Chapter 10: PHILISTINE / Don’t Fear The Reaper
Co-authors:
TB3 (Thank you so much! ….especially cause this is the minor hiatus. Go have fun writing Last Train!)
Jed R (Special thanks for… okay, fok it, what you did goes beyond cameo. Awesomeness ensued)
Editors:
Redskin122004
VoxAdam
Pre-readers:
Kizuna-Tallis
One man goes into the waters of baptism. A different man comes out, born again. But who is that man who lies submerged? Perhaps that swimmer is both sinner and saint, until he is revealed unto the eyes of man.
Zachary Hale Comstock, Bioshock Infinite
"Get going, Simon. Just don't be distracted by the what-ifs, should-haves, and if-onlys. The one thing you choose yourself - that is the truth of your universe."
Kamina, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
“Who the hell are ya?” he demanded, revolver pointed at a human and pony who had tried to get the jump on him in a ground-floor corridor.
The hospital foyer had been deserted, but his attempts to explore further than the reception had ended when they had ambushed him from inside an examination room…
“I’m Caduceus! Please don’t kill me!” the mare yelled.
“Sylvia Bray,” said the good-looking woman with the assault rifle, this one something that looked like a black M16 (or one of innumerable derivatives) with a desert-beige 40mm grenade launcher mounted underneath, but with more inscrutable PHL tech mounted on it.
“Ivan Bliss. PHL,” Kraber said.
“We were holding down the fort, but the Newfoals were looking for more converts… What the hell can we do?!”
“Shoot the kontgesigs?” Kraber suggested. “Quick - are there any patients in here at risk?”
“At least two dozen who can walk. The evacuation order prioritised the bedridden and incapacitated. We got the last of the unconverted wheelchair-users to safety about thirty minutes ago.”
“What do you mean, ‘unconverted’?”
“The ponies took control of one of the outpatient wings, we were using it as a waiting area for the evacuation. Now, now they’re all…”
Something clattered to the ground in the near distance, and Kraber crept to a corridor intersection. As the sound of distant giggling became audible, he peeked around the corner.
“Ah, fok...”
The newfoals were coming, wobbling up the corridor as if gesuip with delight.
“We’re cured now!” one said… no, chirped. It looked like it should be an adult, judging by its height and facial stubble, but it sounded almost like a young foal. Or a child’s windup toy…
“Don’t worry,” Kraber whispered. “Ah goat this. Ah’m going tae communicate with them the only way Ah know works.”
“...Have me talk them down?” Caduceus suggested.
“Actually, I was going tae fill them with moor lead than ma college roommate’s plumbin,” Kraber said.
“That works too,” Caduceus admitted.
And so, as Kraber slipped around the corner, he opened fire with the MG2019, and cut them apart. “EAT THIS JOU FOKKING BLIKSEMS, IT’LL ONLY MAKE YA PRETTIER!” he cackled.
“Hey, what the hell…”
Kraber whipped around, seeing a man in a jacket (on which the letters ‘PER’ had been crudely stitched) step out from another examination room. As the two of them made eyecontact, the newcomer whipped a potion vial out of his bandoleer and prepared to toss it-
Kraber acted on instinct, bringing the MG2019 up for a second and firing. Time seemed to slow down, the bullet almost crawling towards the PER man, Kraber distractedly tracking it… then watching as the .338 Norma Magnum round punched through the man’s hand, shattering his fingers, the vial exploding into shards and lacerating his body, one fragment cutting a runnel across his face, another landing dead center in his eye.
“YOU BAS-”
Pausing to riddle the sheep-like newfoals with their weight in bullets, Kraber strode forward, unholstered the revolver, and nailed the man in the balls, even as potion from the shattered phial sank into his flesh and fur began to erupt from from the gashes the flying shards of glass had left….
The mutating mass of meat screamed, a high, piercingly absurd falsetto, and even as he clasped his ruined genitals with one hoof and something that still resembled a hand, Kraber had covered the distance between them.
“BLIKSEM!” he yelled, and kicked out, his boot smashing into the man’s nose, knocking him back into the room.
The man screamed again, and Kraber grabbed his skull, even as he steadily morphed into something equine, and rammed him facefirst through a window.
“MULLINS!” a pegasus screamed, shooting up and out her respective window like a bullet, her wings flying fast enough it looked like she could do a sonic rainboom-
-and then Kraber threw the steadily ponifying PER man, evidently named Mullins, at her. She caught him out of reflex and, suddenly burdened with his weight, tumbled backwards through the open doors of an empty elevator shaft.
He heard the two of them plummet, screaming, down to the bottom of the sub-basement. There was a sound like ripe watermelons splattering, and their screams were cut off forever.
Good.
“They got Shetland, and Mullins!” cried out a woman who game running down the stairs, a rifle banging against her shoulder. “They got-”
Kraber fired the revolver right through her sternum. Staring down at the bleeding hole, she collapsed, while Kraber kept walking forward.
Unfortunately (for themselves), very few of the PER were trained soldiers - under calm circumstances, they might have very well realized that confined stairwells and narrow hallways qualified as a fatal funnel.
These were not calm circumstances, and they surged into the choke-points like blood into a coronary.
Kraber fired the revolver twice to trip up the forward line, then whipped out his shotgun and began shredding into the tangle of human and equine tissue.
“You bucking! Useless! HUMANS!” someone - almost certainly a pony - yelled. “Do I have to do everything myself?!”
Unfussed, Kraber slid into cover, back into a consultancy room (he tried not to notice the purplish stains on the bedding) and peered around the corner.
Fok! A unicorn, and horn all-a-glowy!
Okay - unicorn magic was a nightmare at close range, unless you were trying to get yourself killed. They could do anything to you, even if it was something as simple as suspending you in their TK, helpless and defenceless.
First rule of fighting ponies: take out the horn-heads. Ideally, give your point-men the kind of ammo that macerated tissue and caused massive blood loss - ha! Just try concentrating on you bloody abracadabras when you’re bleeding out through a rupture the size of your own head!
Kraber had that kind of ammo, but he was alone, without backup or support save for a woman who was unfamiliar with her rifle, and another unicorn that didn’t seem combat-ready. And in a man-on-mule showdown, he preferred not to see who was quickest on the draw...
So that led his thoughts to the second rule of fighting ponies: cheat.
“Here!” he yelled from behind cover, tossing one of the pipe-bombs he’d scavenged at the unicorn. “CATCH THIS!”
“Stupid trick, human!” the unicorn yelled, grabbing the pipebomb in his TK, ready to throw it back. Grinning, Kraber stepped out of cover and fanned the trigger of his 1911, dumping four rounds into the distracted stallion…
… who caught all of them in his telekinetic field, all while rotating the pipebomb’s muzzle back at Viktor himse... oh, come on! That wasn’t fair!
“Don’t worry!” the unicorn cried out, smile ragged. “You’ll stop your wailing soon enough…”
“FOK!”
As the pipebomb whistled for him, Kraber dove through a side-door and clapped his hands over his ears, right before the blast and shockwave of detonation punched him in the everything.
“EISH! A LITTLE FOKKIN HELP HERE!” Kraber called over towards the two deadweights he had encountered.
“What the hell do we do?!” Caduceus yelled back.
“I don’t know, something that keeps me from getting fokking ponified!” Kraber called back.
“Found… you…” the unicorn hissed, walking into the open door.
“Ah, fokking hell,” Kraber muttered, .50 revolver in his right hand, .45 in his left.
“Something about you seems familiar,” the unicorn said, a shotgun of his own hovering beside him. Kraber glanced at his illuminated flank. Natural-born, then. Meaning he’d probably ponified a few on the side, lied to people, probably managed to pass himself off as PHL to pull off this raid....
Regular gluesticks were bad enough, but ones that lied like that? Ones that pretended to help out, and just fokked everyone over?
He’s going to fokking burn!
Kraber flicked on his armor’s shield, and smiled. “There’s something oan yuir face,” he said.
The unicorn smiled back, “no there isn’t…”
There was a hollow boom from out in the corridor, and a pink flash reverberated through the room.
The unicorn shuddered, blinking in dazed shock, and then before Viktor’s eyes, his horn flickered, and his own weapon fell to the ground...
“IT WAS PAIN!” Kraber yelled, dropping his .45 and holding the .50 in both hands, firing one round into the unicorn’s face.
...kaboom...
Blood, brains, and fragments of skull exploded out from back of the unicorn’s head, splattering the doorframe and even the ceiling. Rainbow-colored threads of alicornal tissue sizzled in the viscera splattered against the wall, and blue smoke wafted up from the neck-stump.
“What the fok did ya hit em with?” Kraber asked, as Sylvia walked over to him, starring in what could have been either sadness or pity at the unicorn on the floor.
“Crowe Disruptor Grenade,” she answered. “The PHL already have them in hand-grenade form, but they’re hoping to mate them to rockets or old-style RPGs. They’re modified frag-12s, combining the shredded wire with magically-charged crystal shards.”
She rolled on, the technicalities pouring off her like water on a duck’s back, but Kraber wasn’t listening.
All he could process was this simple bit of wisdom: the PHL had reverse-engineered shields from pony magic… and then crowned that by devising a grenade that could crack the enemy’s own barriers...
The PHL, had shield disruptor grenades-
“...so we’re planning to make them smaller, add them as standard enchantments on PHL bullets.”
‘Captain, the Borg have adapted...’
Fokking shield disruption bullets were coming soon. While it took the HLF tons of pipebombs and a lot of bullets to break down magic shields. Oh God, next year was going to suck…
...or, depending on which side he remained, it could prove unutterably ball-fokkingly awesome.
“You can miniaturise them?” Kraber asked, picking up and holstering his .45. while rummaging around in his backpack. He for a pouch of spare, speedloader-less .50 rounds that he kept in case he didn’t feel like wasting a perfectly good couple rounds.
“Sure. It’s not machinery we’re trying to shrink, just a binding medium for the enchantment,” Caduceus explained.
“Wait. Could I make that work with HEIAP ammo? I have two belts of the stuff in my backpack,” Kraber said.
“What’s that?” Caduceus asked.
“Long story shuirt, thaire’s a tungsten penetrator inside the boolit, if it hits armor, the main bullet explodes and sends fire everywhere, but also pushes thaee penetrator down intae the target,” Kraber said. “It’s like a russian doll: bullet innae’ bullet. Works great against royal guard armor, potioneer ships, or zeps.”
“Maybe,” Caduceus said, eyes narrowed. “That’s hardly standard practice though. Only the HLF still use those kind of-”
“Ah boat it oaf ay Swedish trader awhile back, and it fits in my rifle just fine,” Kraber interrupted, trying to forestall her thoughts. “Nae idea how she goat it, but it seemed fun and useful enoof. Nae need tae get all antsy about it.”
“Oh,” she sniffed. “Anyway… for the record, I can’t do anything to your bullets. I’m a nurse, not a weaponsmith.”
She’d sure not sounded like a nurse a few seconds ago.
“Awwww…” Kraber groaned, visibly disappointed. He decided to work it off through his usual method of self-medication. “So - there any more PER aroond that Ah can bliksem?”
Caduceus looked confused at this, and a little disturbed by Kraber’s apparent need to kill PER.
“Up the stairs, probably,” Sylvia said.
“I’ll try and cast a cloaking spell on us,” Caduceus said. “If there’s anything I’ve learned about guns and stairways…”
“One makes easy fokking targets fir thae other,” Kraber finished for her.
“Exactly.”
The nurse, Sylvia, took point, using her own knowledge of the hospital to guide them. Her smaller size and lighter step were useful too, once maintaining the cloaking spell became too much for Caduceus. The comparative silence of Sylvia’s rubber-soled shoes to the pony’s sharp hoofsteps or Kraber’s jangling, equipment-laden tread made her ideal for nipping along an apparently empty corridor (under cover provided from Kraber), checking around the next corner, and waving them on to join her.
In this manner, leapfrogging through wards and halls, they cleared floor after floor. Caduceus, despite her medical training, proved more than competant with her grenades and a rifle she’d picked off a dead PER man. It was strange, Kraber had to admit, seeing PER or unicorns carrying guns - but then, potion made for poor self-defense against body armor, and guns were effective. It concerned him, the discontinuity between her apparent profession and the coolness with which she messily gunned down three human opponents who’d tried to stage an ambush.
He didn’t trust her. Sylvia was just another weakling who’d gone over to the PHL from the beginning, no-doubt, but this mare? No, he didn’t like her one bit. It was too convenient, her presence here, and she was too calm and collected a killer. Was she a spy for the Empire, a double-agent...
Then again, Imperial ponies didn’t seem to like firearms. What’s her game? Kraber wondered.
It was then that he got an apparent answer…
“Is that it?” he asked softly, indicating down a corridor towards a sign that said ‘cafeteria’. They were out of the patient spaces now, and working their way through the backstage, the ‘staff-only’ facilities.
“Yes,” the unicorn mare nodded, “the staff cafeteria on this floor is set up as a panic room. We ordered them to seal themselves in, while we went for help…”
“And you goat me?” he responded, struggling to hide his suspicion.
“Yes…” she answered back cooly. “What a bargain.”
“Guys,” pleaded Sylvia. “Let’s not fight between ourselves. We’re meant to be helping each other, right? At least two of us are doc-”
“Three,” Kraber interrupted.
“You? Really?” Sylvia asked.
“Well, this war…” Kraber said. “Changes people.” Idly, he remembered something from one book, something from Brandon Sanderson. If one day, he walked through a door and found himself with his old college chommies in some Irish pub in Boston, or in Faneuil Hall eating chowder, there’d be no way his past self would recognize him, maybe even vice versa. He’d grown a little, his face was lined with worry even today, he’d racked up an impressive tally of scars, he…
Hell, he probably wouldn't even think he was the same species. Which one would think that? Past or future? Yes. Obviously.
He remembered that silly polaroid that Erika had taken, the one with him holding Kate, lifting her off her feet, smiles on both their faces. He remembered the two of them meeting at Anime Boston, both having snuck out of class, and… heh. He did remember Verity. She’d looked so happy back then.
And it turned out that Zo and Erika had been there, and captured him hugging Kate, with her looking very pregnant. Kate had been happy to see him, and kissed him right on the lips. “You came!” she’d said. “I didn’t know if you’d be able to use those passes I bought.”
And, when the con had winded down, Kraber had treated her to dinner with the money from that… well, adult movie… that he’d worked on with all his chommies.
Fok it, he missed college. He missed all the food, getting to eat meat at a moment’s notice. Sure, there’d been a lot of small worries, but dammit, at least you could have fun. He missed Polo, he missed Bly, Erika… so many friends.
The last contact he’d had with a lot of them had been back when he watched the sermon-turned-riot that lead to the death of the old HTF - Polo had thrown a bottle at Reverend James Thomas’ head, Bly had been screaming into Kraber’s ear over the phone that “No, this wasn’t right!” Miranda had gone off to something in PHL Medical, and…
So many friends, so many things had been lost since those days. Whether drowned in the potion, or erased by the barrier, and then, inevitably, if anyone had gotten ponified, the memories would be locked up, the newfoals convinced there was nothing happy to be found in them.
“Nae - we go together,” he growled. “But Ah knoak. Whit’s thae password for them tae open the doors?”
“Shave-and-a-haircut…” she answered, knocking out the familiar beat on the floor.
“Okay…let’s go…”
With Caduceus leading the way, Kraber on point (and keeping his gun pointing at the unicorn’s back), and Sylvia trembling like a leaf behind them, the three quickly advanced to the door. Pushing the mare to one side with his booted foot, Kraber reached up to rap on the door…
...and felt it swing back on the hinges as his fist made contact. Unbarred, unlocked, sealed…
“Is thaire anyone?” he called out, dreading what he would find. “We’re here tae save you!”
The door swung wide open.
Unbarred…
Unlocked…
Unsealed...
‘Undead...’
