It felt like the air should be stale.
The Crystal Empire hadn't existed in millennia, and this vault may have been one of the first things they built. Sealed to only be opened with the right key, it couldn't have been breached in ages. Setting hoof inside, walking over the metal floor, Rutile kept expecting layers of dust and the tell-tale taste of recycled air, like a ship in the middle of a long voyage.
And yet, the floors and walls looked freshly cleaned, and the air was cool and crisp. Even the light-crystals seemed to only be flickering as part of their activation cycle, not from age. It was like she was walking into an active facility, just with all the workers having left and the signage in a language she couldn't read.
With only her and Tundra's breathing and hooves, alongside the hum of the crystals and her own magic, for company, the barely-audible snap stood out with the starkness of a gunshot. And shortly afterward, the space they were in started to warp.
The creatures that appeared were in the general shape of ponies, but it was like their parts had been popped off and replaced with that of other creatures like a foal taking apart their toys. Unusual paws, claws, wings, horns, and tails bedecked the chaospawn, and they moved jerkily around the room like puppets on strings.
"Knew it." Rutile pointed her gun at the nearest spawn as Tundra raced toward a computer terminal. She eyed the door behind it, the crystal nearby lit up red in what seemed to be the universal signal for locked. "Can you get us through there?"
"Yes, but it'll take time!"
"Then I'll hold them off." The light around her horn surged, and several sets of mismatched eyes were drawn to the light. "COME GET SOME!"
The minotaur's left arm was gone from the elbow down, and a thaum-cannon was grafted to the stump in its place. His gnarled face was twisted into a grin as he and his goons advanced on them, and only laughed when Rutile's twin pistols slid from their holsters.
"It's nothing personal, little pony," he boomed. "The Order of the Two Sisters has a huge price on your head, and there's nothing more profitable than when a bounty's marked dead or alive."
The diamond dog to his right gave his own wicked grin. "Bet that horn will sell for a good price, and I hear pony hearts have a few good uses too." His eyes then landed on Tundra. "And those antlers and pelt will look good on someone's wall."
Tundra shook violently behind Rutile, who gritted her teeth. "You want pieces of us?" She leveled both pistols directly at the minotaur's head. "THEN COME GET SOME!"
Bullets didn't do much to chaospawn.
Well, no, the bullets definitely did something. They struck, and they left a hole. It just didn't seem to be slowing them down any and Rutile wasn't sure they really noticed the bullet holes now decorating their torsos and heads. She remembered settlements who'd been overrun by the things, where the inhabitants had resorted to dropping rocks on them, because that would keep them in one place and they'd eventually stop moving as whatever force was animating them presumably got bored.
Unfortunately, in this smooth metal hallway, she was all out of boulders to crush the advancing spawn with, though she was getting some luck in aiming for legs and wings, as they seemed to obey just enough natural laws to need those in order to move. Once she ran out of bullets, she started slinging bursts of magic to give her cover for a reload, and that did a little more; Rutile didn't know many spells, but she was able to add just a little bit of fire to the edges of what were otherwise raw bursts of magic, and one of the ones with goat horns and a mermare tail shrieked as the flames spread through shockingly flammable fur and scale.
Tundra was frantically mashing at the interface with her hooves, but thankfully none of the chaospawn seemed interested in her compared to the unicorn hurling metal and fire at them. While that was entirely the point of Rutile making a spectacle of herself, it did mean that the horde of at least a dozen pony-sized beasts were heading right for her and she only had one gun and one horn. She was backing up to try to keep in ideal firing range, and she knew that she was going to run out of floor to back up over.
That happened a little sooner when she suddenly had to leap forward away from the snapping jaws of a spawn with the head of a timberwolf, that'd managed to get behind her. Her shoulder slammed into a part of the wall, that, rather than simply making the usual sound of flesh meeting unyielding steel, proceeded to beep at her.
That beep was followed by part of the wall opening, and the clatter of something hitting the floor. Rutile risked a look, and her ears perked. "What have we got here?"
She slid one of her front legs into the device, and watched with a whirr as the plates of metal latched on to fit her perfectly. She then pointed the muzzle of what looked a lot like a cannon at the timberwolf-like spawn, and the device roared to life, the beam of light that erupted from it handily slicing the spawn in half.
Rutile's face lit up like a foal who'd just gotten five years' worth of birthday presents at once. "Oh now we're talking!" She whirled around and pointed her leg at the sheep-like spawn in front of her with four wings, but rather than forming another ray of death, all she got were a series of beeps that she didn't need to be an expert on magitech weapon to know meant out of charge.
"Buck." Her pistol flew up and she took out the spawn's front legs with a pair of well-aimed shots, then leaped backward over the pieces of the one behind her, trying to regain some distance. She didn't expect the snake-like tail of the half-a-spawn to coil around her leg and send her crashing to the floor.
