//------------------------------//
// The Pony With an Army of Assassins 
// Story: The Life and Times of a Winning Pony 
// by Chengar Qordath 
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Most ponies probably would’ve started panicking and running the instant they saw an army of bug monsters approaching the city. I’ll admit, I was pretty tempted by the idea too. However, my West Hoof training kicked in, and reminded me that for the moment I was the officer in charge. Right now the safety of every single pony in the Kicker compound was my responsibility. I wasn’t planning to let any of them down.

First things first, I needed to remind everypony of that. I clamped down hard on my own fear and took charge. “Sparkler, stick with me for now. Everypony else, get ready for battle. I want every watchpony and anypony else who knows how to fight on the walls, and anypony who can’t handle themselves in a fight somewhere safe.”

A pretty generic set of orders to start things off, but it would at least get ponies moving. It also gave me a little bit of time to think it all through. Time to try and figure out just what the hay my next move should be.

“We’ve still got the shield,” Sparkler commented, a hint of barely restrained fear in her voice. “There’s no way they can get through a shield like that.” From the way she was saying it, I’m pretty sure Sparkler was trying to convince herself as much as anypony else.

Sadly, I couldn’t do much to reassure her. I didn’t want to terrify her out of her wits or anything, but pulling my punches wouldn’t do her any favors either. Downplaying the threat would just make things worse. “Maybe the shield will hold them off, but I think we should get ready for a fight regardless. Plus, I don’t think an army’s worth of shapeshifters would be openly showing themselves unless they were ready to make their move.”

“So I guess that means Miss Twilight got changelinged after all,” Sparkler concluded. “And she’s up to something that’ll take the shield down. Bet the wedding must be getting pretty interesting right about now.”

“Seems likely.” If the enemy was planning on taking down the shield, they would have to knock Shining Armor out of the picture one way or another. With the wedding going on right now, it was a safe bet that something crazy had happened during the ceremony. So far, the best guess I could come up with was that the Twilight changeling had gotten to him somehow and whatever she had planned to take him out of the equation had already happened. Either the shield was about to go down, or it had been weakened enough that the bugs wouldn’t have a hard time busting through with a sustained attack.

Speaking of changelings, I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to get jumped by a shapeshifter the instant I turned my back on anypony. I didn’t think it likely the bugs would have snuck somepony into the city to take me out, but it was better to play it safe. I walked over to Star, one of the few Kickers who wasn’t running around trying to fulfill my orders on account of what happened with Lyra, and flicked a wing. The blade left a shallow little cut across her cheekbone, with a few drops of blood trickling out.

Star didn’t manage more than a raspy yelp, but Sparkler was quite ready to leap to her fillyfriend’s defense. She quickly interposed herself between me and Star, then got way too far into my personal space for an unarmed mare facing off against a pony in full wargear. “Cloud! What the hay are you doing?”

The only answer I gave was to put an identical cut across her cheek, and then one on myself too for good measure. I checked what color the blood was once it had hit the ground. All red. I hadn’t been too worried about Sparkler being a changeling—or myself, obviously—but checking Star was prudent after she’d been gone for most of a day.

Sparkler backed off on the righteous indignation once she’d figured out what I was doing, which was a welcome relief. I really didn’t need to deal with teenagerness on top of everything else. She even explained it for Star’s benefit. “Those bug things are shapeshifters. One of the best ways to tell whether they’re for real or not is that they bleed green.”

“Only once the blood leaves contact with the body, though,” I cautioned. “Keep an eye out for any ways of getting around it—odds are the bugs know some.” I turned to my cousin. “Star, check the soldiers. Sparkler, I want you checking all the noncombatants. Recruit what help you need to get the job done, and test everypony. Not even Princess Celestia comes on the compound without bleeding first.”

“Plan?” Star asked. Her voice seemed a bit better than it had been right after she got back, but I had a feeling she wasn’t going to be barking orders in a parade ground voice anytime soon.

“We hold the compound.” I scowled up at the shield. “Whatever’s going on at the palace is either something Celestia, the Solar Guard, and the Element-bearers can handle, or so far out of our league we wouldn’t make a difference. Or both.” I would’ve felt a lot better if we had Princess Luna around too, but she was off with the Long Patrol checking the borders for threats. Clearly, the swarm of changelings had slipped past them; not hard to do if they just shifted to look like ordinary ponies and didn’t cross the border all at once. Shapeshifters don’t fight fair.

I moved on to the part of the briefing that concerned Sparkler. “Going to be a lot of scared civilians out there, and most of the smart ones are going to run to the nearest strongpoint for safety. For everypony who lives in sight of the compound, that’s us. You’re going to have a lot of incoming civilians to check, so find plenty of noncombatants to lend a hoof. I don’t want to be stuck choosing between turning ponies away and worrying a bunch of bugs are going to jump out of the siege bunkers and hit us from behind.”

I took a look over the compound, dredging up everything I remembered from my lessons at West Hoof that might apply. “Check for anypony with useful skills too. Probably going to be some veterans who aren’t in the Home Watch. Get them to help you maintain order, and send any you can spare to the armory. We’ve got enough chainmail and weapons to bulk up our numbers some, even if it’s not as good as proper platemail.” I thought that over for a moment, then added. “Also, keep an eye out for somepony who can take charge, once you’ve done some bug-testing. No offense Spark, but I’d rather not put a teenager in charge of a horde of refugees.”

“Keep an eye out for doctors too,” Star suggested. “Or anypony close enough to do the job. Even a vet knows enough basics to keep a pony from bleeding out.”

Sparkler looked back and forth between the two of us, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. She was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, and her eyes were so wide they looked like they were in danger of popping out of her head. When she spoke, there was an unmistakable tremble of terror in her voice. “Cloud—Star—this is ... I don’t...”

Under any other circumstances I would’ve been gentle and understanding with her, but right now we didn’t have time for her (completely understandable) panic attack. I grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a slightly rough shake to snap her out of it. “Sparkler! I know I’m throwing a whole lot of responsibility on you, but right now you’re one of the two ponies in the hold I can be one hundred percent sure isn’t a changeling. It’s not fair of me to ask so much from you when you’re still just a kid, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to grow up a little faster. Can you handle that?”