“Oh, shite…”
At least two dozen shapes stood in silence within, barely lit by dim emergency lighting. Shell-casings littered the floor from submachineguns, shotguns, and rifles made of bits of pipe. The white, once-sterile floor was bright crimson, traced with the prints of boots. The sickly-sweet lavender scent of potion was on them, and they were swathed like mummies in the torn fragments of hospital gowns and uniforms.
“Yoh, fok nae,” Kraber said, realizing what was coming next. “GET BACK!”
The nearest of them looked up at Kraber as the door swung open, drew back its lips, and giggled.
“You’re too late!” said the newfoal. “We’ve already been saved.”
!!BANG!!
Later on, Kraber did not remember pulling the trigger, or yanking the pins on three of the frag-grenades, or slamming the door shut as he tossed them in.
No, all he would recall was the newfoal’s head exploding, and the red-Red-RED that filled his vision…
...and the distant THUMP of the explosion shredding everything within the ‘panic room’...
...and the crunch of his booted foot connecting with Caduceus’s body, hurling the unicorn nurse to the floor.
‘Traitor...killer-MURDERer, FOKKING MURDER!’
“YOU PONY BITCH!” he screamed, unholstering the .50 revolver and placing it to the unicorn mare’s eye. “I’m going to…”
A house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Kraber walking into it, finding it empty. The ceiling fan lazily drifting, the smell of chocolate cake.
No…
Potion spread across the floor.
NO….
“..you killed them…” said a quiet voice. “You just… killed them…”
He turned, slowly, and saw Sylvia had picked up his dropped .45, and was pointing it into his face, her rifle hanging over one shoulder.
“You were meant to HELP RESCUE THEM!” she whispered. “They weren’t like the others, they weren’t violent, or attacking. They were pure, new-born…white as snow. And you KILLED THEM…”
Kraber saw the light of madness dancing in her eyes, as she pointed to one side with a quick flick of the gun, indicating for him to step away from the unicorn.
“Get away from my friend. She might be Fallen, but she’s still a pony. She has more right to live than any of us…”
“...You?” Caduceus asked, aghast and prostrate on the floor. “What did you do…”
“Three flasks of potion, wired up to the cafeteria’s sprinklers…” Sylvia stammered. “And a smoke grenade on a timer…”
“What the fuck?! Do you… Do you honestly think I’d be proud of you for this?! Or Rime Ice?! He loves you, he loves Earth, he loves the coast, and you do this?!”
“I know neither of you would understand… you’re Fallen, both you and Ice… but you’re still ponies… and when this is over, She’ll make you well again, make you both pure again…”
“Oh, shut up,” Caduceus snapped. “Look at you! Rime and I were raised in Equestria, both of us! We came over on the same plane to the same airport after the Barrier ate up Britain, we ate the same italian dinner, we share the apartment… Dammit, we saw Equestria’s downfall. We know what it really is. Who do you think you are, talking like you know us?!”
“I take no pleasure in what I’m doing,” Sylvia said. “I can’t stand this world anymore. The HLF could have joined up with the PHL, but no, they made all the most terrible decisions. We’ve committed far too much evil in our lives to-“
-her grip relaxed for a second, and with a swing of his arm, Kraber struck the .45 out of her hands. She tried to reach for the rifle, even as Kraber drew his own gun and…
-killyoukillyoukillyoukillyou-
...brought the larger-chambered revolver to bear and fired one round into her knee.
She screamed.
It’s worth pointing out that in a fight, you can’t let the pain overcome you - giving into the pain that means you’ve already lost. It’s also worth pointing out that while movies might have you believe fighting is choreographed, it isn’t - Kraber’d learned to throw punches on the streets of Cape Town and Boston, not in some fancy dojo, so the inevitable violence was going to be ugly and awkward. Both case in point, what Kraber was about to do to Sylvia.
As the nurse fell to her knee, clutching it and hissing through her teeth shitshitshitshit!, Kraber drew back his foot and drove it up into her face. There was a wet, splintering crack, a spray of red, something giving under the sole of his steel-toed boot, and she flopped back, smearing her blood and tears over the floor, screeching. Struggling, she reached into her jacket, pulled a potion vial out into view, and - he stamped on her abdomen. WHOOMP! She vomited blood and bile all over Kraber’s feet, only for him to grab her with both hands and hurl her against a wall, pinning her upright. Bones cracked like twigs. The vial she’d been holding spiraled out of her hand, out of sight.
She was dying. Already dead, but her brain had not caught up with her body yet. Kraber headbutted her, then half-punched, half-grabbed her, ramming her into the floor, eliciting a splutter that was too full of fluid to be a scream anymore.
A pistol fell out of her jacket, a small 10mm Steiner-Bisley. He saw her weakly fumble for it, and dragged her away, spinning her in a half-circle, legs flopping behind her. Then, holding her left arm, he stepped on her shoulder.
Gripping her left shoulder with both hands, he pushed forward against her back with his free leg and pulled…
There was a pop, and Sylvia screamed. He let her drop onto the floor and she writhed in agony, her shattered arm and leg flailing as she tried to crawl away. Kraber stood and looked down in contempt on her, seeing her dilated eyes, her weakly flexing fingers trying to get traction on a floor slick with her own fluids. He kicked her in the face yet again. Blood, sputum, and vomit pooled out of the shattered ruin of her mouth.
He left her to bleed out on her own.
“That...” Caduceus gasped, sobbed. “That was…”
“Brutal...disgusting...ovirboard?” Kraber said idly, wiping bits of Sylvia off of his legs.
“By the Golden Lyre, what the fuck is wrong with you!?”
“Ah don’t fight tae win,” Kraber said, rummaging in her belt, sticking the pistol in his backpack (you never knew when you needed another gun nowadays) and placing her supply of potion vials on top of the nearest vending machine. “Me auld Dad always told me - Ivan, dinnae fight tae win, fight so you don’t have tae again.”
“She was like a third your weight and no threat once disarmed!” Caduceus yelled. “IT’D COME OFF BETTER IF YOU SHOT HER IN THE FACE AND WERE DONE WITH IT! Admit it, you enjoyed that you depraved shit!”
“Course I fokking did!” Kraber said, on the edge of a laugh.
“You’re… horrible,” Caduceus said.
“Horrible?!” Kraber yelled. “HORRIBLE?! MORE HORRIBLE DISGUSTING THAN THE FOKKIN KONTGESIGS’RE PONIFYIN’ FOKKIN KIDS?! TURNIN’ THEM INTO FOKKING ZOMBIES THAT’RE USED TO CLOG GUNS WITH BODIES?! FOK THAT FOKKIN’ KAK IN THE POES, YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY THE FOK I’M LIKE THIS?! ”
Rhetorical question - Kraber was going to say so anyway.
“PINKIE PIE, THE GODDAMN FOKKIN VARKPOES, PONIFIED! MY! FAMILY!” Kraber yelled. “SHE CAME THERE, WITH FOKKIN’ PER, AND RAPED MY FOKKIN CHILDREN’S MINDS SO THERE’S NOT A FOKKIN THING LEFT OF THEM, AND MY WIFE’S PROBABLY SOME PONY’S FOKTOY, THE BARRACKS BIKE, OR A FOKKIN MEATSHIELD I’LL HAVE TO FILL WITH BULLETS! AND THEN SHE’LL HAVE TO TELL ME I COULD’VE BEEN SO MUCH HAPPIER AS A FOKKIN ZOMBIE, AND CALL ME A BLIKSEM! ”
Caduceus quivered under this tirade, but managed to not cower.
“SO, YOU FOKKIN GLUESTICK, YES! I’M HORRIBLE! BUT I SINCERELY HOPE YOU’RE NOT FOKKIN SAYING I’M BAD AS THEM!” Kraber yelled.
“No,” she replied simply, picking up Sylvia’s rifle. “You’re just living nicely up to the standard Celestia holds the whole of your race in.”
Fuming, he turned away, landing a furious blow on an innocent coffee-dispenser. Something cracked, and the machine began to drip fluid onto the floor...
“You know,” he sighed, “Bout five years ago, Ah’d never dream ay this sortae thing. A good pub-fight, kicking some skinhead’s face in, but never… that.”
There was silence between the two of them.
“Ah cannae gie mercy tae PER. Ah dinnae mean some moral thing, Ah mean Ah actually physically fokking cannae. There’s a human movie, Schindler’s list. Ever watched it?”
“Yes,” Caduceus admitted.
“The moral’s that war reveals the truth in people,” Kraber said. “So… we had war. And it toorns out this is what Ah am. A mass-murderin, terroristic, serial-killin, child-murderin kontgesig thit likes what he does. Sure, Ah’m proud ay some ay the death ah’ve caused, ay killing PER like her. But… turns out, this is who I am. This is what I dae. Twenty-eight fokking years of people calling me a sociopath, even in fokking grade school, of people telling me I had no empathy, of people accusing me of rape that one time.” He paused. “Course, I’m not a rapist - Ah didn’t know she was underage - but it still hurt. Cause I really did love her and our children. I… I wanted to be a doctor, so I could help people. I loved those children, I really did. I thought I was a correct ou, but I… turns out I’m… this. There’s some days when I like the bloodshed, and some days when I hate myself for it. I wish…”
He was silent.
“I wish someone would turn me off and just… fix me.”
“I’m so… Dammit, I don’t know what to say,” Caduceus said.
“Yeah,” Kraber said. “It’s probably fir the best that they all got ponified. I’d be a horrible father and worse husband anyway,” he muttered. “I’m half-tempted to drink that potion over there anyway.”
“But you won’t,” Caduceus said. It wasn’t a question. “I saw the first newfoals, you know,” she said. “Some poor convie named New Bloom…”
“The name sounds familiar,” Kraber said. “Think I heard of that too.”
“New Bloom was nothing like the person that drank it,” Caduceus said. “And neither were my friends. A lot of them went to the PER, and eventually, they took the drink. But now, they’re not my friends.”
“Cause they left for the PER, or they’re newfoals?” Kraber asked.
“Both,” Caduceus said. “I might not like you, but I’ll shoot you if you drink it. Nobody deserves.... that.”
“No,” Kraber said. “I might deserve it…. but I don’t think anybody else does. I’ll go clear out the rest of the PER,” Kraber said. “Make my way tae the roof. You try and evacuate any survivors. Don’t come after me.”
“Alright,” Caduceus said. “You probably won’t come back, you know that?”
“Yeah, I won’t,” Kraber shrugged, hearing somebody come around the corner. “But at the same time… it’s all Ah’m good fir anymore. And when you get down tae it-”
A PER woman saw Kraber, ready to shout a warning, and got a bullet to the face.
“It’s still pretty fokking good to kill off kontgesigs like them.”
“Jesus, Kraber-” Verity starts.
“No, that’s…. that’s.. my cousin over... in Brazil,” Kraber says, stammering a little. “It’s actually pronounced with an H, but.... when we visited, back before the war... heh, we’d always say ‘Hey, soos!’, so we just call him Soos now. Wonder where he is now… and Cousin Isaac...”
“Are.. are you crying?” you ask.
“No, no…” Kraber says, then looks over at all of you. “Yes.”
He looks the same way he did back that one night in August, the one where he’d let you live. He is drained, you realize. There is… There is barely anything left in him. Whatever’s left of him, from before the war, there’s barely anything.
“My God,” Bly says. “I… what were you doing out there in the HLF?”
“You don’t want to fokking know,” Kraber says immediately. His eyes are welling up with tears, even, and this man - this proud, brash, newfoal-and-PER-killing machinegunner - is a shadow of his usual self. “Ever.” And, from somewhere under his pillow, he produces a bottle of bourbon, drinking it down.
And so, looking almost unsure of what to do, a little confused, Aegis rises up, hooves outstretched, and hugs his friend.
Kraber looks at his bottle, then up into the white-furred snout of his friend. “Ah, the fok with it,” he says, and puts it on the table to the side of him. “Vinyl, if anyone comes in, tell em that’s medicinal.”
And, with one of those ever-so-rare smiles on his face, he hugs Aegis back. And even Vinyl joins in, and so does Bly.
“You’re better friends than an old fokking sociopath like me deserves,” Kraber mutters, but he doesn’t believe it. You can tell, and he… he looks almost happy, for once.
“Actually,” says Lunar Phase. “You’re not a sociopath.”
“I’m not?”
“No… Aren’t you a doctor?”
“Not that kinda doctor! Besides, all the psychology I did was bullshitting on the internet,” Kraber admits. “I don’t know shit about it.”
“You’re not antisocial - you’re doing this, after all,” Lunar Phase says. “And you said you wanted to get a stiff drink with me, and a bunch of other ponies - and you feel bad for what you’ve done. I mean, hell, why are you even in this hospital room? Didn’t you care about your children?”
“Because I felt bad for…” Kraber starts, looking over at Verity, and a smile spreads over his face. “Well, fok. How about that.”
“You’re probably a good person, then,” Aegis says. “I mean, think about it. About why you joined the HLF… then the PHL.”
And in response to that, Kraber hugs Aegis even harder.
“Can’t… breathe…” Aegis chokes, half-jokingly.
“This is so damn cheesy,” Verity mutters.
“Yeah, but it’s some of the best news I’ve got in awhile,” Kraber says. “Me. A good person!”
He’s beaming like a child who’s been told he can eat all the cake in a bakery. It’s like a weight’s been taken off of him, and he leans back against a pillow.
“How about that…”
It’s right about then that you and Aegis’ foals dogpile him.
“HUG ATTACK!” Amber Maple screeches.
“No! My only weakness! HUGS!” Kraber yells, struggling not to laugh, and nobody can stop themselves from cracking a smile. “How did you know?!”
“But Aegis was hugging you earlier,” you say, confused.
“Yes, well, my continuity is terrible!” Kraber laughs.
Finally - after what felt like an eternity - Kraber had made it to the roof.
It was strewn with dead PER - dead ponies and humans alike. He stood among the corpses and blood, panting heavily.
“Hello!” someone - or rather, somepony - chirped.
“Another fokkin newfoal,” he said, turning to meet the voice, his MG2019 at the ready. “Well? Do you think you have a fokkin chance against me?!”
The newfoal stood above him, on the lip of the hospital helipad. She was a charcoal grey unicorn mare, her horn upraised like a sword poised to drop. Had amber-red eyes appeared to glow in the dark, and her mane was a shock of bone-yellow-white hair that extended all the way down her back before re-erupting into a frothing tail.
Rather absurdly, she looked to be clad in an old-timey nurse’s outfit with high socks. Both the uniform and the leggings were as shockingly white as her mane, except for the blood-red trim and patterni…
...oh, the red wasn’t part of the design.
“Now, now... don’t you recognize me, Viktor?” she chirped.
“How the fok did you-”
“Oh, it was perfectly obvious,” she said. “I’m rather disappointed in Cady for not noticing. Your Scottish accent is terrible! I’ll ask you again: Do. You. Recognize me?”
“No,” Kraber said. “Far as I’m concerned… you’re just another fokking obstacle.”
“Another pony to kill?” she asked. “To shoot in the knee, kick in the face, break the collarbone, and leave to die, without the mercy of even a wee sip of potion?”
“..Sylvia,” Kraber breathed. “FOK! You just can't kill people like you used to..."
“You missed the vial,” she said sweetly. “It landed on the coffee-machine. You cracked it with your fist, but not enough was leaking… me, the filthy ape me, had to crawl my way over with the arm that worked, and drag the machine off its stand and onto my head…”
She tipped her head back and screamed, a boiling screech like a saw-toothed steam whistle. It was a rusty, tortured sound, that told of scalding water and shattered glass and savage, primal triumph.
“No, no, no...not triumph, Victory…” corrected an unwanted voice, and he saw the damn newfoal that called itself by that name standing beside the raving mare...
“...it burned, broiled me to the bone, so deliciously deep that even Her Mercy couldn’t heal the scars...”
