The reverberations of the sonic rainboom had not only shattered the fragile integrity of the space time continuum but what was left of Iron Will’s sanity. His drug addled thought process began shifting away from the immediate necessity to evacuate his bowels to deeper, darker memories that he had thought to be long forgotten. As he stood somewhere halfway through the electric slide and the funky chicken Iron Will found that his body was no longer responsive and that his eyes were focused not on the numerous bitches that were trying to grind against his prodigious girth but instead a point far away and past even the most distant horizon. Despite the handful of sessions of cut-rate, unlicensed therapy and decades of heavy drinking and significant drug abuse, Iron Will was slowly slipping away from not only Equestria but from reality itself.
It was to his utter horror that he found himself no longer on the dance floor but two thousand feet above a hot, steamy section of the Everfree delta some thirty-odd years in the past. Regular clusters of laser light to his left and right exploded in clusters of stars, a thousand party cannons loaded for bear assaulted the dazed minotaur with glowing white phosphorous streamers. The indistinct murmur of the various partygoers now lost behind the incessant drone of the plane’s engines, the screams of the dying, and the silence of the dead.
“Get hit with flak, better watch your back!” he roared at the purple and green dragon at the controls. The hell was he doing up there anyway? No matter – he peered down the sights, watching an orange-red sea of flames whip by below. Every few moments a flaming mane, but it was already too late for them.
The regular beat of the music grew deeper, shaking him to suddenly-numb bones, regular flashes of orange-red light in the darkness heralding the death of a thousand hopes and dreams of soon-to-be dead orange chicken. The quivering form hunched up next to him threw her head back to the beat of the distance artillery and suddenly it was gone, spray of electric blue blood gently warming his body like a Faustian mishap at a glow stick factory.
Suddenly the bombsight moved a yard to his left, the rest of the plane following suit, and his head slammed into the side of the fuselage as the plane dove into a sharp right roll.
“How’m I supposed to exterminate when you keep makin’ this bucket reverberate?” he shouted in the cockpit’s general direction, before realizing he had gotten his horn stuck in the rustbucket’s skin. Just the tip, though just for second; with a shudder of how it felt, he suddenly realized why the mares didn’t like the phrase. He could feel the horn peeling away, and with a guttural roar he yanked it loose, just in time to be slammed into the left bulkhead.
“Asshole! Buck! My Shit!”
But Spike wasn’t there anymore; directly in front of him the plane opened onto a hole in the sky, pinpoints of light and hot streamers whipping past as the plane broke into a thousand points of light, and he was falling
“Gimme that mic!” he shouted, grabbing at the bundle on the still-twitching mass next to him. He wiped off a spray of hot liquid and mashed buttons. “Talk to me, Spike!”
Sticking his head around the corpse, he caught a glimpse of the enemy line, a glowing series of flashes in the dark, vague screams of the damned floating over no man’s land. “This is no mirage!” he declared, eyeballing it at a thousand yards. “I need a barrage!”
“You are the plane,” growled Spike, his voice faint and distant as if was carried aloft upon a soft summer breeze from someplace far away.
A hail of glowing-hot party streamers took off the tree a few inches above his head.
“I look like a plane, you little shit stain?”
“You are the air support!” again answered the voice.
And then everything made sense. He was the plane. He was the air support. There was no back-up, no air support, and no rescue. He was alone up here. It was just him, some two thousand feet above the ground, in a flak riddled plane surrounded by the mangled husks of his former comrades in arms. He shielded his eyes as another burst of flak tore itself through the fuselage of the plane like a hot knife through butter, a single shard of white hot metal grazed his god-like physique but he felt no pain.
Damn, he looked good.
No longer were there any doubts in his mind as to what his ultimate purpose was. He would die here just everyone else. Just like Scoots, just like Spike, just like the rest of the air wing, and just like the hundreds of faceless enemies that he and his unit had bombed to tartarus and back. And that deadbeat bitch Applejack, that man stealing foal.
As the plane spiraled downward, wreathed in red flame, Iron Will closed his eyes for what he thought would be the last time. The tree line now no more than thirty feet away he braced himself for the afterlife.
But the sweet release that Iron Will so longed for would elude him once again as the world abruptly snapped back into focus. As he regained his bearings he found himself off to the corner of the dance floor, his chiseled, manly face covered in tears and fecal matter as he sobbed into a pillar, his legs covered in shit, and a hundred faceless souls wept bitter tears as their sobs faded into nothing more than dust and echoes on the now silent dance floor.