“I—” Sparkler closed her mouth, and took a couple shaky breaths. The shaking died down, and when she spoke she still sounded scared out of her wits, but in control. “Yeah. I got it.”

With that settled, the three of us double-timed it to the clan’s siege bunkers. The bunkers were there for exactly this sort of scenario: Canterlot under attack, and a lot of civilians needing a safe place to stay. Sure, the bunkers were old and most of them had been converted into storage areas, but they would still keep ponies safe. I just hope we didn’t run out of room for civilians on account of all the random stuff ponies had shoved into unused bunkers over the years.

I concentrated what Watchponies I had around the bunkers themselves. The bugs had wings, so there wasn’t much point trying to hold onto the compound’s outer walls. Three dimensional warfare made terrain much less of an issue. I didn’t plan on letting the changelings set one hoof in the compound without giving them a fight, but the only fixed points I absolutely had to defend were the entrances to the bunkers.

The worst part of the whole situation was how helpless I felt when it came to really controlling the situation. Sure, I had the Home Watch, but a company’s worth of ponies, most of whom were either too old or too young to be on the battlefield, wasn’t much of an army. Nothing compared to the battalion of Solar Guard at the palace, and however many other units were spread around the city.

The ugly truth was, I had no real say in how this battle went down. One company mostly made up of kids and ponies in their golden years wasn’t going to be enough to change the outcome of the battle for Canterlot—that would be up to the Princesses, the Guard, and maybe Rainbow and the other Element-bearers. All I could really do was try to keep myself and everypony else in the compound alive until the day was saved. I didn’t like feeling that helpless.

Once I’d gotten everypony into position, there wasn’t much more I could do, other than watch and wait as the changelings slammed themselves against the shield, and deal with the steady trickle of civilians coming into the compound for shelter. From the look of things, Sparkler had managed to get some kind of testing regime set up, because I could see ponies getting checked for blood as they entered the bunkers. I didn’t think it too likely there were changelings masquerading as random Canterlot civilians, but there’s a big difference between ‘incredibly unlikely’ and ‘impossible.’ If nothing else, it would put ponies’ minds at ease, and get everypony used to the idea that all new arrivals needed to be tested.

There was just one thing about this whole scenario that didn’t add up: from what Princess Celestia had told me, the changelings like the one who’d gotten Mom were pretty rare, and didn’t get along with the rest of them. I know Cadance’s intelligence service had slipped up on letting Mom get snagged, but it was hard to imagine them getting basic facts like that wrong.

Most of the possible explanations were a bit worrying. Could we have missed the changelings who broke away from the hive mind, somehow going from a few isolated holdouts to an entire army? Or had the hive mind found a way to work out the flaws in their imitation process? That possibility was especially scary, since if the hive mind had come up with a way to make better infiltrators, they might have found a way around the few changeling detection tricks Sparkler and I had discovered during our research.

If either of those were the case, we could be in huge trouble. Princess Celestia mentioned that they would be checking for any more changelings after what happened to Mom, but if the bugs had a way to elude any efforts at detection then there was no telling how many key guardponies might have already been replaced. A sick feeling of dread settled deep into the pit of my stomach when I realized that they might have gotten Dad too. Even if they hadn’t, Dad was at the wedding, right in the middle of whatever might be happening there...

No. I couldn’t afford to think about that. I needed to stay focused on what I could deal with. Right now, that meant the Kicker Compound. Even if I could get to the palace in time, if whatever was going on there was something Celestia and everypony else couldn’t handle, then one more mare wouldn’t make much of a difference. The Home Watch would be a drop in the bucket compared to all the Solar Guard and all the other ponies at the palace.

I had to assume the changelings hadn’t completely undermined everything in Canterlot, if only because otherwise they wouldn’t need to openly attack at all. I also had to assume the testing tricks I knew were still effective for similar reasons. Frankly, if the bugs had already infiltrated everything and I had no way to figure out who was a changeling and who wasn’t, we were all probably doomed anyway. For the moment, the best move was to proceed on the assumption that we weren’t all doomed, and that these changelings still followed the old rules. Sure, the one infiltrator we’d found was part of the breakaway group that didn’t like the hive mind, but Princess Celestia said that some of those rogue changelings worked as mercenaries. There might be bad blood between the two groups, but mercenaries are known for being able to put up with quite a lot of things if the price is right.

The sound of changelings smashing into the shield quickly became a constant, thudding roar in the background. I didn’t even need binoculars or Sparkler’s long distance viewing spell to see the cracks spreading along the shield’s surface. Looks like we’d been right about something happening at the wedding; if the shield over the city had been at full strength, it would’ve taken more than a couple bugs smacking against it to start cracking it.

I could feel the dread settling into my stomach as the shield grew weaker and weaker with each passing moment. A part of me really wanted them to just hurry up and break through already, because there was no way the actual fighting could be as bad as just sitting there, waiting for them to attack. It was silly to think that way when every minute it took them to break through the shield bought us more time to get more ponies to safety, but a part of me did just want them to get on with it.

The changelings didn’t keep us waiting for very long. After a couple minutes of pounding there were cracks all over the shield, and then with a rumble that the whole city probably felt, the bubble shattered. The bugs wasted no time pouring in through our now wide open defenses.

I would’ve liked to have given some kind of appropriately epic and awesome speech to the ponies under my command right before the first wave hit. Something really stirring where I talked all about our clan’s long and proud history, what the stakes were and how everypony was counting on us to hold the line. You know, the sort of speech you’d see in an epic play. Hay, I would’ve settled for a badflank one-liner.

Instead all I managed before the first wave hit us was, “Feathers, that’s a lot of bugs.”

I guess I’m not cut out to be an action hero. The worst part was, five seconds after I’d said it, I came up with a perfect quip about needing a big can of bug spray.

The changelings didn’t give me a chance to come up with anything better. Cones of green magic sprang up around them as they dive-bombed into the city, allowing them to slam straight into buildings or even the streets while doing far more damage to the stone than they did to themselves. The largest concentration of bugs seemed to be headed for the palace—no surprise, Celestia and most of the guardponies in the city were there. However, plenty of other changelings landed elsewhere in the city, probably aiming to grab easy food and just generally cause as much chaos as possible.

And some of the changelings landed in the Kicker compound.