“Look at her, Kraber”, ‘Victory’ giggled. “She’s so much like me… a war-born newfoal, a prototype of the Pretty Privates yet to come… oh, the great Nepenthe would love to have a magnificent mare such as this in her sisterhood…and you too…”
“...look at me, Viktor. I’m so broken that I can’t even connect to my brothers and sisters… cast out on my own, running on Auto-law, my brain too smashed to share in their screams, from all that you did! Behold the face of your daughter-mare!”
“Great. Another love-child. I’ll have to use protection next time...”
The newfoal’s horn flashed, and the still night air whipped up into a breeze that swept back her mane, exposing the fur around her horn…. which was lacerated and slashed, glowing from within with the same crimson light that burned in the pits of her eyes, as if something just under her skin or her horn was trying to make its way out...
“Are you proud of the destruction you’ve wrought?” she said in a voice like rancid honey. “Are you proud of the suffering that you-“
“Actually, YES! I’m apparently so badass that not even the fokking potion can take away the scars I leave!” Kraber laughed. “This is gonna be kwaai…”
The newfoal blinked for a moment, and then leered, more bloody light spilling out from her torn face. Disgusting, and yet, it almost appealing, like a tribal brand...
“Well - that’s disturbing. Now, I’ll give you one chance…” she chirped, “Join me, and you’ll be happy all the time! I’ll have a new playmate too…after I’ve roughed your brain up a...oh wait, no - you scrambled your own basket of eggs long ago. This, Viktor, this is going to be kwaai…”
“Go fok yourself,” Kraber snarled.
“But you’re so sad!” the newfoal protested. “You’re crying all the time, lashing out at everything! If you take the potion, that’ll all just float away! You’ll be superior! You’ll live on forever, with madness myself at your side...”
“First - that’s at the expense of every fokking thing that’s me,” Kraber said. “Second, you’re not superior, you’re a fokking golem someone dredged up from muck of someone’s soul. Thirdly… you’ll never be happy.”
“Don’t be silly, I’m-“
“If you’re happy without sadness to balance it out,” Kraber interrupted, “The happiness just dulls you. You can never truly enjoy anything… cause what the fok’s enjoyment if you enjoy everything? You’ll just be an automaton in a year or three, unable to feel anything, mentally screaming because you can't believe that feeling so dead inside is anything but being happy… even as you shoot little children in the street, turn them into more like you, thinking that the best thing you can do is make more of yourself.”
The newfoal shook slightly.
“Constant happiness like that is a lie,” Kraber finished. “What’s laughter without tears…”
“It. Is. PERFECTION! she hissed, before shuddering with lustful abandon. “Oh, you…. motherbucker…I know my name now… I am Reaper,” she hissed, levitating two of the PER’s combat shotguns away from the scattered corpses. Then, with a telekinetic tug, she bent the bayonets clipped under the barrels into wicked, sickle-shape arcs. “I will harvest new foals from the dirt of humanity, I will-OW!”
Kraber had opened fire with his MG2019.
“You ponies. Talk. TOO. FOKKING. MUCH!”
‘Get out of her way!’ ‘his’ newfoal whispered in Anka’s voice, and Kraber, before the crazed mare fired whatever neurons in her horn controlled her TK, moved.
Her bullets ripped through the air immediately behind him, missing him by the breadth of one of Kagan’s hairs, Kraber panting heavily as he brought the MG2019 to bear again, blasting in her general direction before hurling himself into a roll, avoiding a second medley of buckshot.
Coming up in a crouch he moved to aim, but found himself staring in horror. The mare, ‘Reaper’, had produced two purple flasks.
‘Potion...’
Waving cheerily with one hoof, she teleketically smashed one phial against the bayonets, slathering them in purple slop...
“Oh, fok…”
...the second, she hurled at him. Staggering he tripped onto his back, barely avoiding the lethal projectile, and immediately found the mare advancing on him, swinging her two shotguns like scythes.
“You get hit enough with these, you’re bucked!” the new foal screeched in a lunatic giggle. “Now, sit back and TAKE YOUR MEDICINE!”
Dodge, Vikt-
Kraber forced himself into another roll, and Reaper’s swinging bayonets smashed into the spot where he had been.
Viktor, for his part, had already ducked into cover behind an elevator housing, and found he was not alone...
“Gotcha now,” one surviving, heavily bleeding PER man hissed, holding up a vial to Kraber, trying to unzip his armor, and-
Kraber whipped out a knife and jammed it into the man’s armpit. That was an artery - the man was sure to die soon. The man staggered back, only to get caught in another shotgun blast from Reaper.
“That’s fokking hilarious!” Kraber laughed.
“No, this is!” shrilled Reaper, and before Kraber’s eyes the screaming man began to shrink within his clothes… and his howls of pain became neighs.
Wait, what the fok?!
The newfoal - this fokking abomination - just ponified a man with a shotgun blast. What the…
‘Potion - he had a potion flask in his hand, and the blast not only shattered him - it smashed the flask as well, and doused him in its contents...and you too...’
He looked down and saw the purple fluid smeared all across his armor.
‘Fok, all it would take is one good puncture and...bye-bye bipedalism… and hands… and saturday nights.... and sentience. I guess that’s bad too.’
His mind whirled, even as he continued to backpedal across the roof, keeping up a steady repeating salvo of shotgun shells, which Reaper either swatted from the sky or dodged, forever smiling in her crazed, infuriatingly smug manner.
As he kept the two of them in motion, he calculated: the PHL armor had proven pretty damn durable, and they had more ponypower behind their enchantments than the PER…
But he didn't know if he could take a direct hit.
As he was trying to keep out of Reaper’s range, he tripped over something else: the freshly turned newfoal stallion.
“Oh, she saved meHEEEEHEHEHEE!” the bluish newfoal giggled as he made his way in Kraber’s direction. “I-“
“HOU JOU FOKKIN BEK!” Kraber yelled, and kicked the newfoal in the face. It screamed, not in agony but in rage, as it flew off the roof, tumbling madly to the street below.
Oh, fok.
Ignoring the sound of the screaming newfoal, Kraber switched to his MG2019.
“Reaper reaper that’s the queen calls me,” the unicorn mare sang. “Because they all, DIE! When I sing I ponify! You act as though payback makes you a nobleman is that a fact? Well you’re a goddamn philistine!”
And suddenly, she’d teleported - right in front of Kraber, holding those two shotguns with the curved bayonets.
“Requiem aeternam, bullet right through the sternum
Lullaby to hell, babe
Reaper’s got your name!
“EAT THIS!” Kraber replied MG2019 aimed at her, spraying long bursts into her general direction… come on come on, the MG2019 usually broke shields quicker than this...
She fired point-blank into Kraber’s stomach.
Something above his armor flickered, and Kraber staggered back…. It held.
Thankyou magic-shielded armor.
“Reaper cannot let you in, it’s just not fair
I’m a pure mare-”
“I’M NOT FOKKING YOU, JOU BLIKSEM!” Kraber yelled over, firing his MG2019 in her general direction, idly noting a growing sound like the roar of turbines…
Floodlights swept across the roof, and he realised that what he could hear approaching were helicopters. A quick glance confirmed two of the whirlybirds, both headed inbound towards the hospital.
Excellent, medevacs, he was probably going to be good…
“-colts cannot crack this oyster shell
So go on, whip around that gun
like you're the best, it's just no fun
Another hero? Oh, please!”
In retrospect, Kraber really should have known better.
Especially when the two choppers - Russian Hinds - opened fire on him, and pegasi with potion bandoliers swarmed out of the side-hatches, along with human PER hanging on the end of zip-lines.
“OH, COME ON!” Kraber yelled, rushing out of the way, panting, just barely dodging two more shotgun blasts from Reaper.
“Reaper cannot let you in, it’s just not fair-
For once, Kraber agreed. This was getting to be a horrible, horrible day.
I’m a pure mare
colts cannot crack this oyster shell
So go on, whip around that gun
like you're the best, it's just no fun
Another hero? Oh, please!”
Please let my shield tank this… Kraber prayed, firing into Reaper’s shield as a burst of shotgun shells raced in his general direction.
IT HELD! He pulled the pin on another PHL grenade and tossed at the mare. Then, he swung around the other side of his cover, hoping to catch her from behind once the blast disrupted her shield...
“Requiem aeternam
Reaper has come, sinner!”
CRACK!
“Yes!” he roared, seeing her horn smoulder in the wake of the pink, magical flash. The MG in his hands roared fire, and by the time she had gotten her shield back in place, he’d landed at least a couple of rounds in her flank.
And yet she still kept on coming. FOK! Why was she so fokking durable?!
“Thigh-high socks are my absolute territory
Go on and drool -
the otaku cannot resist
You think the fire in your eyes
makes you a tiger in disguise?
Dream on, you goddamn pussy!!”
The helicopters were overhead now, unable to fire, but dropping their human cargo onto the roof. The men and women falling from the sky were lightly armored, wearing what looked like metal breastplates under their clothes, glowing purple….
“KILL HIM!” one pegasus shrieked, pointing in the general direction of Kraber. “KILL THE BASTARD THAT WITHHOLDS CELESTIA’S LIGHT!”
Requiem aeternam
Reaper has come, sinner!
“I’D LIKE TO SEE YA FOKKIN TRY!” Kraber yelled, opening fire with the MG2019 at the pegasi plunging onto him, clipping their wings and turning dives into death-spins.
The sound of them smashing into glass and concrete was musical…but he couldn’t afford flashy kills. Couldn’t afford to make them suffer. He had to remember what Caduceus told him...
Wait! Those helicopters up there were Hinds, Mi-24s… renowned as flying tanks, but what was that line from ‘Snow Crash’?
‘Fucking Soviet piece of shit, they made that windshield out of...’
“It’s just one human!” somebody yelled, opening fire from the door gun. “PONIFY HIM! OR KILL HIM, I DON’T CARE!”
The chopper’s gatling ripped through the area immediately behind him, a bullet smashing against his shield, but it held - thank god, it held, and…
FOK! A bullet rammed into his stomach, the shield and PHL armor dampening most of the force… but not all of it…
...the surplus Newtons were enough to throw him back into a solid wall. Again, his shield flashed, and he bounced away from the impact, sprawling onto the rooftop.
“Is tha - ISTHAT ALL YOU HAVE, KONTGESIGS?!” he yelled, slipping behind cover desperately trying to ignore the (fokfokfokfokfok it HURT) pain.
“Thigh-high socks are my absolute territory
Go on and drool -
the otaku cannot resist
You think the fire in your eyes
makes you a tiger in disguise?
Dream on, you goddamn pussy!”
He’d been shot before, yes… but never with something so fokking big! Damn, if he ever joined the PHL, he wanted a better shield over his armor.
He tried to breathe in, breathe out. His hands probed his abdomen, finding no entry-wound, no point of contamination for the potion, but he could still feel a stick witness inside the armor, against his skin…and blinding pain when he tried to breathe.
A rib, he realised… the force had been enough to compound fracture one of his ribs...and now he was bleeding out inside his own armor.
Okay… no fokking regenerating health. Had to… Had to kill them before he… died of blood loss… FOKKING OW! What had he been hit with, a fokking antivehicle round?!
“Turns out, it was an antivehicle round,” Kraber says, still wincing a little. “It was a civilian Hind, and they’d managed to find a homebrewed HMG… stung like a bakvissie with teeth in her beef portal…”
Everyone winces, and you’re not sure whether it’s from Kraber’s description or imagining the sensation of getting hit with one.
“Can your armor seriously tank antivehicle rounds?!” Verity yells. “I’m calling bullshit.”
“Nah,” Vinyl says. “You can survive getting hit with one if the shield’s down… assuming it’s not in the heart or something. The shields can tank it, but not many. There was just enough of the shield left that it blunted the force. It would have gone through his armor with no trouble, though.”
“That, that sounds painful…” Scootaloo says.
“It could have been worse. The later marks had a twin autocannon in place of the Gatling, and that was chambered for 30mm sounds nearly seven inches long...getting hit by one of those would have meant...
Kraber pate, served al-dente. Definitely not Kosher.
Damn, he really had broken a rib. He could feel the damn think rasping against the inside of his damn chest...another hit like that might break it the other way and puncture a lung…
‘Getting potioned almost sounds better than drowning in my own fokking blood. Almost...’
Reaper reaper that’s the queen calls me!
Because they all, DIE!
When I sing I ponify!
You act as though payback makes you a nobleman
is that a fact?
Well you’re a goddamn philistine!”
Adjusting the grenade launcher sight he’d added onto his scavenged pipebomb launcher, he ducked behind one of the numerous buildings on Maine Medical’s roof, ran onto a recent (well, recently when the war started) upward expansion, sighted his target and fired.
The pipebomb, propelled by nothing more than a highly compressed spring, flew upwards along the flat trajectory he’d hoped for, reaching the apex of its arc just as it impacted…
...face-first into the windshield of the nearest hovering chopper.
The rest was physics. The pipe-bomb’s detonator initiated, and the force of impact plus the tiny jet of superheated plasma on the tip of the blast was enough to shatter the ill-maintained glass, filling the cockpit with scintillating crystalline shards and good-ol-fashioned (just like Ma’ used to make back on the farm) shrapnel.
The explosion itself was comparatively small. The result were not. For a moment, just a moment, Kraber saw a severed arm, and a pegasus wing, fly out of the wreckage, chopped apart by the helicopter rotor. Then, unguided, with all controls shot, the chopper slewed sideways onto its beams and fell out of the sky, dropping into the street. As it sank in flames past the roof, the tail-rotor struck the tip of the building, and flew off its mount. Trailing sparks, it spun across the roof like a demented firework, bisecting an unfortunate PER man on its merry way. The upper half of the unlucky bastard’s torso, diagonally cut through, jumped up about two feet in the air, blood spraying out both halves of his body…
All this chaos and viscera left only one small problem. There was still one helicopter, and Kraber found himself now fresh out of pipe-bombs..
Please God, if you’re listening, make this shield work, he prayed, and poked his way out of cover, sending a wild burst up in the direction of the second Hind, ducking back as something hit him in the shoulder, leaving a splatter of something purple.
FOK! More ponification potion! Was that… Were they using ponification pellets in paintball guns?! There was a sick logic to it all - even if he won the fight he still stood a chance of getting the stuff on himself changing out of his armor. It would be a pyrrhic victory, but still another newfoal to the cause…
‘Is that how I’ll be born?’ giggled Victory. ‘Oh please yes, please fall over and be reborn just when you think you’ve won!’
Another rifle round, this one a bog-standard .223, punched against the PHL armor… then another one, a heavy .308 from one of the battle rifles that most militaries had gone crazy for in the earlier days of the War. Okay… Another round, this one in his shoulder…
His shield flashed again and again, so that instead of ripping through bone and tendon, the impacts felt only like being hit with a mallet. Already clutching at his burning chest, Kraber struggled to ignore the fresh pain, instead gritting his teeth and reloading. He tossed out another grenade stolen from the PHL, this one a flashbang. Good for riot control. He threw it out in what he assumed was the general direction of the PER varknaaiers standing on the roof, shielded his eyes from the blast, and then rushed out through the disorientated mess, MG2019 aimed up at the helicopter. His lungs hoarse and his every breath full of broken bits of glass he fired up at the Hind, emptying every round in the mag into the chopper.
But, as he fired that last manic spray, roaring in defiance and agony, another round smashed into his thigh, whipping that leg out from under him.
“Go for the opening!” screamed a pegasus, who rushed rushed towards him, a knife in his mouth.
Kraber swung the now-useless rifle like a club and knocked the newfoal off his feet, before grounding him permanently with a .50 dose of lead to the face.
Ah fok fok fok fok it hurt, and he could feel his blood dripping down through into the legs of the armor - heh, no way this was going to be an open-casket funeral, not looking the way he did right now-
- NO. No fokking time for that! The second helicopter was still overhead, trying to swing around and paint him with its own MG... he couldn’t take any more rounds. No matter how many the PHL armor could take, there wouldn’t be many before it punched all the way through him.
