend, aren’t you?”
“Zest! Don’t do it!” Sugarcoat called out to her. “You can’t fight her! You’re not ready! Just run away!”
“I gotta try! I can’t leave you!” Zest called out.
“I think the word ‘try’ is being too generous.” Aria rolled her neck.
Zest covered her foreleg in a spike of ice and thrust forward.
Aria chilled her doll, making it take on an icy sheen. Zest blades collided, but broke against this armor of frost. Aria swiped hard right, smashing into Zest’s face, then she ran forward. She left the doll, leaving it to ram into Zest while Aria circled around.
The full weight of the doll hit Zest hard, sending her flying. But Aria managed to outfly her momentum. She slammed a hoof hard into Zest’s back, throwing her forward again. Then the banshee grabbed the chains tethering her to the doll and pulled forward, forcing Zest to collide with it from the other side.
Once again flying towards Aria, Zest had only just enough time to see the banshee rise above her and spike her down toward the ground.
Normally, one didn’t have to worry about things like crash landings, but now that sheet of ice on the ground made sense. Zest could collide with enchanted ice and she hit the ground hard!
Aria was already back on top of Zest, back in her body, as she pulled up her hoof to strike again. Aria held Zest pinned to the wall of ice as she repeatedly pummeled away. Zest couldn’t do anything! The blows just came too hard too fast.
The ice below Zest gave way before her form did, at last shattering and giving her the relief of falling through the ground. But Arai still pursued her, flying out of her body and underground after Zest. She grabbed the younger ghost by the collar and threw her above ground again.
A side hook sent Zest flying along the wall.
Finally, she got a brief moment to assess her situation. Looking down at herself Zest decided that it wasn’t good at all. Zest was ‘unraveling’ as the others called it. She’d seen this before when getting small cuts, just never to this level.
If you cut a ghost’s ear or leg off, these blue fiber-like lights would dance around the edge of the missing part. Normally, they moved inward and your form would slowly go back to the way it was. Right now, huge chunks of Zest were missing. She was more like a cheese elemental with all the holes Aria punched into her body!
None of her limbs were missing, but no part of her appeared unscathed. Little blue threads danced around the edges of her wounds and lightning arced between the gaps.
There was a point where you’d start unraveling rather than healing, eventually disappearing and dying. Zest never got a straight answer to how much of you had to be missing, nothing better than ‘it depends’ anyway. Hopefully it was more than half.
She could only hope she wasn’t past that point already.
Aria watched Zest as if expecting her to surrender or run away after getting whooped that badly. The power difference between the two of them was that extreme.
But Zest had no other option. If she was already doomed…
Zest straightened up and created an ice blade along her foreleg.
“Seriously? What are you even trying to do?” Aria rose a brow. “You can’t even beat me, but you want to fight somepony who could kill a hundred of me in a second?”
She began to trot closer to Zest.
“Do you honestly think you can stop this?” Aria asked. “You already lost, don’t you get it? This place is already destroyed. Everything you care about, everypony you want to protect. All of that’s already gone. All you can do is push back the inevitable by inches. Even if you do win today, Old Manehattan will be destroyed. You’ll never win for real.”
She wasn’t wrong. Zest couldn’t possibly imagine going against the real monster if things were already this bad.
“There’s only one way to save yourself.” Aria held out a hoof. “Just give up. It won’t be so bad. You already lost, it’s just a matter of accepting it. All this effort and hope isn’t going to do anything but hurt you. You’re going to lose. But all the pain can stop if you just give up.”
She probably wasn’t wrong about any of that either. But this wasn’t exactly news to Zest. She’d been thinking about this for months. Impending doom had hung over her shoulders for long enough that she was no longer a stranger to it.
She’d lose, but she had an answer.
“Maybe I’ll lose,” said Zest. “But I’ll never be a loser! If I'm already dead, that just means I have no excuse to quit!”
Aria grit her teeth.
“Fine! You want this to be painful? Then let me make this painful!”
She created a wall of ice behind Zest and pulled her hoof back. Aria slammed a spike of ice into Zest repeatedly until this wall shattered too and Zest went spinning out of control towards the sea of flaming metal below.
So much of Zest’s form was missing now! She was surrounded by an aura of blue fibers. This… might be it. She could barely move. Maybe only one of her legs even remained, the rest vanished.
To finish things off, Aria stepped to the edge of the wall. Seven spears of ice appeared behind her, ready to fire at Zest.
That was when the wall protecting Manehattan shattered. An injured Sugarcoat came in from behind and smashed Aria aside with an enormous club of ice. The cost, of course, was the robots escaping into the city.
Whatever happened up there, Zest couldn’t see. Maybe she’d never know. She felt straight through the ground shortly after.
She felt herself spreading out, the static that made up her being flowing outward like a pool of blood. She did think it was the end. It had to be.
Wallflower didn’t know his name, but the blue stallion was one of the traitors. He led her through the corridors much faster than she could have gone on her own, bringing her down to a conference room.