The only thing I could think of to describe what it was like when they hit was to compare it to accounts I’ve read of what happened when Equestria’s battlemages cut loose. There were explosions all around us as changelings slammed into streets, houses, and anything else unfortunate enough to get in their flight path. One of the civilian stallions we’d slapped some spare weapons and chainmail onto was our first casualty when a changeling slammed right into him. Somepony screamed his name, giving him just enough time to turn and look. The bug hit hard enough to leave a hoof-deep crater, and when it stood up, it shook itself like a dog to rid itself of several broken mail rings stuck in its chitin.

When the changelings finally stopped coming down, the sudden silence that came after the explosions stopped was deafening. That silence only lasted for a few moments before it was replaced by a new sound: a whole lot of civilians—and probably some of my ponies too—screaming in terror. Those screams slowly died down to frightened whimpers; there were still bugs hitting a few other the city, but it was a small trickle compared to the initial torrent. All the impacts had kicked up enough dust and powdered concrete that I could barely see anything. I breathed a sigh of relief when the dust cleared enough for me to see that the siege bunkers hadn’t been breached.

Then a single sound cut through all the dust and smoke. “SKREEEEE!”

The first changeling I saw was the one who’d taken out that militia stallion. Or at least, I was reasonably sure it was the same one. The fact that it was halfway through shifting into his form when I put a wing-blade in between two of its chitinous plates gave it away. I was a bit surprised by how easily it went down, compared to the one I’d fought in the cave. Then again, the bugs that went rogue from the hive mind were supposed to have been an attempt at making a better type of changeling, so maybe the normal ones were weaker. I certainly wouldn’t complain if we had a slightly easier fight on our hooves.

Then again, in the cave me and Rainbow were double-teaming a single bug. Now it was a whole swarm of them that probably outnumbered all the ponies-under-arms in Canterlot a couple times over. Quality is nice and all, but numbers will tell.

Soon I could hear grunts of exertion, changeling battle screeches, and sounds of weapon hitting chitin from all over the battlefield. All the dust kicked up by the changelings’ arrival made it hard to see exactly what was going on, though. That was probably part of their whole plan; the more confusion and chaos they caused, the easier it would be for some of them to slip into our lines unnoticed. I could already tell we would need another round of blood tests once we dealt with the first attack. Assuming we made it through at all.

The civilians gathered outside the bunker went wild once the attack started, trying to bullrush their way inside. The bugs did everything they could to encourage the panic, with several of the bugs in their natural state buzzing the crowd and snatching up one or two civilians at a time.

“Protect the civilians!” I wasted no time leading by example, flying up at the bugs. It wasn’t just a matter of decency and altruism; if we couldn’t keep the changelings off of the refugees they were sure to go into a full scale riot trying to get to the bunkers. The last thing we needed was to get into a fight with the ponies we were trying to save.

About a dozen pegasi took to the air with me, but the first strike went to Star and the other unicorns in the clan. Star shot out three golfball-sized blasts of energy that homed in on one of the bugs and punched holes into its chitin, while one of the other unicorns managed to bring two bugs down to the ground with some sort of net spell. The crowd of civilians made sure they didn’t get away.

Then I closed in, along with the pegasi who’d tagged along with me. Wing-blades aren’t the best weapon for punching through heavy armor, but they’re wonderful when it comes to air-to-air combat. I promptly demonstrated that to one of the changelings by slicing one of its thin, insect-like wings in half. Those chitinous exoskeletons might be hard to get through, but their wings were exactly what you'd expect from an insect; nothing but thin, fragile membranes that could never hope to stop a blade.

I was a little surprised so many of the bugs kept trying to fight un-shifted instead of trying to make themselves look like ponies. Maybe it was hard for them to fight and pretend to be ponies at the same time? Maybe they had to concentrate on it, or focus some. Not enough to be crippling, but to the point where there was a benefit to fighting in their natural state. Or maybe it was part of some bigger strategy. Either way, I didn’t have time to worry about that while there were changelings to deal with.

The changelings broke contact pretty quickly after our counter-attack started. Going after a bunch of scared unarmed civilians is a lot different from facing off against proper opposition. The Home Watch might be full of retirees and kids, but they were retirees and kids with combat training, weapons, and full plate. That made all the difference.

That’s not to say the fight was a cakewalk. One of my younger watchponies was pinned, and nearly had his throat ripped out by a changeling’s fangs before his grandmother struck the beast down. Another dived at the Watch’s unicorns, snatching a red-armored pony and carrying her up above the rooftops, then letting go. I saw one of the pegasi try to catch her before she hit the ground, but in all the chaos of the battle I couldn’t tell if he made it in time.

The bugs also left plenty of trouble in their wake, even after we’d seen them off. I spotted one of our civilian conscripts getting into a scuffle with one of my younger watchponies out near the edge of our battle line. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. That’s the problem with fighting shapeshifters—they don’t play fair. I rushed to the scene, wing-blades at the ready. Needless to say, the instant I arrived on the scene each of them cried out in near-perfect unison: “He’s a changeling!”

I didn’t waste any time with niceties. A quick scan showed that each of them had picked up some cuts and bruises, either from the fight with the bugs or their own scuffle. Both of them was bleeding, and a quick look down confirmed the situation. “Break it up and check each other’s wounds, you two.”

They did as instructed. Both of them had left some blood on the streets, and all of it was red. The two backed off from each other, each looking a bit sheepish. The conscript shuffled his hooves and mumbled, “Tried to see if he was a real pony by asking if he knew what Sapphire Shore’s top-rated song was, but he got it wrong. Figured anypony who didn’t know that...”

“Well, you figured wrong,” I grumbled, struggling against the urge to facehoof. I didn’t want to get on the stallion’s case too much; he was actually thinking and showing some initiative, even if it hadn’t worked. Asking stuff like pop culture trivia that most ponies would know, but outsiders probably wouldn’t wasn’t a bad idea as such, but it was the kind of thing where a pony could easily get caught in the crossfire. Plus, with the way the hive mind worked pretty much any questions, callsigns, or anything else would get compromised pretty quickly. Those sorts of tricks might trip up one or two changelings, but up against a hive mind swarm they wouldn’t last. As soon as one bug overheard the right answer, the rest of them would know it too.