He felt for his armor’s chest, and found two more grenades, one of them a flashbang, the other with Japanese characters on it. He vaguely remembered them, though he had no idea what they meant…. Fujin? The purplish-pink stripe on the rim told him it was another anti-magic weapon, but it still had an explosive charge like any other frag-grenade…
He weighed it in his hand, and tried to remember an old episode of Mythbusters: shooting live grenades out of the air…
What he’d taken away from that episode (incidentally: myth confirmed, kinda), was that a sufficient blow might be enough to trigger a grenade’s explosion. Like say a sniper round… or a rotor spinning at over 300rpm.
Well, here went nothing.
“HOLD THIS!” he yelled, and tossed it up in the general direction of the helicopter.
He would have liked to have seen what followed next in slow-motion, seen which rotor-blade struck the grenade, and flicked it away with enough force to trigger the reaction.
‘Huh… Adam, Jamie - did you know that if you strike magical crystals really, really hard, they kinda… implode...’
The grenade had not exploded, per se. A giant purple-pink-black sphere had formed in midair, right where the helicopter’s midsection fuselage had been, sucking up everything and everypony save for Reaper, who stayed stubbornly attached to the ground, her hooves looking almost rooted to the concrete. Kraber, for his part, was apparently heavy enough to remain ‘on deck’, weighted down by the sheer mass of his gear, holding onto a railing...
The PER grunts however, in their lightweight armor, followed their pony compatriots and were drawn, screaming, up towards the pocket-singularity. A few overshot it and flew into the helicopter’s whirling rotor, twirling around the singularity in an unstable arc, which had sheared off its driveshaft and was now suspended above the vortex, held in place between its own lift and the suction of the void. The sky filled with a matrix of blood as it sliced and diced anyone unfortunate enough to strike it, limbs and droplets swirling back into the singularity in what looked almost like small rivers.
The bisected halves of the helicopter spiraled around the sphere as if rooted to the ball of energy, the tail end slicing through the hospital roof and another newfoal.
“Kwaai…” Kraber whispered.
And then, as if unable to sustain itself, the glowing singularity wound down, and like a sun going supernova, violently rejected everything it had swallowed. Comets of ultra-compacted metal spewed out and embedded themselves in surrounding buildings, while a noxious cocktail of blood, oil, aviation fuel and coolant gushed out as if from a cracked egg, baptising Kraber and washing away the potion on his armor.
What remained the helicopter’s nose crashed into the roof, bounced, and dropped to the street below. The tail section, still airborne thanks to the spinning tail rotor, tumbled away, cutting through a pegasus, and tried to mate with a nearby house.
Fragments of Hind and hide rained down from the sky. A forearm with a wristwatch still attached landed on Kraber’s chest, and he hugged it in silent shock as if it were one of the stuffed animals in his pack.
The few PER who had fallen back to safety before being consumed got shakily to their feet, laughed weakly…
...right as the helicopter’s main rotor, still intact and spinning, dropped down out of the sky like a razor-edged flower head caught on the breeze…
Blood, metal, and shrapnel flew everywhere, pollinating the roof. Kraber, still lying prostrate on his back, saw blades spinning inches from his face, before the bloodstained rotor came to a creaking halt.
“And that,” Kraber says to all of you, “Was the nastiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Which, you realize, is saying a lot.
Actually, it’ll be the second, but that’s not important.
“Life’s good to me sometimes,” he whispered, and weakly climbed to his feet. “Oh, you have got to be tuning me kak…”
Reaper, a little worse for wear, stood not thirty feet from him, smilingly splashing one hoof in a puddle of...something. Fragments of superheated metal lay around her, from where the rotor had evidently struck her magical shield, and come off the worst for it…
“Want some?” she asked, holding up a hoof. “It’s the kind of stuff you like…”
Kraber caught the reek of petrochemical loveliness, and staggered backwards out of the pool of blood and fuel.
“...the kind that BURNS!”
She kicked a small wave of the stuff onto the fizzing metal, and with a sound like a elephant splatting against concrete from thirty-thousand feet, the…
“...the entire fokking roof was on fire!”
Yup. Destroying the helicopter had neatly doused most of the surrounding rooftop with quality avgas, and the damn newfoal had just set it on fire.
She didn’t seem to care, strolling through the flames with her shield up, the rising air wafting her mane almost angelically around her face. The orange-blue flames were actually a very complimentary colour to her searing red eyes and the seething ruptures in her face.
And she was still humming that insufferable tune.
Wheezing, exhausted beyond belief, Kraber reloaded the MG2019, and squeezed down the trigger.
“...stop the fokking song!” he rasped, unable to get his voice above a pained whisper.
But Sylvia, or Reaper, did not listen, continuing the inane, prattling lyrics, closing the space between him even as his bullets dimmed her shield with each fresh blast.
“Requiem aeternam
Bullet right through the sternum
Lullaby to hell, babe
Reaper's got your name!”
”COME AT ME, YOU NZAMBI KONTGESIG!” Kraber wanted to roar, wishing to lose himself in sound and fury. But it wouldn’t come, his burning chest wouldn’t obey, leaving him trapped in the silence of his rage and the crackle of the flames...
Driving him back towards the edge of the roof, she whipped one shotgun up, the bayonet slicing through his armor - Wait, fok, wasn’t there supposed to be a shield?! - and cutting a run through it…
It wedged, jamming between two plates.
“Well, that’s annoying…” she shrugged, and fired.
The pellets smashed against his stomach.
Reaper looked up to him, annoyed, and levitated a huge rifle at him. It looked like a sniper rifle.
At point-blank range, the muzzle was inside what remained of his shield, and the bullet tore straight through his abdomen - damn that hurt.
Even as she kept on singing the song, Kraber could see her aiming the shotguns into the hole.
So Kraber did the only thing he could. He reached forward, grabbed hold of Reaper’s horn, and let his weight fall forward, twisting as he did to force her under him, grappling hand-to-hoof on the roof as the pool of flame expanded and swallowed them.
Kraber was wounded, but the armour was evidently fireproof. Reaper did not have to deal with injury and blood-loss, but was unable to shield herself when pushed face-first into burning liquid.
But she didn’t scream, even as Kraber felt her body spasm and smelled her flesh burn. Instead, she bucked him with her hind-legs and reversed their positions, so that she was now on top of him.
At least she’d finally stopped singing, though.
“Hi there…” she squealed, mashing her scorched face into Kraber’s and planting her hooves on his chest… “I’m Reaper, the Pret…”
“I’ve fokkin’ heard that already,” Kraber wheezed, and headbutted her, wishing that he’d kept the spiked HLF helmet. She staggered back, whatever spell she’d been about to try disrupted, and Kraber took the opportunity to knee her in the stomach. With her thrown off, he rushed up to her, kicked her face, and pressed the revolver’s muzzle into the soft pocket of tissue between her neck and barrel.
“In the godswood, the First Men come to pray!” she tittered. “Pray before the smiling face of the heart tree!”
Something CRACKED in his chest, and his own blood filled his words. The revolver’s cylinder snapped open, more blood pouring from the open breach, and smiling back at her, he twisted the speedloader into place, closed the cylinder, and summoned all his strength to pull back the trigger.
“Jou like that… jou fokking kontgesig…” he spluttered.
Her grin grew even wider, even lying there impaled on the revolver.
“This won’t end it…”
“Yes it will…”
He fired, again and again and again, his prone posture bracing him as all six rounds punched her barrel apart, blood dripping in great gouts from her wounds, splattering against him.
She looked to be regenerating, even as Kraber’s bullets ripped through her, but finally, the last round seemed to silence her song, and he laughed in triumph.
She went limp, and Kraber pushed himself up, dropping her to the side - then, with an afterthought, lifting her up and throwing her into the flames.
“Fokking kontgesig...pony kontgesig...!” he wheezed, turned away and clutching at his side.
And then he heard a whisper.
“Reaper, reaper-”
Oh, fok.
A shotgun shell rammed into his arm, forcing it back, only for a hoof to smash into his left shoulder.
“YOU THINK A KNIGHT OF HER SUN IS SO EASILY EXTINGUISHED!” the mare screamed, throwing herself onto his back. “THAT HER FIRE IS SO SIMPLE TO PUT OUT!”
He spun, stumbling, and jabbed back with his elbow, knocking her free.
“FOK!” he hissed, clutching his arm - the poesgesig had broken his collarbone! - and grabbed back at the revolver, slinging the MG2019 on its strap over his shoulder. Okay, okay…. FOK! Down to just one-handed guns… against a psycho super newfoal.
Yeah, he was fokked.
He kicked Reaper in the face yet again, and rolled to the side, wincing as he landed on his bad arm, brought up his .45, and fired off more useless rounds.
Yeah, useless. The .45 ACP rounds didn’t do shit.
Thankfully, the semi-automatic pistol had been optimized for a truly one-handed reload, and he remembered this as he placed it in his left hand, trigger finger closed over the trigger guard, which pulled back the slide as he inserted a new mag.
“RISE!” Reaper cried, standing within the flames, and as she screamed, the flames turned black as night, and the pink-purple of sunset…
“Fokking metal…” Kraber winced, before he heard a shuffling sound that froze his blood. “Oh you’re tuning me kak…”
The corpses, any corpse by the black flames, were standing up. Like puppets on strings humans, newfoals and ponies all shambled to their feet and hooves, flickers of onyx light crackling on their limbs, in their eyes, on the shrapnel and glass that pierced their flesh.
Even worse, the few dying men and women on the roof, those scant survivors that were little more than brains, spinal cords, and failing organs were ponifying as Reaper cut them with her scythe-like bayonets...
“I AM THE REAPER!” she screamed in ecstasy. “LIFE AND DEATH BOW AT MY WHIM!”
She was a freak… a walking nightmare. A prototype of something to come...
‘I have to kill this thing before it get standard-issue somehow,’ Kraber thought. ‘Can’t mass-produce something if the test-type doesn’t come back to debrief...’
But killing this kontgesig was sure gonna suck. Kraber fired his .45 once more, aiming for the skulls of the newfoals. First he had to reduce these inhuman shields.
“Come on, come on….” Kraber whispered, fanning the trigger, desperately wishing he’d sprung for that laser sight. “COME ON, COME ON! THIS ALL JOU HAVE?!” Kraber yelled. “I’VE PICKED THINGS OUT OF MY ASS-CRACK THAT WERE MORE THREATENING THAN JOU PIELKOPS!”
BANG - another newfoal’s head exploded. Okay, okay…. He thought he hit nine?!
He ducked back behind an AC unit on the roof, wincing as his arm flopped uselessly against his torso. Fok, but it hurt!
The that last flashbang grenade was hurled in the general direction of all the newfoals, and he seized the momentary chance, stumbling and limping for the stairs down into the hospital....
“He’s getting away!” Kraber heard one newfoal scream, and his eyes flicked up to see a stallion, pointing.
“This way, he’s here!” the creature cried again, in Reaper’s voice. “Come on, Bliss, or Kraber, whatever your name is! I heard you talking to Cady!”
Shuddering with revulsion he pushed through the door, and rushed (as best he could) down the stairs, reloading the .45 as he went, before shouldering open a door and switching back to his revolver.
“You wanted to die, didn’t you? Come on… we have something better!”
He stumbled down the stairs. Heh… maybe. Maybe he did want to. But no matter what… no fokking matter what…
He had to be brave. Had. To keep! Fokking! Moving!
The hospital was eerily silent as he seized hold of an abandoned gurney and pushed it ahead of him, using it to bear some of his weight. Except for the squeak of the wheels and the rasp of his breaths, there wasn’t a sound to be heard… save for something groaning, practically screaming in agony.
Probably one of the pegasi he’d shot down.
Fokfokfok it hurt
Another staircase forced him to abandon the gurney, but he hoped to find a wheelchair or something to replace it.
But no, there was nothing to hand. Instead, bracing himself against the wall he pressed on, ignoring the minor, distant sensations in his leg, his chest, and collarbone. He was fokked… had to get away, had to get away...
He kept moving. Somehow, he felt like he should stop, but that’d make him a fokking moegoe.
He could, stop, and just give up... everything. Be with his family once more - but he'd never be Viktor Marius Kraber again.
"Would that be so bad?" Victory asked. "You'd be happy! Vicky's a sad, crying man with nothing to live for!"
At what fokking cost? His eyes darted from door to door as he skulked through the hospital's hallways, avoiding shadows and desperately wishing he had a silencer for his .45. If he drank of that stuff they called Mercy… would he know what he once was? Would he remember himself, would he truly be happy with his family, or would he-
“Come on, you deserve the potion! A fresh start equals-”
“Maybe I do,” Kraber said, cutting Victory off. “But other people - other people in this hospital - fokking well don’t.”
He didn't fokking well want to know anyway.
So, he limped forward, gasping and wheezing, desperately trying not to think of where the blood everywhere had come from. In this hallway, the lights were flickering, there were IVs strewn everywhere, and-
Oh, fok.
ANKA!
It was her body, in front of him, a .500 Magnum-sized hole in her skull.
And standing over her, he could see himself. Wearing his HLF armor, now rusty and pitted, covered in… oh God, oh fok, bones. There was an equine skull on one shoulder, a human one on the other...
And then he winked at Kraber, held up a glass in toast, and drank deep of it. Purple liquid dribbled over his chin, and he smacked his lips.
“Tastes like...freedom…”
If I get out of this, Kraber told himself, I am going to get so fokking high. Or gesuip. I’m going to find the vilest, nastiest, liver-punching rotgut I can find, and drink the whole bottle with time for seconds.
All of a sudden, the vision of himself, mouth wet with potion shuddered, and appeared to shrink inside his armor, limbs shortening, sleeves flailing, like there was nothing inside...
Oh God no.
Kraber whispered the shema, knowing what was going to happen next. It didn’t disappoint - within seconds, like a butterfly from a cocoon, Victory the Pretty Private had crawled out.
“Hey, Vicky,” she said, smiling up at him, “Look behind you.”
He ignored her.
“I said… Look behind you.”
“You’re not fokking real…” Kraber hissed. “I’m bosbefok. I’m crazy, and by God, I’m getting out of here and saving everyone from those fokking PER without you fokking me over.”
“Oh, such a disappointment,” Victory said. “I just wanted to warn you about the terrible, horrible pony behind you…”
“Don’t listen to her!” Kate yelled. “She just wants you to get ponified! She’s not even real!”
“Oh, but I am, unlike you,” Victory purred. “I’m as real as his nightmares. As real as his fears, as real as he makes me out to-”
“SHUT THE FOK UP, BOTH OF YOU!” Kraber roared, and fired the revolver, leaving a massive bloody stump where Victory’s head had been, blue smoke wafting up from it. “YOU DON’T CONTROL ME! EK BEHEER ME!”
Victory collapsed, blood spraying out from her neck-stump against the wall.
None of this makes any sense! Kraber screamed internally. She’s not real! Why the fok did I just shoot her?! How the fok could I shoot her. What the fok’s going on?!
“Honestly, I’m as confused as you,” said Anka, lying on the floor, blood oozing forth from that hole in her skull, welling up in the puddle behind her brain. “Partly because I am you, but, well, semantics.”
“Oh, Celestia, that hurt!” somebody else yelled. “The bucking ape shot me!”
The lights flickered on, and Kraber could see another pony there, this one a red pegasus. He’d punched through both of her wings, grounding her. Kwaai!
“Wha… I didn’t… Where’d all this blood come from?!” the pegasus screamed, staring up at Kraber. “I… whose blood is that?!” she pointed in the direction of where Anka and Victory had been, only for Kraber to realize that their corpses weren’t there.
And yet the blood remained. Kraber could even see strange hoofprints and even an imprint in there, with no trail.... as if a strange pony had just been standing in the blood and fallen over, their body disappearing...
He abruptly decided it was better not to question that, and shot the pegasus in the head, splattering her brains against the wall. More blood…
“Blood for the blood god, skulls for his throne…” cried a voice from off in the dark.