Breathe, came an old mantra. Embrace the pain. Make it theirs.
Rutile twisted, and her free hind leg slammed into the base of the snake tail, freeing her and sending her skidding back. She harnessed the momentum to roll to her hooves, and went for the eyes of a spawn with the front limbs of a bear. It roared in apparent pain, but that didn't stop it from rearing and knocking the gun from her telekinetic grip with a swipe of its claws, the wide swing sending them grazing her shoulder as well. Even the tips of those claws tore through her flesh with ease, and droplets of blood hit the floor like spilled rubies from an overturned jewelry box.
Rutile raised the thaum-cannon, frantically probing at it with her magic, and when she heard a beep that she prayed meant that it'd recharged, she aimed at the bear-spawn. The beam fired again, and Rutile's horn blazed as she directly fed it her magic, watching the beam widen and not so much cut as obliterate the chaospawn, as well as several behind it.
She also felt new pain as the metal against her front leg grew hotter and hotter, the scent of burned flesh and hair more than just her targets', but she didn't stop, not until she had to in order to catch her breath. Stumbling on three legs as the fourth was trapped in red-hot metal, she looked at Tundra. "I could use that bucking door!"
"You try translating ancient computing code, then! This coding language doesn't exist anymore!"
Rutile cast a quick cooling spell on the cannon, and instantly regretted it as the icy feeling almost felt worse than the heat. She probed at the gun more, searching for something else, anything--
There was a whirring, clicking, and more beeps, and something new fired from the muzzle. Rather than a beam, an orb of magic soared in an arc and landed in a group of spawn. Once it hit the floor, it exploded, sending them flying in all directions, in varying levels of whole.
For a moment, despite it all, she couldn't help but grin. I'm in love.
Rutile saw the doors fly open to Tundra's triumphant, "Got it!" and she ran, seizing up her pistol and companion both in her telekinesis as she bolted for the opening. The muzzle of the cannon automatically folded in, and it clanged against the floor as her focus narrowed to the point of safety, ignoring the agony that lanced through her with every step.
The moment they were through, the doors slammed closed again behind them without a moment to spare, and Rutile collapsed in a panting heap. It was over.
Or just beginning.
"Foal of a--"
Rutile jerked away from the burn of the antibiotic gel on her gashes, Tundra needing to duck under one of her kicking hooves. Far from the shaking mass of fur and antlers earlier, the narrow avoidance of a broken jaw didn't seem to phase her any. "Hold still, Root." Dark green magic tugged at Rutile's now-bare front leg, a different gel starting to spread over the places where coat was gone and only painful flesh remained. "You're lucky you weren't burned worse, with how much magic you were forcing through that thing. What were you thinking?"
"I was thinking I didn't want to be torn apart by chaospawn," she spat back, and looked at the cannon laying on the floor nearby. "And I didn't know it'd overheat. I'd never seen a thaum-cannon do that."
The device had looked enough like the old minotaur's for her to guess its function, but now she had the opportunity to look at it more carefully. His had been battered and dented, the paint where he'd marked it with his name and crew symbol fading, and there had been signs of hasty welding to provide the modifications necessary to use it as a prosthetic rather than having a limb inside. Meanwhile, this one was sleek and showed no signs of wear or tear, with a set of symbols--a model number, perhaps?--engraved along one side as the only mark on it.
"That's because they have sinks to vent off excess magic." Tundra glanced sideways at the cannon, then continued her work. "This one is old and probably experimental. It's not going to be up to standard."
With infection warded off and burn treatment complete, Tundra shook the spray bottle of bandaging concoction, and Rutile flinched at the initial touch of the foam-like substance as it spread along her wounds. "It still packs a bigger punch than my pistol." The painkilling effect soon, mercifully, set in and it solidified in a flexible, semi-transparent covering. "I'll just be more careful with it from now on."
Tundra inspected the covering, presumably hunting for any flaws in the seal. "I'm hoping you won't need to use it again. I'm pretty sure those doors were sealed to keep the spawn out."
"Or keep something worse in."
"Do you have to be so pessimistic all the time?"
"Well, given that, after I made my vow to you, we've--" Rutile started tapping the hoof of her uninjured front leg against the floor to count. "--Been chased off a world by zealots, had to shake a hunter looking to saw my horn off, had to do a hasty patch job on my ship's artificial gravity generator in Harmony-forsaken nowhere, had a close encounter with an ages old debris field..."
"I get it, I get it..." Bottles and jars floated back into the medkit. "Well, short of us getting to a planet with a proper hospital, that's the best I can do. Just take it easy on that leg."
Rutile snorted a little as she got to her hooves. "No promises."