I rounded up the rest of the pegasi who’d helped chase off the changelings, and we headed back for the bunkers. When we got back, we found another me, busily directing the defenders to much weaker positions and letting in refugees far too quickly.

I really don’t like fighting shapeshifters.

“Get that bug!” the fake me immediately ordered the rest of my soldiers. Under other circumstances, I would’ve taken a moment to appreciate the irony of that statement. All the soldiers the changeling had stolen from me immediately tensed up, as did the squad I’d taken out to lead the counter-attack on the bugs. I tried to come up with some proof I was the real me, and fast. The last thing we needed was to start fighting amongst ourselves.

Star stepped up, earning a bit of deference from the other watchponies on account of her rank and age. Between being very close to graduating from West Hoof and her own position within the clan, she was effectively the second-highest ranking pony in the Watch. She looked between the two of us, concentrated for a moment, then telekinetically grabbed a spear from one of the conscripts and rammed it into the fake Cloud Kicker’s side. The bug let out a pained shriek and reverted to its true form, and was promptly finished off by the other ponies.

“It might have been a perfect copy of Cloud,” Star explained, “but it didn’t have a tracking gem on it.” I don’t think I’d even been more grateful for the fact that my little cousin is the sort of crazy where she thinks planting tracking devices on all her friends and family is a normal bonding thing.

“Good work, Star.” I looked around and took stock of the situation. Between getting into a pitched fight with the changelings and the fact that one of them had taken my place for a bit, we would need to do another round of checks to make sure all the ponies here were ponies. I hoped the Princess and the Guard managed to turn the tide on this fight soon; if we had to deal with multiple waves of attackers, all the blood testing would start being a real pain. Still, better than the alternative.

“Looks like we’re in the clear for now,” one of the older watchponies announced. “Guess the bugs weren’t ready for somepony who could actually put up a fight!” The remark drew a few muted cheers from the nearby Kickers.

“We gave them a bloody muzzle,” I confirmed, drawing some approving stomps from the crowd. For a moment I was torn between playing morale officer and building up their confidence, or pointing out the grim realities of the situation. I wound up settling for something halfway between the two. “Let’s not get sloppy though. We’ve showed them we can fight back and sent them packing. They ran off because they knew they couldn’t take us, but when they come back, they’ll probably bring a lot more of their friends with them.”

It didn’t take much more than a quick look out over the rest of Canterlot to make the grim reality of the situation sink in. We might have pushed the changelings back, but the Kicker Compound was just one tiny little corner of a very big city. I wasn’t under any illusions that we’d scored some kind of crushing victory, and we certainly hadn’t broken the hive mind’s morale. Odds were, they’d pulled back because there were a whole lot of easier targets to go after.

If I were running the hive mind, I’d hold off on attacking any strong points or fortified positions and focus on mopping up all the ponies who weren’t offering any kind of organized resistance. Not to mention dealing with the obvious big threats, like Celestia and the Elements of Harmony. All they needed to do with the Kickers was set up a cordon around the compound to keep any more ponies from getting in or any of us from breaking out. There was no reason to commit the forces the changelings would need in order to take the compound. Not when there were more important battles going on elsewhere.

“So, when do we start hitting ‘em back?” I was a little surprised when Sparkler of all ponies spoke up, and moreso when she stepped out of the crowd wearing a suit of chainmail that didn’t quite fit and awkwardly carrying a spear. “Once I got enough ponies doing checks on the civilians they didn’t really need me anymore, so...” she said in response to my unasked question.

My first instinct was to tell her to get her teenaged plot back into the bunkers. A second later I reluctantly dismissed the notion. I just knew if I tried to order her to safety she’d dig in her hooves and get all teen-stubborn and rebellious on me again. If I shoved her back into the siege bunkers she’d just try and sneak out again, and I really couldn’t spare the effort it would take to have ponies watching her to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid. At least if I kept her where I could see her, I could keep her from doing anything too stupid.

Another, slightly more cynical line of thought popped into my head a moment later: Twilight and Star had both mentioned, just in passing, that Sparkler had a fair bit of magical muscle. She was a long way from a trained mage—heck, Star found out about her muscle because of how much energy she wasted due to sloppy casting—but raw power has its place too. Sparkler might be a useful asset.

I just hoped I could keep her safe. If anything happened to her, Derpy would kill me, slowly and painfully. If I was lucky and the bugs got me first, she’d find a way to bring me back just so she could make sure that I’d suffered enough before I bought the farm.

Well, first things first: I needed to answer her question. If I were dealing with proper guardponies I could’ve just ignored the civilian trying to comment on our tactics. However, the Watch wasn’t very formal, and I had a bunch of combat-capable civilians who’d been pressed into service too. Military discipline wasn’t on the table. “We can’t even start thinking about going on the offensive until we get all the refugees processed and in the bunkers. Until they’re all safe, we won’t be doing anything other than holding the line.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sparkler readily agreed, nodding along. “You’ve gotta get 'em outta the way so you can focus on a counterattack or something.”

I frowned and gave a quick shake of my head. “I’m not sure we're going to launch a full-scale counter-offensive at all. We've got a strong position here, but we don’t have much in the way of numbers. Attacking will take away all our defensive advantages and leave us vulnerable. Not to mention splitting up makes it a lot easier for the bugs to pull some kind of trick.”

“Sure, okay, but...” Sparkler looked out over the rest of the city, spotting a few distant colorful specks fleeing from a mass of black chitin. “Look, you're lucky enough to have your own little private army to give your family time to hole up, and nice big bunkers to hide in. Most of Canterlot doesn't have that, and I'd bet that pretty much everypony that can fight is already fighting.”

“I know.” I let out a pained sigh as I saw several of the black specks swoop down on those distant ponies, snatching them up. “I know there are a lot of ponies in trouble out there. But if I spread my forces too thin to try to save everypony, I'll end up losing them and not saving anypony.” I grimaced as I laid out the grim mathematics of the situation. “The bugs won't make many kills; they want to take ponies alive for food. I don't plan on turtling up and sitting the fight out, but I have to be realistic about what I can accomplish.”