“Victory?” He spun and fired blindly into the dark. “Anka?”
There was a wet thudding sound, and someone screaming “MY SPLEEN!” He’d certainly hit something...
“He’s over here!” another voice screamed, and Kraber limped away, desperately hoping that the newfoals wouldn’t find him. Neither the real ones, or the ones that stalked his thoughts...
The stairs. Had to get to the stairs! Fok! If only he had some claymore mines, something! Anything! FOK!
Shema yisrael Adonai eloheinu, adonai echad
Ah, fokking hell, his leg hurt as he descended. It was all he could do not to scream, hissing out between his teeth, spittle moistening against his gas-mask.
He had to ignore it. Pain was just chemicals, like any other drug.
‘Just a dull buzz’, he just barely failed to convince himself.
He just… of course he walked this way. That was only natural. There was no pain, he just needed to get out…
He looked up. This was where Sylvia had died. If only he could find her gun, the one Caduceus had taken, the one with the....
The shield-disruptor grenades. He smiled, and found the treacherous nurse’s clothes, torn through. He desperately tried not to look at the bloodstains near the coffee machine, and the skin that looked stuck to the floor, melted on, even. It was caught between equine and human, with tan fur growing out and random points in the viscera.
Oh, God.
That was an eye on the floor. Somewhere between Equestrian and human, not quite the glassy unnatural amber-red of the pony, not quite the brownish eye he remembered Sylvia having. It resembled a double-yolked egg, two irises bulging from a single orb.
He stepped on it, crushing human and pony alike… no, no - crushing the monsters in between, neither one nor the other… newfoals squashed beneath his boots.
“I’m insane… crazy… bosbefok...”
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, and reached into her backpack. He pulled out a wallet stuffed with photos where once there had been money and credit cards. He snatched one out at random - Sylvia standing between two other women (one smiling sadly, the other laughing, with a grin aimed at the sad one. He knew that one - the smile of somebody telling you to lighten up and enjoy yourself), while in the background several ponies played blackjack. A mare, her mane a vibrant purple, was holding onto the laughing human women, pegasus wings hugging on tight. Caduceus was there too, photo-bombing the picture, an empty shotglass hanging on her horn...
‘Mercy and Jackie, Cady and Sylvie. And Rio - poor Rio. Vegas. August, 2018. Friends forever...’ said a scribble on the back. He turned it over again, peering back into the past, gazing back before the war. Humans and ponies enjoying each other’s company, smiling and laughing…
You kontgesig, he told himself. He snarled and grabbed the picture, wanting to rip it… but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, to shred a preserved scrap of innocence. There was precious little of it left, nowadays...
Instead he stuffed it back into the wallet, beside the other treasured photos, zipped that into an empty pouch on his armor, and continued to loot through the tattered remnants of a life. A few rations, some medical supplies… spare magazines for that 10mm, which he stuffed into his own backpack. And even a belt with more disruptor grenades…
The disconnect between those artifacts of the world before the war and the weaponry in there was almost heartbreaking. He’d known people like Sylvia at college back in Boston - not that he personally knew her, that would have been silly - and he’d seen them get broken. All of them, in that picture… he doubted they’d ever expected war. To have to hold a gun. He fokking well hadn’t.
There were pairs of socks and clean underwear, a sheaf of Imperial tracts. Risky - possessing these in some places counted as probable cause for getting shot. Comics, even. There were also books that looked to have been made in other countries, and he stuffed those in his backpack as well. Artifacts of Barrier-Eaten countries sold like hotcakes in various markets.
He’d have a decent sum of money after all this…
If he lived through this day at all. Slinging a belt of grenades over his torso, he limped forward. Why the fok was he limping, anyway? He just had to… keep… going. It was only his fokking sanity and free will at stake, anyway.
Another set of stairs. He could hear voices.
“Oh, thank God you got to us,” somebody said. They sounded wheezy, as if they were having trouble breathing.
Okay, okay, good. He just had to keep moving. Newfoals didn’t call upon the name of “God”, little-g or big-G. It had to be humans, then. Survivors that she’d found somewhere.
“How’d you kill all the newfoals, anyway?” asked the new voice.
“There was a man,” came the reply. “Ex-HLF, or ex-sanity, or something... Luna-damned sadist, he was.”
Yeah, well fok you too. Still, it was hard to argue…
“...but still, he just seemed so broken.”
Kraber stumbled down the stairs, falling against a wall…. right against his bad shoulder.
“FOK!” he hissed.
“What the hell was that?!” he heard a human woman yell.
“Don’t make so much noise!” someone said. “They’ll find us!”
“Oh, don’t worry, they’re already coming!” Caduceus yelled. “Fire on my mark!”
Kraber struggled for the stairs, stumbling. He just had to get to them, to safety. To strength in numbers. To people that could cover for him, unless…
A thought struck him. Unicorn medics were usually able to heal newfoals in battle, so… could he? Wait. Nah, fok that. Magic gave you cancer, filled you with tumors. Everyone knew that.
...it had also shielded him, and when packaged into hand-held form had already saved his life twice tonight...
Did it even matter? Would he really have a chance, even if he found safety in numbers? Functionally speaking, he was a fokking cripple. Most of his arm didn’t work, and he’d probably permanently damaged his bad leg.
He heard a thumping, cracking sound in his left leg. He had to keep going, though! HAD! TO KEEP! FOKKING MOVING!
YOU ARE NOT FOKKING FINISHED, VIKTOR! YOU’RE NOT GIVING UP NOW, JOU FOKKIN MOEGOE! He remembered the instructions in the Bundeswehr, from ages back. The ex-military drill-sergeant that had trained him in the HLF when he finally found a proper unit.
Not… fokking… finished…
His breathing was ragged.
He knocked on the door below him.
“Hey! Fok! It’s me!” he hissed.
“Is it… is it a newfoal?”
“No, you idiot! Newfoals don’t use human swearwords!”
“That makes no sense at all. Doesn’t their culture not have those words?”
“Actually-” Caduceus started. “Whoever you are, open the door!”
Kraber opened it, and collapsed on the floor, gasping. Two ponies loomed over him, a familiar mare and an unknown stallion.
“Oh sweet Luna, you! Why’d it have to be you?!” Caduceus groaned.
“You know him?” one stallion asked.
“Will-o-Wisp, this is the human that cleared away all the newfoals,” Caduceus said.
“Really?” the stallion asked. “Thanks!”
“No. Just… just don’t. Why are you here, though?” Caduceus asked. “I thought you were dead! Or… or worse.”
“Yeah, I’ve always been kak at trying to kill myself,” Kraber said. “I, ah… Anyone have some morphine?”
“What?” Caduceus asked.
“I can barely, fokking breathe,” Kraber said, trying to lift himself up on his right arm, and slipping, falling back.. on the hip with the huge bullet in it. “FOK! They bliksemed me good - broken rib, smashed my collarbone...”
Caduceus looked down at him, concerned. “What… what did you get yourself into?”
“Eh, you know, got shot… twice, had a pony break my arm, got in a fight with a…”
He paused and looked her in the eye…
“Sylvia,” he said, with no small effort. “I fought Sylvia. She took her potion, and now she’s some kind of psycho-super-newfoal. She calls herself Reaper now, and she fokkin raised the dead...”
Her eyes widened, and he struggled to visualise the mare who had gone running around a Vegas casino wearing a shotglass for a hat. But no, he couldn’t see her.
“Can, can you, ah…” he coughed, blood dripping out his mouth. “I need you to cast a healing spell on me!”
“That could kill you!”
“I’m sure that’ll be a big fokkin’ concern to me when I’m getting ponified,” Kraber said. “Except Reaper’s coming with her damn zombie bliksems, my collarbone’s broken so I can’t use the two fokking weapons that would be any use against her, I’m limping, and I’m probably gonna die of blood loss or a hemorrhage.”
“But.. you saw what magic…” Caduceus started.
“Don’t worry,” he said, utterly resigned to his fate. “There’s nobody that’d miss me if I die from cancer, and my parents would probably actively fokking celebrate their racist kontgesig shitstain of a son dying. I’ve nothing to lose if you just fix my body. Especially because I probably gave myself permanent damage on the way here.”
“I’ll try, then,” Caduceus said, shaking. “Just… I hope you know what I-”
“Fokking do it!” Kraber yelled. “I’ve got a smashed rib thanks to taking a fokking antivehicle round in the waist, my collarbone broke, and there’s something wrong with my fokking knee. A lot of people are dead if I keep going like this!”
“They’re over here!” one newfoal screamed.
“If it makes you feel better, nobody will miss me,” Kraber said. “Also, can… is there a way tae decontaminate this armor? I don’t want to take part of it off and then find there’s still potion in the weave...”
“Alright,” Caduceus said, her horn glowing.
Kraber braced himself, feeling a strangely calming warmth as Caduceus’ burgundy-colored magic washed over him. It tickled, her aura, and rose goosebumps all down his back and legs, as if he was sitting, comfortable cool and damp beside a running bath or swimming pool.
But pain came soon enough, a strange sense of coldness in his arm, in everywhere that had been hurting, like he had plunged scalded flesh into ice water…
I can’t scream, Kraber reminded himself. No matter what…
His left arm shook, and it was like being stabbed in the hip again… it popped and crackled, shaking, and every muscle in his left arm, every muscle was burning. It was like being flayed with a white-hot knife, like he’d done to one PHL pony back in Africa, but he couldn’t scream-
“...You exposed yourself to that much magic?” Verity asks. “You’re crazier than I thought.”
But you, Dancing Day, can tell she’s admiring that level of bravery, and consider it a small victory for Kraber to have won even that small a concession.
“Damn that’s gotta hurt,” Aegis says. “I once had to get my leg speed-healed in the field… hurt a lot, but it worked.”
“Did the pain come from the magic hurting you?” Bly asks.
“Well, yes and no,” Kraber says. “Sure as fok wasn’t giving me cancer - I checked with the PHL. It’s just that healing is meant to happen over time, at the body’s natural pace, and artificially accelerating that process really fokking hurts.”
“You’re sure?” Bly asks.
“My broken collarbone, and a damn rib, were both healed in a couple seconds! Reset and respliced, nerves threaded together, splinters and marrow stuffed back where they had come. Of course that’s going to hurt. It was the second or third worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”
“Second?” you asks.
“...You really, really don’t want to know,” Aegis says.
“Interesting…” Bly says, writing something down on a notepad. “You’re a tough bastard, aren’t you…”
“Mr. Bly? What’re you doing?” you ask.
“Just taking note of his story. We’ve been writing out the reactions of PHL personnel to magic to see if some of R&D’s concepts-”
He shivers a little. Which is understandable, as PHL R&D - which routinely employs Mr. Kraber and Mr. Aegis for weapons testing - is insane. Effective and smart, but insane.
“-are feasible without liquefying people.”
“How’s it going, anyway?” Aegis asks. “I been wanting a new big gun that won’t hurt my friends… Maybe a Resistance P225. The ones that Boundless Creation works on.”
“I remember using a Boundless Creation minigun…” Kraber says, smiling. “That was awesome.”
“You’re not gonna tell us?” Scootaloo asks.
“Eh, uncle Viktor and and daddy will mention it later,” Rivet shrugs.
“Well, here’s the thing. They actually seem healthier,” Bly explains.
“Does this mean I can finally get that bass cannon brigade I wanted?!” Vinyl gasps.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAARGK!” Kraber bellowed as he came roaring out of the shadows, catching a cluster of undead newfoals by surprise.
They responded with potion flasks, which shattered against his shield, their contents burning off in a cloud of purple steam, as ineffectual as ice against the sun.
“Gentlestallions?” Kraber asked. “You’re just in time to watch me… practice medicine. COME AT ME, JOU KONT SE KIND!”
He roared again, firing the revolver into a newfoal unicorn’s horn. A lump of alicornal tissue and bone flew into the air, leaving a few rainbow-colored strands of something poking out from the middle of the unicorn’s forehead, and obliterating everything above it, leaving a messy stew of blood and brains splattering the walls.
“THIS WHAT JOU HAVE, BOYKIES?! REMEMBER THIS, KONTGESIGS!”
His next shot went straight through a pegasus mare’s potion bandolier, shattering the glass and punching a massive hole through her abdomen… only for the newfoal to refuse to die. Instead, the shrieking revenant flew at Kraber, only for him to reverse his grip and pistol whip her with the revolver’s heavy rubber grip.
There was an audible crack.
“THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE WITHOUT THE FOKKING BARRIER!” Kraber laughed, and kicked the newfoal in the face, brains and blood spattering over his boots. “WHY THE FOK WERE WE EVER AFRAID OF YOU!?”
“Because we’ll win…” they all replied in unison, eyes glowing and voices in resonance. “It is commanded that we win…”
He fired again, ripping through the nose of an earth pony that looked to be carrying a mouthful of potion in his cheeks in place of a flask, sending an absurd spray of red, purple, and gray everywhere.
“You cannot defeat us…”
A pegasus newfoal rushed through the window, a chain of potion bottles in her mouth, and Kraber fired the revolver again, pulping her intestines, leaving one wing flying off into the distance in a wildly improbable, gravity-defying arc.
The pegasus, however, spiraled into the window, ramming facefirst into the wall, oozing blood and perforated with broken glass.
“You mock the barrier, but cannot answer it…” she gurgled, in sync with a pair of unicorn newfoals who appeared at Kraber’s flank.
“You defy the sun, but cannot challenge it…”
Their horns roiled with sickly shadows, spells charging, and Kraber fired his revolver again, aiming for the horn of the one closest to the windows.
“You have no recourse, no answer, no future…”
The mare’s head exploded, the unused energy from the spell going wild and shattering the window inwards, pulling a spray of glass shards into the other unicorn’s body. Kraber crossed the distance in seconds, and rammed his boot up into his face.
“You have nothing…”
KICK!
“Nothing but death…”
KICK!
“Nothing but Our embrace…”
He stamped on its neck. The newfoal didn’t get up.
“ALRIGHT, WHO THE FOK’S NEXT?!” Kraber roared, reloading. “Caduceus - I might need your help.”
Before any answer came he threw the door to the stairwell open, only to find…
A pegasus newfoal mare staring back at him (a ‘normal’ one, not one of Reaper’s corpses) with an absurd, surprised look on her face, flittering in midair, a potion vial in her mouth.
Kraber lowered his revolver and drove his left hand into her mouth, feeling teeth shatter before his fist.
“I thought Sweet Apple broke-!” another ‘natural’ newfoal yelled. More were coming up the stairs, even as Reaper’s hordes descended from on high…
“Can’t break what’s already broken,” Kraber said, and slid Sylvia’s rifle and his Fostech into his hands. “LET’S DANCE, JOU BLIKSEMS!”
Despite what movies might have you believe, dual-wielding is stupid. It’s hard to aim, hard to maintain sight lines, blah blah blah sciencey stuff.
Of course, at point-blank range, that didn’t matter for kak, as Kraber simply waded into the mass of newfoals, the shotgun pellets and 5.56mm bullets cutting through up to five newfoals at once, sending blood and limbs flying everywhere. A steady stream of viscera flowed down the stairs and splashed against his armor, so much that he could barely see the original forest-green color.
He fired in short bursts that could have been anywhere from 2-5 rounds, keeping the blood pouring.
“IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND!” Kraber yelled, as the Fostech utterly destroyed a newfoal’s skull.
Then both guns ran dry.
With barely a thought, Kraber whipped out a knife and his .45, and kept ascending the stairs, stabbing and firing.
“REAPER!” he bellowed, climbing over corpses and steel and concrete. He’d climb into Heaven itself if need be. “Where are you? I’m coming for you!”
He kicked open the door, strode onto the roof and reloaded Sylvia’s rifle, placing a fresh disruptor grenade in the breech of the launcher. He held the Fostech in his other hand, loaded with a fresh drum.