Wallflower never actually possessed a pony this badly injured before. It was actually difficult to make her legs move. Really she wasn’t even used to leg-based locomotion anymore in general. She had to stay focused. The patsy would do most of the work for her.
She could hear robots tearing through the lower corridors. There wouldn’t be much time until the base was overwhelmed.
Wallflower reached a boarded-up conference room where all the soldiers had holed up, ready with their battle staves. Even with all these barricades, there were just too many robots out there. They wouldn’t have long.
“Ma’am! We have Colonel on the line!” One of the soldiers offered the phone to her.
“I’d appreciate it if you kept the phone on speaker,” he said.
Wallflower knew why, but waited a minute before nodding, as instructed.
“Colonel!” Wallflower stood at attention. Her voice was exactly like Sour Sweets. “It’s true that several robots have attacked the wall. But the ghosts aren’t to blame! I’ve already done the test and the radiation levels they emit means they can’t have been in Old Manehattan this whole time.”
She looked at the other ponies, all of them with their battle staffs at the ready. It was probably best they were on edge, given what had to happen later.
“Oh?” Suspicion dominated the colonel’s voice. “Then how did they get here.”
“I think I’ve already managed to solve that mystery as well. The real perpetrators of the attack are the Mad Science Cartel! They’ve been shipping robots into the city for the past year. Their goal is to drive a wedge between Old and New Manehattan because if the ghosts are cleared out, they can be free to excavate the super-reactor.”
The colonel remained silent. Only a little more! Wallflower was breathing a bit too heavily for this part, but at least she wouldn’t have to pretend she wasn’t afraid much longer.
“But the ghosts stepped up to protect us!” Wallflower forced a manic smile onto her face. “The specter on the wall shouldn’t be attacked, sir. She’s on our side. I wouldn’t be surprised if your forces aren’t needed at all.”
“Oh, I know that specter is your friend.”
Wallflower took a long pause as she was instructed.
“What do you mean?”
“Sour Sweet… I know you’ve been making purchases from the Mad Science Cartel for the past year. I simply didn’t know it was this serious.”
“Wh-what?!” Wallflower didn’t actually have to pretend to be afraid. She was still shaking in terror from Sugarcoat’s death grip earlier. “No! No! That’s not true at all! Why… why would I ever do something like that?!”
“We’ve had enough evidence to arrest you for a few months now and we should have done so before it came to this,” the colonel spoke indignantly. “And I think I know why now too. You wanted to frame this incident as a call to your personal politics, that we need more unity, right? If your ghosts friends save us from some disaster we’ll be more accepting of them. Is that what you thought?”
Wallflower looked around the room, panicking. That was something she was good at. Then she exploded into her rehearsed diatribe.
“The ghosts do so much to help us and none of you appreciate it! If a pony stops an airship from crashing, no one notices. If they let the airship crash and pull a single survivor out, then they’re a hero. That’s how ponies see things!”
“You can’t just put other ponies' lives at risk to make some political point!” The blue stallion called her out.
“Ghosts are the ones being oppressed!” Wallflower shouted. “They can resort to whatever tactics they need to get the rights they deserve!”
“You’re seriously going to kill all these innocent ponies just for that?” The stallion asked.
“Destroying an oppressive regime is more important than a few lives,” said Wallflower. “This is the last bastion of ghosts outside Crater Cemetery. I need to protect them no matter the cost!”
“Lieutenant!” The colonel called out. “If I’m not mistaken, you’re surrounded.
Wallflower looked around, then pulled out her battle-staff, prompting all the other ponies to do the same.
“You’ll never take me alive!” Wallflower pointed the staff at the others!
This was it. All she needed to do now was die in a shoot-out.
All the ponies in this base would ‘die’ in just a little while. That was to say, they’d become ghosts. There was no way they could lose at this point!
She closed her eyes, and fired, ready for Sour Sweet’s body to be annihilated.
But no return fire came…
Slowly, she dared to open her eyes.
She opened her eyes and turned to see somepony who looked like he belonged on the streets rather than a military base. The rough-looking colt wore a green hoody and carried a heavy chain and baseball bat with him.
He had Wallflower’s patsy by the neck, a chain wrapped around his neck and strapping him to this new stallion’s foreleg, tight enough to make him struggle. All the other ponies in the room filed in behind him, acting as if he was the one in charge now.
“Actually,” the newcomer said. “I think you’re the one who’s under arrest. Colonel.”
This was a familiar feeling. Zest was in total darkness, unable to move her body, only her left foreleg able to twitch. She wasn’t actually on her back, but she may as well have been.
Only… this time things felt a little different.
Electricity was gushing out of her like blood, probably would have been quite the show were the ground not absorbing all of it. Though strangely… the electricity still felt as though it were a part of her despite leaking out.
She felt some of it reach the surface and began to electrocute something… metallic? Zest could feel the lightning leaking into whatever it was… she could feel herself leaking into it.
“Wait.”