“'Many' kills?” Sparkler grumbled. “With as many ponies as they’re grabbing, even a small percentage is a lot of funerals.” For a moment I was afraid I was about to be on the receiving end of a long self-righteous teenage rant, but then her shoulders slumped down and her ears went flat. When she spoke, there was a weary, defeated tone to her voice. “The worst part is, I know you're right. I hate it. I hate these damn bugs, and I hate what's happening. And worst of all, I hate feeling like there’s nothing I can do to change any of it.”

Star stepped up and put a hoof on Sparkler’s shoulder, then gave her a supportive little nuzzle. After a moment, Sparkler responded, weakly nuzzling back and leaning against her fillyfriend for support.

I raised my voice a bit, just to make sure the rest of the Watch and ponies-at-arms could hear me. “We're gonna make it through this, everypony. We don’t need to take on every single changeling in Canterlot, we just need to hold out long enough for Princess Celestia to turn this thing around.”

“How’s she gonna do that?” Sparkler grumbled under her breath.

“Well she's the Princess!” A nearby conscript answered her. “She’s got all kinds of ways to save us! Or maybe the Elements of Harmony will deal with it, like they did with Discord and Nightmare Moon!”

“Celestia doesn’t always save everypony,” Sparkler snapped back. “There used to be a lot more Doos around.” One of her forelegs shifted, to rub along the scar her foster father had left her with. Well, the only visible scar. “And sometimes when she does show up to do the saving, it’s too late.”

Star gave Sparkler a rather pointed nudge to get her attention, then frowned at her and gave a quick shake of her head.

Sparkler flinched at her fillyfriend’s disapproval, her ears flattening. “Sorry. S'an old instinct to get mad when I get scared, and I'm kinda terrified right now.”

I stepped up to the side of Sparkler that wasn’t plastered against Star and put a wing over both of them—taking due care with my wing-blade. “We're all scared, Sparks. A pony’d have to be crazy not to be scared with all this stuff going on. But right now, we need to keep it together.”

Sparkler closed her eyes and took a couple deep breaths, then gave a single sharp nod. “Right. We’ve just gotta keep these bugs off of us until the Guard or the Element-Bearers or Luna or ... somepony, can figure something out.”

Luna was a long-shot, but I wouldn’t rule her out. Sure, she might be out on the border right now, but I was willing to bet that if Princess Celestia could get in touch with Twilight at a moment’s notice, she could do the same with her sister. Probably with something a bit fancier than having a baby dragon burp out letters. With any luck, Luna was already on her way back to Canterlot, and she was bringing an army with her.

I tightened my wing around the two of them. “We're gonna get through this thing. Promise.”

Sparkler gave a small tremble, and her voice came out as a small, almost child-like whimper. “Pinkie Promise?”

“Pinkie Promise,” I confirmed. No reason not to offer it; if things went bad, the fact that I’d broken a Pinkie Promise would be the least of my worries.





Things went almost eerily quiet after we dealt with the first wave of the changeling attack. We could hear the battle going on all across the city, but they didn’t launch another full-scale attack on the compound. That’s not to say they left us completely alone; there were a couple more probes just to test our defenses and keep us from getting too comfortable, and we found a few bugs mixed in with the refugees. One of them managed to slip past our blood tests—our best guess was that it kept a hoof touching the blood after it hit the ground. We didn’t realize what had happened until it snuck into the armory and had wrecked enough stuff to effectively cost us a whole squad’s worth of conscripts.

Once we had our refugee problem under control, I sent out a couple probes of my own, just to find out what the situation was. Like I’d suspected they would, the bugs had just set up a cordon around us. No reason to waste all the changelings they’d need to attack a fortified position when they could just cut us off from the rest of the city. A couple of the groups I sent out ended up tangling with the bugs; the results made it pretty clear going on the offensive was probably a non-starter. Fighting from a fortified position in the clan compound gave us a big advantage. Out in the open, where things would turn into a fast-moving chaotic urban brawl where I would have a hard time exercising any kind of command authority, the advantage shifted to the side with a hive mind.

Finding that out cost me five Kickers, and twice as many conscripts. I don’t think it was a very good trade. I hoped the bugs took them alive, but from what I’d seen they tended to be a lot less shy about using lethal force on guardponies than they were on civilians. I suppose that figures; most unarmed civilians couldn’t put up much of a fight, but a warrior could do a lot of damage if their opponents pulled their punches and avoided killing blows. The bugs might want to take ponies alive for food, but they had all of Canterlot as a buffet. Losing a lot of extra drones just to take a few more ponies alive wasn’t a very good trade.

Still, we were holding out. That’s all we really needed to do. Just hunker down and ride the storm out until help came. Even if I couldn’t go on the offensive, we were keeping some of the changeling forces tied up just by having a strong position. The hive mind had to keep some of their bugs back keeping us contained and preventing anypony else from making it to the compound. I might not have seen what Dad and the rest of the Guard had planned for the defense of Canterlot, but I would bet every bit I had that the compound was one of the Guard’s rally points. If the bugs didn’t keep a solid perimeter up, enough soldiers might trickle in to give me a substantial force to work with.

As it was, about a squad’s worth of guardponies had managed to get through before the changelings finished tightening the noose. No officers, just enlisted ponies. Most of the ranking officers had been at the wedding—another reason that was probably the first target for the changelings. I had the guardponies and a few of the older watchponies seeing what they could make out of our civilian conscripts and filling up the sergeant roles. I wasn’t too happy about slapping weapons and armor on anypony with muscles and an inclination to fight, but I wasn’t in any position to be picky. Considering the fact that we were nothing but food to the bugs, I didn’t expect the changelings to respect the traditional rules of warfare when it came to unarmed civilians anyway, so we might as well have everypony who could give them a proper fight.

I took a quick jog around the compound, checking how everypony was holding up, helping a few of the conscripts get their armor on right, and offering a few encouraging words. The usual sort of platitudes you’re supposed to offer about how everypony’s been doing a good job. It felt hackneyed and clichéd to me, but that kind of thing is supposed to help morale. Morale’s always important, but especially so during a siege—ponies can endure a lot, as long as they believe that they just need to keep holding out until help arrives.