“I’m already here,” giggled Reaper’s voice, and he whirled around to find his target perched atop the staircase hut. “And lookit that, you got yourself patched up…”
“Yeah...FOR ROUND FOKKING TWO!”
He fired, and she easily sidestepped the furious shot. As more of her undead puppets rushed to dogpile Kraber, she watched on with laughter in her eyes, and that accursed song on her lips.
“You… you killed all of them…” the first newfoal to reach him whispered in Reaper’s voice, even as Reaper herself kept singing.
Kraber said nothing and shot the newfoal in the face with the Fostech. Another thirty seconds had dropped everything but Reaper herself, and slathered him in blood.
“Why won’t you take the potion?!” Reaper screamed in glee, as Kraber’s bullets smashed against her shield.
Kraber briefly considered saying something witty, but fok it, it was a newfoal. Nothing any man or woman could say to them that’d make them listen.
He held his ground, even as Reaper’s shotguns smashed against his shield. Need… more… fokking… time…
It was as if everything was in slow motion. Her shotgun shells crawled through the air, bouncing off, purple smoke hissing off the places where it impacted him.
But they were coming closer and closer with each volley, whereas his thundering responses only seemed to crawl towards the newfoal beast by millimeters...
Had her shield gotten fokking tougher or something?! Even with the grenades from Sylvia’s rifle, it was still going down at an almost fokking glacial rate.
“Because it’s not a fucking solution!” Caduceus yelled, and suddenly, everything was tinted green - a stream of energy from her horn was feeding into Kraber’s shield, strengthening it… and Reaper’s bullets burst further-and-further away.
“Caduceus!” Reaper yelled in recognition. “Why are you helping this human?! He’ll kill us both!”
“No, just you,” Caduceus said. “But you were never alive to begin with…”
“But… we’re both ponies…!” Reaper screamed, her forever-grin strained for the first time.
“No. I’ve lived my whole life in Equestria, you’re just a fucking zombie golem that thinks being a pony is doing whatever Celestia tells you!” Caduceus yelled, before turning to face the man she knew by the name ‘Ivan Bliss’.
“BLISS! Pass me that rifle Sylvia had!”
The shield crackled around them.
“Why?”
“I’M GONNA DO SOMETHING TO THE BULLETS INSIDE!”
“I thought you said you couldn’t do that!”
“I lied!”
Caduceus caught the tossed rifle, and squeezed her eyes in concentration Reaper’s shield was ablaze with green fire, small baseball-sized explosions radiating out from where Kraber’s .338 rounds hit. And then Caduceus was at his side, Sylvia’s rifle held in her TK, shaking and shuddering as the same magical energies contained within the disruptor-grenades bound to the bullets.
The result was a magical firestorm as thaum fought thaum. And then, before their eyes, Reapers shield flickered, cracked, and finally shattered like a glass bubble.
She seemed frozen in shock as Kraber lined up for the kill, last of his ammo clips loaded. He squeezed the trigger, felt the gun lurch once in his arms, and jam.
“Fok!”
Instead of a stream of .338 rounds, only a single bullet struck Reaper, glancing off her horn. Her head snapped back…
“FOK!”
And when the mare’s gaze tipped back forward, her grin had been replaced by a snarl.
“FOK-FOK-FOK!”
And with that, disaster struck.
“I CAN’T END IT LIKE THIS, BETRAYER!” Reaper screamed, as Kraber cleared the rifle’s jam and hauled back on the bolt. He fingered the trigger, saw the tracer fly true… but instead of trying to catch the last of his rifle rounds in her TK, Reaper instead disappeared in a burst of shadow…
...teleporting back into view behind Caduceus, before reeling back and bucking her in the neck with both hindlegs. Something cracked, and Caduceus dropped to the floor, visibly struggling to breathe.
Reaper held up her agglomeration of stolen weapons, ready to empty them into Caduceus. “For Sylvia’s sake, I’m sor-”
“DIE!” Kraber yelled, whipping out his revolver. His rifle might be out, but her shield was done and he could still fight. Sinking easily into a two-hand grip, Kraber flowed through the action of aiming like flowing silk, and firing all six rounds in what felt like the space of half a second. The resulting sound was not a single bang, but more akin to a peal of thunder.
The .50 rounds punched through Reaper’s horn and her neck, and she fell, coughing blood.
He reloaded, snapped the cylinder shut, and fired them all off once more, repeating until he swore he could see a ridge of bone just above her eye. One final lucky shot managed to sever her horn, and finally, blessedly, she fell.
He moved forward, cautious. He’d seen this creature stand up from so much already, he had to be sure…
“Cold…” he heard her whisper, before she made a broken, whimpering noise.
“It’s so cold….” Reaper repeated, blood leaking down from her horn’s stump. “Cold… everywhere…”
Kraber reloaded, and stared down at her, stone-faced, about to pull the trigger.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I wanted this...and didn’t… It’s all my fault. I can’t… she was in my head, Twilight Spa… called itself a Daemon. It was a monster and I invited it in... tore at me, made me want… things…love things.”
She shuddered, vomiting black blood, and was then looking back up at him with vivid purple eyes.
“Wasn’t she magnificent…” the lich giggled. “So many little whims and errors and accidents rolled up into an amazing, powerful creature…”
“There won’t be any more of them…” Kraber responded, unsure of who or what he was talking to but convinced it was somehow responsible for Reaper’s existence. “None of those abominations…”
“Oh, there will. Someday, sometime, another me, another fragment of the Mistress will make the same mistake or do the right step at the wrong time, bottle the same champagne… create another supersoldier, and multiply them by the dozen. And then... then you’ll all scream…”
“The fok’s happening here?” Kraber asked Caduceus.
“I don’t know!”
“I’m not a PHL doctor!” Kraber protested. “I’ve never seen anything like this!”
“Well, neither have I!” Caduceus yelled back.
“You know so bucking little!” giggled the thing that was neither Sylvia nor Reaper. “You didn’t even know I was here, that I and my sisters are here and will forever be inside every newfoal… and we whisper and talk and plan… this thing, this glorious Reaper, is the potential inside every soul blessed by potion... and when another sister stumbles on it, we’ll have… Victory.”
Kraber shuddered, absolutely sure that she was staring at him. No, into him.
“That’s right,” she said. “I know. Your family misses you, and they think you’d be much happier with them, Vi-”
BANG!
He shot Reaper in the eye, and the light that radiated out from around her horn dimmed.
The body stirred, and then it was a human eye, desperate and pleading, looking up at her. Sylvia’s eye.
“I… I thought… It’s such an easy thing to say you hate something… so easy to hate… what a piece of shit I am, I ca… can’t believe I went the easy way… I thought I knew… I wish I knew something…. anything. Shoot me, end all of this!” she begged.
“Okay,” Kraber said, raising his revolver up.
“Any moment,” she said. “It’s… my soul is dying. I want to die with… with most of it… Just promise me.“
“What?”
“Don’t lose your way.”
“I won’t,” Kraber said.
“How… sublime…” she whispered, blood burbling up from between her lips.
“Goodbye, Sylvia.”
He switched to his shotgun and fired, for the last time.
He didn’t go back to the island, to the base. He couldn’t maintain the pretence any longer. Instead, Caduceus had led him back to a studio-apartment that she claimed as her home. He suspected the true owner was dead.
The walls were covered in pictures. Cheap prints of digital pictures, and glossy photos. All of them showed people, and ponies. Laughing, smiling, holding one another. Sylvia was in many of the pictures, as was Caduceus, and their friends.
But as he moved along the wall, he saw the friends depart. The woman with the smile that challenged and invited - ‘Jackie’ from the scribbled notes on the reverse side - disappeared first, to be briefly replaced with a white newfoal mare with a black and red mane, who then vanished back into Equestria or into the PER underground of America. The last sighting of ‘Rio’ was in a missing person’s report from a Montana newspaper, which shared the same date as a wanted poster for ‘Merciful Light, Imperial Spy’...
That left just Caduceus, and Sylvia. And now… now there was no-one left but Caduceus herself.
Alone.
No-one left but himself, and he doubted she’d call him a friend.
Alone.
This room… this apartment… it was a temple. To absent and dead friends, to happier times. He wasn’t sure whether to cry or smile as he looked over at it. He’d forgotten that sort of thing, himself. He still possessed some relics of the old world, yes, his stuffed animals, some of Anka’s drawings, some old ballet slippers he’d left in his pack, odds and ends, but…
A tide of memories broke over him, and he knew he couldn’t stay.
Off in the distance, the sun was rising - he could see the beginnings of the day to come. It was early morning, and Kraber was all too conscious of how tired he was.
Much as it could have been fun to stay, he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t relax, he couldn’t do anything.
In another room, he could hear Caduceus lightly snoring, more peaceful than she had any right to sound.
He checked a clock in one window - 4:45 AM. He yawned, his eyes close to giving up on him. But he couldn’t stay here. He had to leave before someone found him, before anyone else did.
He stripped off the armor and shoved it into a huge duffel bag, the same one as his LMG, and threw on a battered, bullethole-filled coat that looked to have been partly burned, and appeared to have a flower growing from it thanks to wild magic. With the beard he wore, he looked like the average bergie to be found anywhere in America nowadays. Especially on the coast.
He scrawled out a quick note, walked over to Caduceus’ bed - such a comfy, cozy-looking room, and yet so cold. So empty.
Caduceus, the note read.
This is for the best. Don’t look for me - you’ll know who I am in a few day’s time. I wasn’t that good at covering my tracks…. or my accent, for that matter. I don’t know if you actually believed for a second that I was from Scotland. Still, we were both lying to each other - I know you’re more than you say you were, and I don’t think I was good at keeping myself covered.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I can’t stay in the city. You’d want me dead if I told you why, and at this point, I wouldn’t blame you. I kind of want me dead. I know this won’t be any absolution with you, but… thanks. For fixing me up, keeping me alive, saving me from Reaper, everything. I wish I had something, anything to give, but-
He crossed that out, and passed her the photos he’d taken from Sylvia’s wallet.
I think that if Sylvia’d been around a bit longer, she’d have wanted you to have these. Maybe, when I’m not such a fokking kontgesig, I’ll be back some other time.
Goodbye.
Ivan Bliss.
P.S: If a Night Guard mare named Nebula comes by, tell her I miss her. I’ve left a few cans of good rotgut for the two of you to share.. I think you’d really get along well.
P.S.S: Sorry about taking the money from Sylvia’s wallet. I’m kind of homeless and impoverished.
He folded it, placed it on her nightstand with the promised two cans from his pack as paperweights and, careful not to wake her, he slipped out into early-morning Portland.
Sirens moaned in every direction. Speakers mounting on passing army trucks announced that the Sorghum had been recaptured in the night (strange - at some point the gunfire had stopped and he had not noticed), and that the immediate crisis was past…
“-the HLF criminals are now in custody, though a disturbing number of his accomplices have fled…”
Kraber slowly turned, feeling his eyes adjust to the pallid light.
“...but rest assured, justice will be done on them. Rumors persist of Thenardier Guard involvement, but only Menschabwehrfraktion members have been found so far...”
‘They did plan to use us as fokking meatshields,’ Kraber thought bitterly. ‘Fok.’
“Hey, Verity? What was that you said about backstabbing?” Kraber asks, raising an accusatory eyebrow.
“I didn’t sell out my-”
“Who do I like look like?”
“What?”
“WHO THE FOK DO I LOOK LIKE?!”
“Sharlto Copley,” Verity answers.
“Do. I. Look. Like. A. Teef.”
“Wh-”
“DO I LOOK… LIKE A FOKKEN TEEF?!”
“No…”
“Then why’d you try to fok me like one?” Kraber asks.
Verity facehoofs. “Oh God dammit. You… you seriously made me do that bit?”
“Yeah, I did,” Kraber says with a shit-eating grin “See… I’m fairly sure you planned to betray me from the beginning. I wasn’t coming back from there anyway. Why else would the Thenardiers ask the Menschabwehrfraktion for this kind of job? It’s not like we’d get out without consequence.”
“You destroyed the HLF!” Verity accuses him.
“No he didn’t,” you say.
“...Wha…” Verity starts.
“Your father’s still part of it,” you point out. “They’re still terrible.”
“Look.. little filly… did you see what he did? When he left us to die?!”
“It doesn’t seem all that bad,” you say. “Verity. Even if he betrayed you, you were still part of an operation that bombarded Portland… the HLF are… are going against us cause they think we’re immoral. You didn’t do much to help humanity there, and what he did doesn’t seem all that different…”
Verity stares for a moment. “Great. Being told I’m not so different,” she groans.
“Ah, it’s part of a natural process,” Kraber says sympathetically. “You have to learn from your mistakes. You’ve got to want to be better, and then it’ll stop.”
She glares at him.
“Fine. Take what they said as a challenge to get better,” Kraber suggests.
’This...’ you think, ‘Will not end well.’
The streets were cratered with shellfire, and in the morning dew the dust and filth clung to everything, settling in a deathly pall. People moved through the grey waste like ghosts, scavenging, looting, searching for the dead. He adopted a shambling gait, adding to the act of the average bergie, as he staggered through the streets.
It was a good act, because it wasn’t an act.
“...Can’t imagine what this has to do with ‘saving’ humanity,” one woman said, holding up a heavy bit of rebar and using it as a lever to push a slab of concrete off of a pony.
“Oh, fuck, thank you!” the pony gasped. “My… my legs… ah God, that hurts…”
And Kraber saw what he’d done.
This… this is who we are, Kraber realized. This is what we do.
If any HLF on that rig had made their way off, he sure as fok didn’t want to meet them. Wasn’t a place for him in the ruins of Portland or the HLF. So, with that in mind, he staggered towards what looked like a commandeered bus.
The bus he’d taken was old, a krimpie among buses, a relic of an earlier era that had been clumsily refitted into what little of the modern age could be built up at times like this. There were Crowe solar panels on the roof, and the seats were ever so slightly uncomfortable, arranged so they’d work with ponies and humans, and not quite doing the job of either.
Evidently, Kraber wasn’t the only one that had agreed. There were a couple stallions and mares squashed uncomfortably into the rattletrap beside him… even some zebras. He’d never been quite sure of how to feel about zebras. He’d signed on to kill ponies, and eventually Pinkie Pie. But the zebras weren’t part of the newfoal rushes, you never heard about zebras trying to ponify everyone.
“I have to deal with PER, people that want to fuck me,” muttered one zebra mare in… Kraber still found it a bit weird. Xhosa. Still, considering that ponies spoke English - though Celestia claimed they spoke Equish or whatever, and used that as an excuse to take possession, he’d long since decided not to question it. “So much shit I gotta go through. Still better than home.”
Ah, what the hell do I have to gain from not talking?
“Why?” he asked. “What was it like back home?”
“Well, the Queen Bitch leaves us alone…” the zebra mare said. “But any day now, she’ll go after my folks. It’s not ‘if’, it’s when.”
“...What do you do about it, though?” Kraber asked.
“What can we do?” the zebra mare asked. “The Queen Bitch eviscerated the Griffon lands - the only ones that had enough military power to support us. If any provinces rebel, she decides not to provide them with rain and bombards them with storms. And the reindeer of Adlaborn, our oldest and truest friends, are pressed ever further into their heartland as the Equestrian forts press closer to their borders. There’s places that have practically killed off their own culture just to make sure she lets them be. I guarantee that in a couple years, they’ll be newfoals too, or as near as.”
“That’s fokking awful,” Kraber whispered. “How the hell’s that worse than here?”
“Well, at least she lets people on earth have some semblance of dignity,” the zebra mare said. “The Tyrant? She’s just playing with her food, but at least here we can die free.”
The bus stopped at a grade crossing, waiting for a train to pass in front, heading back into Portland. Probably to help in withdrawing resources, not to render aid, though thanks to the HLF - to him - it’d have some major delays along the way. Kraber marveled at it - it looked to have been put together by a model train fan with more parts than sense of realism. There was a large steam locomotive, too big and moving too fast for Kraber to identify (and even then, all he knew was that it was identifiable by how many wheels it had. And that was… four? Three? It was dark) followed by a large cabless booster unit, a road slug, that looked to run on clockwork. The things had proved surprisingly popular when trying to save fuel.