I was about halfway done with my tour of the compound when one of the Kicker pegasi I’d posted as a forward scout flew down from the roof of a nearby tower. “News, ma’am.” The stallion was young, barely older than Sparkler. Probably in his first year at West Hoof. I couldn’t remember his name off the top of my head. “We’ve got movement out in the no mare’s land. Looks like some guardponies managed to break through the cordon.”

I flew up to his position and took a look for myself. Sure enough, I could see the distinctive white and gold of the Guard moving quickly between buildings in the zone between the compound and the edge of the changeling perimeter. For a moment I was curious about why the bugs weren’t giving them more trouble—there looked to be about two dozen guardponies there. That was a big group to slip past the changelings unnoticed. My first instinct was to think it might be a trick and they were all disguised bugs, but if that was the case the changelings probably would’ve tried to sell it a bit harder. From what I’d seen of their tactics so far, the hive mind wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice a few drones to gain a larger tactical advantage.

Or maybe the changelings knew that I knew how they operated, and were trying to work a double-bluff on me. Or maybe they knew that I knew that they knew that ... argh. I guess there was nothing for it but to test them once they got close enough.

A closer look at the guards revealed another reason the bugs might have let them in. They weren’t moving very quickly because several of them were being carried on stretchers, and there was a lot of red mixed in with the white and gold. Not the kind of red that signified Kicker armor, though the shade was about the same. Maybe the changelings figured that saddling me with a bunch of guardponies that couldn’t do much beyond use up my very limited stock of medical supplies was worth giving my numbers a small boost. If most of them were too hurt to fight, it wouldn’t do my situation any good.

“Sparkler,” I called down. “Need another one of your vision spells!” I’d been keeping the teenager relatively close to hoof, since that was about the safest place I could think of for her aside from in the siege bunkers. Besides, that spell of hers was handy; there hadn’t been any good opportunities to look around for a set of binoculars or a telescope.

A closer look didn’t tell me much about whether I was dealing with bugs or ponies, but it did show me something else. The soldiers seemed like a pretty mixed group, but that wasn’t a surprise. What was important was that one of the wounded on the stretchers was a grey stallion whose armor had Machwing Company unit markings. “Shadow’s teats, no!” I didn’t think it likely that the Machwings had two grey stallions in their ranks. I couldn’t tell just how badly Cirrus was hurt from this distance, but the fact that he was on a stretcher and his armor had been banged up enough for the uniform enchantment to fail didn’t bode well.

“Sparks, tell the doctors to get ready for incoming casualties.” It’s not like I could keep her from finding out about her uncle’s injuries forever if this was the real deal, but I’d rather spare her the worry if it was a changeling trick. And if it was legitimate, it would at least put off her freakout until after we’d gotten him into the makeshift field hospital we’d rigged up in the bunkers. Maybe I could get her to stay in there with him, instead of running around the battlefield. Silver linings.

I mustered up a couple squads, and we met the incoming guardponies at the gates. Up close, they were in even worse condition than they’d looked from a distance. I didn’t see a single unwounded pony in the lot of them, and most of the ones who could still walk looked like they were only standing through sheer stubborn willpower. Most of the serious wounds had makeshift bandages, but the amount of blood they were dripping onto the ground meant we didn’t need to do much in the way of testing.

When I got a good look at Derpy’s brother, I felt like I’d been bucked in the guts. He had the usual collection of minor battle wounds, but that was nothing compared to the state his right wing was in: I couldn’t see the actual injury underneath all the bandages, but there were jagged bumps that shouldn’t be there, and the bandages themselves were nearly soaked through with blood. My own wings gave a sympathetic twinge at the damage.

The instant my ponies finished checking the two or three ponies on stretchers who weren’t already leaving blood samples on the ground, I sent them to our field hospital. After a moment’s consideration, I turned to one of the Guard sergeants who’d trickled in during the lull in the fighting. “I’ll be in the hospital, seeing if any of them have any intel. Hold down the fort, and find me if anything happens.”

“Yes ma’am.” I was a little surprised when the guardstallion saluted me, but I chalked that up to force of habit from the guardpony. When you’ve spent most of your adult life saluting anypony who gives you orders...

The walk to the field hospital was a short one by most standards, but it felt like it took far longer than it should’ve. Probably because I knew what was waiting for me at the end of it. Maybe it was selfish, but I’ll admit that I was thinking as much about how Sparkler would react to seeing Cirrus as I was about getting useful information regarding the battle. My West Hoof training might be telling me to look at the big picture, but basic equine compassion reminded me that the big picture was made up of a whole lot of little pictures sewn together. As long as the bugs didn’t try anything, I could spare a few moments to give Sparkler some comfort.

I picked up the pace a bit to make sure I got to the hospital before Sparkler saw her uncle. It was better if I warned her before she saw him for herself. When I got there, she was busy helping out the docs with preparing our field hospital for new patients. Well, one of them was an actual doctor, albeit a pediatrician. We also had a retired Kicker combat medic, a West Hoof cadet halfway trained to be a Guard surgeon, and a few civilians who’d been pressed into service as nurses and orderlies. Sparkler seemed to have temporarily joined that last group helping fetch medical supplies and get them in place so the docs would have everything close to hoof once the new casualties got here.

I caught Sparkler’s eye, and the teenager trotted over once she’d finished up her current delivery run. Halfway to me her pace slowed and her eyes went wide with dread. I might not have said anything, but I would guess I was looking pretty grim. Sparkler’s always been a bit too sharp for her own good; she put two and two together faster than I would’ve liked. “No. Nononononono. Who is it? Who’s hurt?”

So much for breaking the news gently. Trying to work my way up to it would just make the dread build up and give her even more time to panic. So instead I put a foreleg around her, pulled her into a hug, and told her. “It’s your uncle. He’s hurt bad.”

Sparkler let out a terrified little whimper, and her forelegs wrapped themselves around my barrel in a desperate hug. “How bad? Is—is he going to...?”

“The docs’d know better than I would.” Not the most reassuring answer I could’ve given, but an honest one. I gave her a quick, reassuring squeeze as the wounded guardponies started filing in. Sparkler immediately wriggled out of my grasp and rushed to her uncle’s side, clutching one of his forelegs and desperately whispering to him.

After a quick check to make sure our doctors had everything in hoof, I figured it was time I got back to the frontlines. The medics were already starting on triage, sorting out which ponies would need long-term care, who was in danger of dying, and who they could quickly patch up and send back to the battlefield.

Right as I was about to leave, I spotted our pediatrician-turned combat medic stepping up to one of the walking wounded guards. He took a wet washcloth to one of the guard’s wounds to wipe away the blood dripping from the injury so he could see and treat the actual wound. When he did so, the wound wasn’t just cleaned, it was wiped away completely. I realized what had happened just in time to shout a warning as the changeling reverted to its true form and pounced on the doctor. With one of their number revealed, the other walking wounded guardponies all shifted back to their true forms. 

Dammit! The bugs had grabbed a couple real casualties—the ponies on the stretchers had all been tested—and faked bleeding wounds that would pass a cursory inspection. We could’ve found them out if I’d thought to look more carefully, but seeing Cirrus and the others in such bad shape had tripped me up. I’d thought with my heart instead of my head, and wound up letting fifteen changelings right past all our defenses and into our field hospital.

I rushed in and jammed a wing-blade through the eye of the changeling that had taken our pediatrician down, but the damage was already done. The other changelings went after our other two doctors and the medical supplies; only the cadet-doctor managed to get a shield up in time, and even he’d taken a couple nasty hits first. At least the old medic managed to take one of the bugs with him.

“Changelings in the hospital!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. I wasn’t sure if it would do any good. Right now I was outnumbered thirteen-to-one; backup might not make it in time before I got swarmed.

I took one’s wings off with a passing swipe, and managed a hoof strike that crushed another’s throat. For a second I thought I might actually manage to pull it off, but then I saw their throats moving in a way I recognized all too well from the fight in the cave. I managed to dodge the first couple globs of green goo, but there were still eleven bugs, and all of them were spitting at me. It wasn’t long before they landed a couple hits and had me stuck to the floor. I could hear a commotion outside as my ponies rushed for the tent, but I didn’t think the bugs would let me live long enough for backup to arrive.

Before I could get around to resigning myself to my impending demise, the whole bunker started shaking. I wasn't sure what the deal was, until I managed to turn my head enough to spot Sparkler. Her eyes had gone pure white, her mane and tail were smoldering, and she was floating in mid-air. I’m no expert in unicorn magic, but I know a wild magic surge when I see one.

“You hurt my family.” There was a blinding flash of light, and several of the changelings just collapsed as if they’d been carved to bits by a razor-sharp knife. “You don’t get her too.” That light flashed again, and the rest of the changelings went down while the goo holding me in place dissolved.

With the bugs gone, Sparkler slowly drifted back down, her magic fading away and her eyes returning to normal. When her hooves hit the floor she staggered a bit, and I noticed blood trickling down from her nostrils. She turned to me and offered a very woozy grin. “Just realized. Light refraction means I can do lasers. Cool, huh?”

Then her eyes rolled up in the back of her head, and she collapsed.

I slowly got back to my hooves, still shaking from the after-effects of adrenaline and everything else that had happened. A couple squads of Watch, including Star, had arrived just in time to catch the tail end of Sparkler’s magical performance. Star naturally rushed to her fillyfriend’s side, helping a barely conscious and only vaguely coherent Sparkler to one of the cots while the drained teenager weakly protested that she was completely fine. While Star did that, the rest of us got to work on assessing the damage.

It was pretty bad. Out of our three doctors, two were down and the last one was beaten up enough that he wouldn’t be doing much doctoring anytime soon. On top of that, we’d lost a lot of medical supplies, unless we wanted to risk using spoiled medicine and dirty bandages. Even with Sparkler’s power surge containing the damage, they’d just about ruined our field hospital.

The stretcher-bound guardponies started stirring and shifting some. In hindsight, they’d been a bit too quiet when they came in. At the time, I’d just assumed it was because they were busted up bad enough to need to be carried in on stretchers. Now, I was starting to think the bugs must have had them under some sort of spell to keep them docile so they wouldn’t give anything away.

I had to wonder about them grabbing Cirrus, of all ponies. Coincidences tend to make me wary. Maybe he’d been trying to get to the compound—either for safety or to find Sparkler—when the bugs nabbed him. Or maybe ... well, the changelings probably knew some stuff about me on account of one pretending to be my mother for so long, and the hive mind knew I was running the show here. For anypony who knows my history and relationships, it wouldn’t be hard to guess that bringing in a wounded Cirrus might throw me off.

At the end of the day, I guess it really didn’t matter. What was important was that Cirrus was here, and he was hurt. Now that we’d effectively lost all of our doctors, Derpy’s brother might end up dying on my watch.

It didn’t take Cirrus long to come around, and at least he seemed relatively lucid once he did. His eyes immediately locked on Sparkler once he spotted her lying on the cot next to his. I took the liberty of answering his unspoken question. “She’s fine. Just a bit of magical burnout. She got pissed when she saw what the bugs did to you.”

Cirrus slowly nodded, his eyes flicking back to his bandaged wing. “How bad?” he rasped out, his voice tight with pain.

“Sorry, can’t say much for sure. The bugs hit our docs pretty hard.” The one who was still alive seemed to at least be coherent enough to tell a couple nurses how to bandage up his own wounds, but I wasn’t optimistic about his treating anypony else. Especially not when we we’d lost so many supplies too.

Cirrus gave a single pained nod, shuffling around a bit. “Painkillers?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” From what little I’d seen, the bugs had been more interested in stuff like bandages and disinfectant than pills. It was worth asking one of the nurses, at least.

There was still one other matter to deal with. I didn’t like the idea of grilling a wounded stallion for information, but we were in the middle of war. “Cirrus, what can you tell me about what’s going on out there? The bugs have had us pretty much pinned down since the first wave. Any idea what Princess Celestia has planned to deal with them? There any way we can help those plans?”

“Princess Celestia?” Cirrus paused, slowly turning to face me. “Y’haven’t heard? They got her right at the start of the fight. Their queen took her out in front of all of Canterlot.”

Every other conversation in the hospital came to sudden halt with those words. Princess Celestia was down. Beaten. Maybe even dead.