Kraber was looking out the window, watching TVs in the windows of an electronics store flicker and crackle. The glass had been smashed, but a metal grill had saved the inventory from damage and looting.
Faintly, through the opened window, he could hear a news broadcast…
“-estimated three thousand dead in Downtown Portland, with a further seventeen thousand unaccounted for…”
“What did you say?” he muttered idly, having missed her last words in the rattle of the passing train.
“She’s playing with her food,” she repeated bitterly. “She doesn’t think they’d ever be a threat. She knows they’ll never amount to anything. And what few resistance factions exist back there are afraid to do anything big enough that she gets rid of their biggest advantage - the campaign against you.”
“- Refugees of Lagos, Nigeria, and other cities atomized by the Barrier were slated to be first in line to receive treatment from Sutra Cross’ medical convoy…”
“It’s only that sort of thing that keeps her from killing every resistance fighter. They’re on sort of a low burn, anyway,” the zebra continued.
“Kinda of like the HLF, I’d bet,” Kraber said.
“Yeah, tHaT’s rIgHt,” the zebra whispered in a dozen screeching tones, and Kraber cringed, shivering at the realization of what that means. It was if there were multitudes of voices over or underlaid under what that zebra’s saying. Oh no.
Oh, fok.
“THaT’s RiGhT, KrAbEr,” the zebra said, her eyes yellowing and melting down the sides of its face, worms growing out the empty sockets. “ThEy’D cHeErEd uPoN fInAlLy sEeInG tHe HLF rEtReAt. AfTeR tHeY’d HeLd A cItY fOr RaNsOm, DeStRoYiNg So MaNy FaMiLiEs AnD lIvElIhOoDs.”
“No…. no no no…” Kraber whispered, and people turned to stare at him, though they don’t know what he is denying. He can’t look Kraber - no, crazy! He can’t look bosbefok before all these people and all these… yes, before all these ponies. Even what few zebras are there.
Grabbing his bag he staggered off the bus and almost collapsed against the smashed window of the electronics store.
“What’s wrong Viktor?” asked all the TVs on display behind the security mesh. From each screen a flickering face stares back at him, glares back at him: his family and friends, Lovikov and Verity, Caduceus and Sylvia, whose eyes glow with the light of the Reaper within. Nebula and Socket Wrench share a screen, as does the filly from the roadblock and her mother. The newfoal is there, and Victory, and the zebra mare. “Who are you running from?”
“Hou jou bek! HOU JOU FOKKIN BEK!”
Another flicker, and now the corpses of the pony family he slaughtered back in the mine appear within the screens, speaking around the worms in their rotting mouths, glaring at him through the maggots in the eyes.
“We only scream, Victor, because you made us scream.”
Fingers trembling, he pulled out his phone, turned on iTunes, queued up the first thing on the playlist and drove the earplugs into his ears, trying to drown out the voices-
“You’re a hypocrite, Kraber,” the newfoal said, clear and audible over the screaming music. “You’re near as bad as what you fight. You’ve inflicted just the same anguish on strangers that was visited upon yourself. You’ve claimed to liberate people, but you fired on a city full of civilians, taking an eye and a limb for every slight against you, leaving the whole world crippled and blind. You’re-”
“SHUT! THE FOK! UP!” Kraber screamed. “I KNOW, DAMN YOU! I KNOW!”
There is a pause.
“...It’s about fokking time,” the newfoal said.
“I know what I’m doing,” Kraber said. “I know what I have to do. I’ll try and be a correct ou. I’ll… I’ll choose life. Maybe I won’t fok a pony, but fok jou - I’m doing something now. I promise that. Now SHUT THE FOK UP AND LET ME THINK!”
He had to admit it now.
The ponies were people too. He’d seen enough - gone so far beyond his limits - that he couldn’t deny that anymore. The ponies he’d met on the rig had been decent folk, same with the ones he’d seen in the city and the ones he’d fought alongside. But Lovikov? He’d tried to shoot him for not being fanatical enough. Galt was a pretentious prick that followed a loathsome philosophy. Mariesa put on the face of a kind and loving mother, but her bloodthirst shone through the mask. His own chommies had shot children and foals - yes, foals, though admitting that is like sandpaper against his brain.
“...investigation continues into the public abduction of Sutra Cross. So far, no official statement has been given by authorities, but all signs point to the HLF.”
“Unless we show self-control, everything will fall apart,” said a yellow earth pony on the TVs, and for a second he thought this was a new hallucination, before realising with relief that it was just a sample from a recorded interview. Thankfully, his subconscious wasn’t that sadistic… yet. Her cutie mark was a blue medical kit with a green cross in the center. She had a red bob haircut - well, manecut, Kraber supposed. “There’s a lot of people in Boston, including ponies in hiding, that won’t react well to the cramped conditions proposed in the evacuation protocols. Furthermore, the inadequate provision of food, water and sanitation create a perfect environment for cultivation, incubation and transmission of diseases. We need only remember what happened when the Feather Flu crossed the species gap and became infectious to humans to realise the dangers of-”
“Wait, can I backtrack a little?” interrupted the interviewer. “Please elaborate on ‘ponies in hiding?”’
“Yeah,” Sutra Cross answered. “The majority of Equestrian asylum seekers have neither military training or the inclination to bear arms, and are affiliated with no particular organisation. That’s not enough for most governments however, who offer refugees a choice between service in the PHL or enforced custody in detention centres. I appreciate the risk of infiltrating enemy agents through civilian refugees, but you can’t fault somepony who doesn’t want to choose between serving in an army or serving time. Or worse. The ones in hiding are the ones who tried to cut themselves a third path. They just wanted out of Equestria...”
Kraber could sympathize with that.
“I hate to say it, but they’re putting themselves in danger,” Sutra Cross continued. “They’re on their own in a hostile world with nobody to vouch for them. But with the way tensions are escalating, I highly advise any unaffiliated Equestrians hearing this to seek out official protection before the HLF or somebody with a grievance against our species throws a punch in their direction. You don’t have to carry a gun to help your host nations in this fight. More than anything now the PHL needs water-bearers more than arms-bearers. We’re never short of people and ponies volunteering to be soldiers, but what we really want are good engineers, medics, scientists, farmers and mages. Most of these unaffiliated ponies already fulfill the same roles in their local communities, already. And...”
She paused. “I just realized this. But that’s what the HLF don’t get.”
Now that, that was hurtful. True, but hurtful.
“They’re only focused on the fighting. Not building new infrastructure, or growing new crops, or even learning new ideas. There’s a few that try, but most HLF just hide in camps and force themselves to either steal or starve...”
“Are you worried about the Front?”
“If by that you mean ‘do I think they’re a threat’, then yes. But I am also concerned for them...”
“And we know how that goes,” Kraber sighs. “I swear, this seems like tempting fate… but this is what I remember her saying.”
“They are underfunded and undersupplied and that makes them dangerous. Worst of all, they’re desperate and scared,” Sutra Cross continued. “Even so, we’re attempting to reach out to them, with offers of medical supplies and amnesty if they agree to come under the aegis of the UN. And by the Golden Lyre, I hope they accept, and realise the good that the PHL can do, for them and with them…”
“Ah, fok,” Kraber sighs, taking another drink.
“...because they’ve suffered just like the rest of us,” Sutra Cross finished. “Yes, for now they are the enemy, but we all have a responsibility to them as much as to our own. To help as many people as we can, because the real Enemy won’t. Every free-minded being has a duty of care to their fellows, and I don’t propose that we fail in that duty.
A duty of care… what had he done like that? Had he saved people since the three weeks of blood? Executed any operations where the safety of civilians was more important than pony casualties?
No, he had simply executed.
He slumped against the wall of the store, unnoticed. Just another breathing corpse in a city whose destitute and homeless now form the majority of the population.
“YOU ARE NO PARTISAN. NO HERO,” the zebra from the bus intoned, fading in from shadow to loom over him, light blue-green eyes burning into him.
She was transparent, another shard of his splintering hold on reality, but the words rang out in his skull, louder than a heavy-frame revolver next to his ear, burning just as much as the gas that escaped the gap between the cylinder and the barrel…
Were those tears straining against his eyes? Gasping from the pain, taking in deep breathes, hyperventilating as if he had just been shot. He clasped one hand to his head. No blood.
He’d killed hundreds, enough that his body count was enormous. He remembered stripping the flesh of the living, salting the wounded, and an litany of drownings, beatings and stabbings.
He remembered the words “tell us what you know or we’ll send you to Kraber, “ becoming a shibboleth of the Front’s torturers. Remembers his growing myth, of being built up as some kind of monster, of coming to believe his own propaganda. Kraber: the rabid dog on a chain, the kind of story told to frighten children, by loving parents full of the kind subconscious hate for their own offspring that inspires those scary stories, on the offchance that a little dose of nightmare before bed will make their children behave, be good, stay close, and avoid the HLF.
Kraber the Animal. Kraber the Krampus, the mad doctor who will find you and get you and take his sweet time killing, working naughty children and foals over for hours, days even, loving your screams
He can’t be that way, can he?! He’s… he’s not… Oh god oh god oh god, you’re not Kraber, you’re not that much of a kontgesig, you’re fokking evil, you have to be someone else? Ivan Bliss? No, people like Nebula and Caduceus will be looking for Ivan Bliss. You’re someone else. Someone from Leith, maybe, someone-
Who am I kidding? I’m fokking terrible at keeping up a Scottish accent-
Your name is Viktor Marius Kraber and you give up. You couldn’t wade against the current of your own grief, but instead of standing your ground you let the river carry you off into the Heart of Darkness, to die forever in cynicism and blood...
He can’t…
He can’t do it anymore! HE CAN’T DO IT! FOK! The tears are coming out before he even realizes it, and the inside of the mask he donned to hide from himself is wet with them.
He loved kids! And now a war-born generation is being raised to fear Viktor the Boogeyman!
He loved kids, and would have learned to love foals too if only...
If only...
If only that man, that poor kid Dietrich, hadn’t gotten gesuip that night in his parent’s car. After three bottles of Leffe Triple, the kid had rolled Papa’s vintage DeLorean DMC-12 on a hairpin turn and needed paramedical treatment before they could safely cut him out of the car’s fiberglass body-shell.
Guess who’d been the paramedic on duty that night?
Drunk driving was the kind of behaviour he expected back in college, but not so much in adulthood over here in Germany. People got up to crazy shit on campus. Not so much here in the shadows of the mountains of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the German ski resort he has come to call his pozzy. Or, well, home, as he explains to people unfamiliar with his accent. It’s been a good place to raise a family, in the shadow of the Alps. He can snowboard as well - he finds it vaguely similar to surfing, back home in Cape Town.
Dietrich crashed in the evening, and beside the thought of his kids’ birthday, Kraber had been looking forward to a planned ski-trip with some friends. He’s missed the challenges of downhill and cross-country, and has barely had a proper chance to hit the trails since he and his chommies all went up to New Hampshire to go skiing.
There was this one place, Wildcat… real bare-bones, no condos, colder than a witch’s tit, looked like it hadn’t had the touch of modernity since about the seventies or eighties. Perfect! All those American condos got annoying. And Erika knew a lot of good trails on that mountain - well, off the mountain, down in the backcountry, near-miles off the mountain onto a whole other peak. Ah, memories!
Oh, the memories...
In the hours before death, the man is attending to Dietrich, pressed into the DeLorean’s passenger seat and trying to stabilize the injuries the kid sustained from being crushed against the steering wheel, before the rescue technicians can bring in the jaws of life. It’s an emergency, and he respects that, but dammit, he’d specifically asked for this day off to be at his kids birthday, the one he hired Pinkie Pie for, but no…
It’s not his bosses’ fault, this last-minute duty change. That bastard on G-wing, Miliardo, had quit without notice and ‘gone pony’ - willingly, or so he heard - and they’d needed someone to cover him. Kraber hates covering for other people on the job, unless they’ve arranged it with him beforehand. “You irresponsible kontgesig!” he’ll always yell at people that make him do that.
And yet, he can’t blame Miliardo either. The guy’s family had all emigrated to Equestria, except for a kid sister away at boarding school... the pain of separation must have gotten too much.
”You see?” Burakgazi will ask, disgusted, a few months from now after rescuing his niece from a Bureau and placing a borrowed STG44 in the fifteen year-old’s hands, giving her a quick run-down on how to use it. “That is how they do it. All your friends or family get ponified… willing or no… and it’s just so fokking lonely. It’s simple psychology, playing on insecurity.”
“Wait, are you a psychologist?” Kraber will reply.
And Burakgazi will simply say that he dabbles in what interests him. Which Kraber can - or will - sympathize with, as he’s tried writing and drawing before. It’s the writing that really showed promise, though. But, no - we are back in the now.
He can’t really blame the kid either. Cases like Dietrich’s are getting tragically common in the age of the Conversion Bureaus. The boy’s parents are followers of that crazy, Jacqueline Dionna Reitman, and have already taken the potion. From what Dietrich mumbles as Kraber preps him for extraction, they’ve been trying to pressure him into making the same choice. Unable to cope with the stress, he’d gone out to lose his mind in the bottom of a glass...
After three bottles of something with an ABV of 8.5, going for a joyride in Papa’s turbo-modded DMC to blow off some steam seems like a good idea. After all, it’s not like Pa can drive it anymore, not with those hooves...
The boy’s murmurs and gibbers in the wreck of the DeLorean freak Viktor out more than he should. It should be nonsense, but there’s a horrifying sense of reality to them. Somehow - for Kraber is good with understanding accents and slurred speech - he knows what’s going on.
And fear. Fear of the things that were once his parents, but which can now barely remember his name, and who try to serve him equine meals on a nightly basis.
Fear that, when he gets to the hospital, they’ll be waiting for him, insisting that he be treated immediately with potion.
It’s because of those fears that Kraber stays at the kid’s side, all the way to the hospital. In the back of the ambulance he forges a few signatures on the report forms, citing complications that don’t exist, and making it ‘doctor’s orders’ that the boy not be administered any potion until he has fully recovered…
...by his estimation, that will be after the kid reaches his age of majority, and then nobody will be legally allowed to force ponification upon him, not even his parents. He doesn’t want this to turn into another clusterfuck...
“I was running away,” the boy whispers from the gurney, barely audible through the oxygen mask as Kraber tries to remember how Direktor Dermail signs his name. “I don’t know where, to Amsterdam, Britain, America, anywhere but my house…”
He’d been making those kind of noises since before Viktor arrived, and that was what had convinced him to falsify the paperwork. Yes, what he did was illegal. But he would argue it was part of his duty to the kid…
...his Duty of Care.
Because it was the right thing to do. Beyond the gruesome work of ensuring Dietrich survives, the forged documents will ensure that he lives...
They part ways at the hospital, the man confident that the boy will not be ponified and that he’s in a ‘stable’ condition.
He mentally chuckles at the pun, thinking in English ‘Right. He should be anything but stable.’
The man likes puns.
He won’t have much to laugh at, soon. Not helped by the fact that the world is going to end.
It is Year One, the last year of anything approximating ‘normal’ human society. It’s a world where meat is plentiful, where everyone’s pozzy is still intact, where the world isn’t in constant war. It is in fact nearly a month before that paradigm gets turned on its head: the Three Weeks of Blood have yet to come, humanity’s greatest treasures aren’t at risk, and most people the world over can wake up without fear that the next morning won’t be their last. And yet, there is something… off.
The man hates that he cannot quantify this feeling that something is wrong. “Off” does not feel like the right word. It's a cliche, people saying "off" in reference to something changing, conveying so much through that verb. But there is a shifting under the skin of the world, a tremor of fear beneath the excitement that remains after First Contact with Equestria.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are not alone. There is life out there, and they’re friendly!’