It’s hard to put into words just how terrifying that thought was. For more than a thousand years, Princess Celestia had always been there whenever her little ponies needed her. Yeah, we’ve gone through some rough times in the past, where things looked pretty grim. Nightmare Moon, Discord, that kind of thing. But no matter how bad things got, we all knew that she would find a way to save us in the end. I mean, we don’t even have very much in the way of reliable history about what Equestria was like before Celestia. Bits and pieces, sure, but a long way from a proper historical account. The records we had for ponies like Lyequinegus involved as much legend and myth as actual fact. One of the only things we know for sure is that before Celestia and Luna, things were a lot worse than they are now.

The idea of an Equestria without Celestia ... it’s pretty terrifying.

Not to mention that the plan I’d hinged just about all of our own hopes of survival on was for us to hold out until Celestia could save the day. That plan was pretty much dead, now.

This was going to kill everypony’s morale; maybe more than most of the ponies here could take. Sure, there were still the Elements of Harmony, but most ponies tended to see Rainbow, Eepy, and the others as an extension of Princess Celestia. Not literally, but they were her top problem-solving agents. If she’d been beaten, what chance would they have? Besides, Celestia had mentioned that the Elements were more for taking down a single big nasty monster than an entire army of bugs. From what I understood of the hive mind, killing the changeling queen wouldn’t be much more than a temporary inconvenience.

The same would go for any prospect of help from Luna. Even setting aside the whole Nightmare Moon issue, she was Celestia’s younger and presumably less powerful sister. How could she solve a problem that Celestia couldn’t? We didn’t even know when she was going to get here; technically, I didn’t even know for sure that she was coming at all. It was a reasonable-sounding assumption, but that’s a lot to ask ponies to stake their lives on.

I was facing off against the very real prospect of morale completely crashing. Sure, surrender might not be a realistic option when you’re up against changelings, but panic and everypony deciding to just look out for themselves was. I had to find some way of getting them to keep it together. We needed hope. A symbol. Something to bring us all together, and give us a decent shot at actually making it out of this whole mess in one piece.

Lucky for me, the Kickers have a little something set aside for just these kinds of situations.

“Star!” My cousin jumped a bit when I called out her name, reluctantly turning away from her barely conscious fillyfriend. “I need to you to take over for a while.”

“Huh?” She shot a confused frown my way. “Why? What are you gonna be doing?”

“I’m heading down to the family vault,” I answered her. “I think it’s time we brought out Shadow’s Armor.”

Star gave a surprised blink, while Cirrus shifted about on his bed. There were a couple other Kickers still in the hospital and all of them went silent at my declaration. Sparkler, who still looked incredibly groggy after her recent magic surge, was the first one to speak up. “Okay, what gives? From the the way everypony’s acting, something tells me this is a bit bigger than when Mom uses her grandma’s nice dishes ‘cause we’ve got company.”

“The Armor’s more than just an heirloom,” Star explained to her. “After the fight between Honored Shadow and the Avatar of Nightmare Moon, Princess Celestia decided that she needed ... well, a bit more firepower. The Elements of Harmony hadn’t been found, and Princess Celestia couldn’t be everywhere at once. So she made the Armor.”

“There are a lot of rumors about how she pulled that one off,” I added in. “Everything from the semi-plausible, like using some special kind of metal, to crazy stuff like saying that the reason she wears her mane so that it covers one eye was because she’d traded the eye for the knowledge and power needed to make the Armor.” As usual, the crazy rumors tended to crop up whenever ponies are bored and don’t know the truth.

“So why haven’t we been using it since the start?” Sparkler demanded. “You’d think if you’ve got some super-strong badflank magical armor...”

“Honored Shadow left orders that it was supposed to stay locked up unless things got really desperate,” Star answered her. “If the bugs took Princess Celestia out, I’d say this qualifies. Just a matter of getting through all the defenses now.”

“I’ve heard there are a whole bunch of mechanical saw blades that will slice you to bits if you don’t know the exact timing to dodge them all,” one of the younger Kickers commented. “And puzzles where you have to answer questions in old Pegasopolan and Unicornian, and if you mess them up you fall into a bottomless pit. The floors are covered in a bunch of hidden pressure plates that shoot out poison darts or drop spiked ceilings on you if you trigger them. Then there’s the giant boulder that will crush you if—”

I turned to the stallion and cut him off with an upraised hoof, then summed up my thoughts on everything he’d just said in a single sentence. “You’ve been reading too much Daring Do.” Any traps that elaborate would just be way too fancy to be practical. Where would we even fit all of that? Not to mention how much of a pain resetting all those elaborate deathtraps would be every single time a pony needed to go into the vault.

The actual defenses were a bit more practical, if a bit boring. Massive locked vault doors, a null-magic zone, to keep teleporting and other magical tricks out, and a bunch of alarms to let Dad, Princess Celestia, the Guard, and a lot of other very important ponies know that somepony was opening the vault. Once you got past that first layer of security, there was another identical one. Five vaults in a row, each door set up to use different locking mechanisms so any safecracker would need to start over from scratch to figure out how to open it. Not the fanciest defenses in the world, but all the vaults really needed to do was slow a break-in down enough to give the clan, the Guard, and Celestia time to get there and catch whoever was trying to get in.

Of course, when Dad showed me how to open the vaults, we’d never even touched the final layer of security on the Armor itself—mostly because we didn’t really know how it worked. The only clue we had was that the Armor would only allow itself to be wielded by ‘those who are worthy.’ Would it have killed Celestia or whoever put that spell on it to go into a little more detail about what exactly she meant by ‘worthy?’ Just saying, worthiness is subjective.

The part that really worried me, though, was the one rumor about how the Armor worked that I’d never heard confirmed or denied. I knew it was probably just another one of those crazy rumors that was completely baseless, but it’s not like anypony in living memory had ever put the Armor on to test it out.

The thing was, the Armor didn’t exactly have a very good track record when anypony other than Shadow tried to use it. There were a lot of guesses as to why; maybe the whole ‘test of worth’ thing ended up deciding that nopony was ‘truly’ worthy, maybe the Armor was cursed, or maybe it ate up the user’s life force as a power source. Though it could just be that we never actually brought the Armor out unless things had gone to Tartarus, and then a normal pony used it to try and take on something we’d normally leave to Celestia. But the bottom line was, whether it was because of a curse, dark magic, or just from tough fights, everypony since Shadow who’d tried using the Armor wound up dying in it.