He cannot deny this unease. His mother has been running experiments on what few newfoals she can find that have not become recluses from their former lives (that’s another thing, why are newfoals so disdainful of their own humanity, so hostile to the memory of the people they had been?), and here findings worry him, as do the rumors beginning to circulate, about Celestia. Her drive to open a hundred new bureaus has unnerved a lot of formerly ambivalent people, himself included. What’s… what’s the need? Even though the rate of conversion has plateaued (though at a higher rate than he would have expected), Equestria is pushing for a mass expansion of their facilities, as if expecting an influx of willing converts… but he can’t rightly say why they are.
He will later suspect a cocktail of spells, suggestion, and pheromones inveigling their way into the general populace and the political establishment, for how else could humans have jumped on that bandwagon so fast? Kagan will support this theory.
He’s called upon his old chommies, the few that he's still in contact with (God knows what Polo's up to now) and they're various shades of unnerved. Though there's funny news as well, specially about Helen’s sister Corinne, the one they bombarded with horse porn, but that’s cut off when Helen says she herself has now joined the Harriet Thomas Foundation, and she’s terrified. She was a sister to the man in all but blood, so a bit of the old instincts stir in him…
He understands her fear. There are groups advocating compulsory ponification sprouting up all over the place, and even some that practice what they preached. Obviously, they are totally not affiliated with Queen Celestia.
Unpleasant ideas are circulating within the medical profession as well, with various doctors reporting that the numbers of people admitted to Bureaus are statistically unlikely.
And Heather, who ended up staying in Boston, nursing at the hospital there, passed along a really disturbing bit of information about a particular patient from last year, a graphic artist. It was one of the rare cases where the resulting newfoal was so unequivocally different in temperament and attitude that it was impossible to deny something was seriously wrong. Heather is now convinced that whatever the potion did, whatever mental rewiring it entailed (“Of course it rewires them, you sure as hell don’t have the muscle memory to walk on four legs like a quadruped!”) is far more extreme than anyone realizes, outright destroying identity at worst.
Heather felt very sorry for that poor artist’s daughter as well. She’d apparently reacted, well… saying she’d reacted ‘poorly’ would be like calling the ocean a body of water. The poor girl had gone nuts, that was how Heather put it. Her screams of “THAT’S NOT MY MOTHER!” had carried through the entire hospital, until the police had to be called in to secure the girl and arrest the father for attacking a representative assigned by the Equestrian consulate...
But that was one drop in a pool of water. After the Conversion Bureaus opened, the number of leaked horror-stories and rumours tailed off to nil, though there’s some that whisper that something’s being done to people’s minds. With nothing to work from, it was impossible to conclusively prove anything.... Sure, ponies come out, not people, but nobody hears anything. Not for a long time.
Yes, something has been set in motion, and people are beginning to sense that nothing can stop it, lending a curious unknowability to the coming days...
There is distrust in the air.
In particular, the man distrusts the Conversion Bureaus. Heather is not alone there. He considers them overused, too good to be true. He has seen the potion, seen the newfoals. There is something other, something they’re looking at that nobody else can see, and some parents were disappointed that Anka, who loved horses, did not invite any ponified children to her party tonight. Come to think of it, Richard Pretorius - his cousin from back in South Africa… seems like he’s not all there anymore...
In the future, Kraber will make it inside the Innsbruck Bureau with a load of satchel charges and bathtub semtex, and the battle cries die in his throat. Even when he is telling a room of ponies and humans about this story, he will never say what he has seen inside Bureaus. He’ll soon have an impressive count of Bureau bombings to his name, but he shall never speak about it. All anyone will know about the Innsbruck Bureau is that he had just stepped inside, and simply decided to kill anything that moved and blown the place to hell.
...Peter and Anka do not like the Bureaus or the Newfoals, a fact upon which the man agrees. He also does not like Reitman’s insistence on potion being the Grand Panacea, the Cure-All-Elixir. He has seen her and that odd unicorn Catseye together on TV, and there is something vaguely off-putting about both of them. An odd… unity to them, like Goss and Subby, as if - whoops, that’s a spoiler. But it is as if they are fundamentally the same, two appendages of the same mind, using two mouths to say what is, in essence, the same.
There are colleagues of his who want to use the potion as well, though the hospital has heavy restrictions on its use. They claim that the potion has been too easily accepted, without sufficient long-term testing (oh how wrong that will eventually prove to be - the potion was tested and refined for years!). But his mother has done her own extensive tests, and the preliminary results disturb him beyond belief. They indicated that, without exception, newfoals eventually show an almost complete dissociation from previously-treasured passions, possessions, peoples and philosophies, becoming almost completely different people. She is growing worried, especially as tensions rise between the increasingly unstable ‘Human Liberation Front’ and Ponification for Earth’s Rebirth.
As people become ever so insistent to ponify his children, her grandchildren...
He can believe it. Newfoals are not the same people they once were. They have faraway, glassy looks. They act vaguely distasteful of anything un-Equestrian, and proselytize on behalf of everything equine. They are distant from friends and family. They cannot rightly be called the same people, and almost everyone knows it.
Can you hear me Mr Kraber
These are strange times. Something is stretched to its limit, and it has to break.
It nearly broke for Kraber when some PER evangelists, one newfoal and one woman, had come by and attempted to ponify his daughter, implying that she had a mental disorder, easily ‘treated’ through ponification. Rather aggressively, as well. His response to the newfoal and his eyes had been simple and decisive.
“I was only being polite about your eyes! They are weird! Now you FOKKING LISTEN TO ME! YOU WILL NOT CHANGE MY HOMETOWN! YOU WILL NOT CHANGE MY FRIENDS! AND YOU WILL NOT CHANGE, OR FIX, OR DO ANYTHING AT ALL TO MY WIFE, MY SON, OR MY LITTLE GIRL!”
The man takes pride in his work. He admits a distaste for the military, but he has joined the reserve forces to better ‘support’ his family. And he likes the feeling of firing an LMG on full-auto, one of those new .338 Norma Magnum MG2019s that still can’t quite improve on Hitler’s old buzzsaw. He does not suspect how familiar the future will make him with these weapons...
When he is done with Dietrich, the man leaves the hospital and jumps into his car, breaking so many speed limits in the process.
You need get out here
The HLF end is coming
soon
He hears something strange over the radio. That there are hundreds, if not thousands of ponies crossing the border every day, and many are claiming political asylum. Some are making names for themselves, such as Vinyl Scratch and Octavia, both of whom Peter and Anka like. Other newcomers attest that Equestria is not all that it seems. Hints of an Orwellian nightmare, cultural suppression, extreme civil unrest, anti-human sentiment, a growing military buildup. But for what? Are they that afraid, having already vanquished the tyrant Sombra? Are they… preparing for war? That’d be a fool’s game.
But that is of no notice to the man as he pulls into his driveway. It is a small, modest house, unused to the man’s new salary, near a ski area because that means a lot of business for him.
He practically flies out of his car, his coat trailing after him.
Today is April 23rd 2019, his children’s birthday. Peter and Anka turn five today. The twins were an unexpected blessing (never an ‘accident’) that came during that production of Trainspotting that he was in, and he has been through hell for them and Kate, dropping prematurely out of university, going from job to job, putting in weeks of overtime to makes ends meet. He would do anything for them, he loves his children, and he will be damned if anything happens to them.
Can only do so little stuck here in Equestria
Flit from mind
to mind,
and read dreams
Kate, his wife, said she would baking the cake. She is the perfect wife, he thinks. Or, he thinks, remembering his love for Welcome To Night Vale, perhaps it’s her imperfections that make her so beautiful and beloved in his eyes. Yes, he loves her because of her imperfections, not in spite of them. She cooks with love and eccentric yet decidedly delicious flair, making such culinary marvels as the roast-garlic-onion jam, brie, roast beef, apple, pecan, and maple syrup sandwich. Which, to the man’s surprise, is delicious. Even the smallest dishes she makes for her husband, a man profoundly undeserving of someone as wonderful as her, might as well be served at the finest restaurants of Germany.
He’s looking forward to seeing what she’s baked as he steps up to the front door.
It’s pure agony
Not being
But feeling nothing, just
the absence of
feeling. Seeing all this
mind opened to your plight
And unable to do anything
Perhaps because of her preternatural skill in the kitchen, she tells the man that he must never refer to her skin as ‘chocolate-colored’. That’s a food, she says. You might get to eat me up, but nobody else does. Besides, it’s annoying when urban fantasy does that. He is looking forward to a kiss from her, a hug to welcome him in.
This party is mostly for Anka. While Peter loves the visitors and ponies less than she does, it is made with her in mind. Perhaps Anka will become a vet? Though she expresses quite the fondness for dance class. She might just have a little girl’s love of costumes, and he wishes so much that he could have been around to see Pinkie Pie create the party. She… Hell, it just seems to fit. Pinkie seems to him like an adult with the partying capacity of a teenager, and the bubbly sugar-driven enthusiasm of a child, which Peter and Anka will love. The man muses on this, the noise in his head drowning out the terrible, deafening silence coming from his house.
Perhaps he wants to ignore it.
When he opens the door, he expects a great, bonecrushing hug from his wife. He expects Anka to laugh and smile and for all the anger he has for being forced to work on his children’s birthday to just melt away. Perhaps Anka will be wearing a horse costume. A brown unitard with a tail. Silly, he admits it, but he helped make it for a ballet recital (who would have guessed that skill at stitching up wounds from industrial accidents also translates to sewing fake manes onto costumes?) and she loves the thing.
It is a struggle to get her not to wear it in day in and day out, but the man loves her even so. Even with his friends in attendance, judging by the girls and ponies Anka has invited, poor Peter will no doubt have already been forced into a matching costume, whether he likes it or not.
The man is also hoping Pinkie Pie hasn’t had to leave for her next appointment. He caught a lucky break in managing to secure her services today, but apparently she has a soft-spot for twins. To his amazement, she refused to accept any of his hard-won cash, saying over the phone she’s happy simple to help ponies ‘smile, Smile, SMILE!’
It’s odd that she limited her definition to ‘ponies’, but her presumes its force of habit for her. From what he’s seen and heard, she seems like a nice pony, and expects a good hug from her too…
...perhaps he’ll get a quiet conversation with her, and some clarification over his concerns and fears over the potion and Equestria…
No!
No, none of that pessimistic thinking now. I’ve worked my ass off, I get to be with my kids and my wife, scoop them up and hug them and ask how happy they are...
“Today is a Happy Day!” he says aloud, before throwing open the door and bracing himself for-
In the first hour after death, the silence is overpowering. The absence of any of the sounds of rowdy children and foals is deafening.
There is no one within the house. He is certain of it. The man calls out again and again, eyes wide. He wishes he had a gun. He feels as if he is walking into the gullet of some great leviathan beast, something to swallow him whole.
In some distant corner of his mind, the man knows what is about to happen. It urges him to get his gun from upstairs, a modest bolt-action hunting rifle. Though he can’t rightly say why, it’s not like the house is full of something dangerous -
That’s not true. There is nothing in this house, and he’s afraid that the nothing is going to come up and swallow him. He knows what is about to happen, a panicked realization that he has been here before. And yet, even as his feet and mind scream against him, he is powerless. He can do nothing.
A speaker crackles. It is playing some pony song that Anka likes, straight from Kate’s iPhone. And it’s on shuffle, so as soon as the track ends, it switches straight to something new.
‘C’mon everpony smile-smile-smile,
Fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine...’
The man knows these lyrics. The man has heard this song countless times before, not just on Kate’s phone but on one of those radio stations that plays music from Equus. He steps into the living room, praying to not see blood on the floor or walls. Prays that his children are fine, that they are just trying to surprise him. Perhaps Pinkie Pie is trying to surprise him? She is a genius of partying, after all. Or so he’s been told.
Praying that the house he and his family have made together is not white with crimson inside, as that favorite song of his says. He looks into the dining room. My god his mouth is dry. There are drops of something purple there. Something grotesque.
He knows the smell before he even sees it. Like lavender shampoo, or wildflowers, but sickly sweet and cloying. He knows that smell, has seen its source in hospitals, held out by dead-eyed doctors with clammy hands and gray-white-yellow skin. They always seem like addicts to his eyes, far too insistent on bringing it to patients attention, singlemindedly convinced on using it on everything more severe than the common cold. And even that’s a stretch.
He does not like these doctors. Nor does he trust their Grand High Wizard, Reitman.
He trembles. No. No, it cannot be.
But it is. It’s potion.
He sees the room. It is as if a cyclone has come through there. Cake is splattered all over the walls, the furniture is smashed, and there are tiny hoofprints leading out the door. There is more of that purple slimy shit everywhere he can see.
There’s a cord suspended from the ceiling, with a few scraps of papier-mache suspended from it.
A pinata. Pinkie Pie had promised a pinata on the phone…
SHE’D FILLED IT WITH POTION!!
...potion which had splashed all over the children when the bat had been swung hard enough, by a pair of tiny hands…
“No… Oh God no, oh God… Oh God...” He thinks he is going to be sick.
But the logic was...no-no-no...his children and countless others couldn’t be newfoals.
But there were hoofprints in the floor. Tiny, foalish hoofprints! Oh God, Oh god… he’s trembling like a leaf, eyes are tearing up, he’s drawing in ragged, unsteady breaths. What sick, deranged, fokking KONTGESIG would do this?! What fokking bliksem could ever devise this idea?!
He’d report-
He’d summon the pol-
He’d drive to the barracks an-
HE’D BLIKSEM THEM, RIP THEM ALL APART AND SLAUGHTER THEM WITH HIS BARE FOKKING HANDS!
He’s got so many things planned now. Oh, they’re going to burn. They’re going to suffer, they’re going to scream just like his children must have, they’ll drown in their own fokking blood as he flays them to strips...
In the second hour after death, the man hears a terrible laughter, and he is not sure whether or not it is his. At one end of the room, he sees a clown in makeup. A pony, though how makeup works with fur, he does not know.
Not Pinkie Pie… one of her staffers… an accomplice...
The creature will not stop laughing. It laughs and laughs, hysterically, and the sound grates against the man’s ears.
The man does not know what he is going to do. He walks upstairs, and finds his rifle and medical bag. All he knows is that he is going to stop that clown from laughing, from laughing that his children have disappeared.
In the fourth hour after death, he realizes he cannot remember why he was pressing that spoon into the pony’s eye. He can barely remember the previous day, or even how he got into the house. Is he interrogating? Is he just angry?
In the fifth hour after death, after some work with a knife, he decides he is trying to avenge them.
In the seventh hour, he realizes he has been screaming at the pony so long he can barely talk. He realizes it has been quite some time.
There’s tables of untouched party-food on the tables, and to keep his new ‘friend’ alive he finds himself stuffing some of it down the creature’s throat.
Cupcakes...
In the eighth hour after death, he takes a short break, dresses the wounds, and reads a storybook in front of it, showing kindness, acting regretful…
‘Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not…’
...only to go back on it with his grandfather’s medical bag. He ruins a perfectly good pair of scissors and pliers that way.
In the ninth hour after death, he has used every chemical and device in that old, weathered medical bag. He goes down to the basement, deciding that the contents of his work-bench will be more persuasive. There’s a nice jigsaw, power drill, circular saw, and staple gun that will do nicely...
In the tenth hour after death, he is so covered in blood that he cannot tell what color his clothes were before. He has run out of power tools to use. Which is disappointing, he could have sworn there were more…
There’s a hardware store down the street, and he has a crowbar...
In the eleventh hour after death, just after the man has used a large saw to cut off one of the clown’s legs, he hears an answer to his repeated demands of ‘why?’.
The pony speaks in a weak, whispery voice. The man has been careful to avoid the vocal cords and lungs so the bastard can speak. He learns that soon, there will be war. That all ponies will rally behind this righteous cause, that Celestia shall let the Barrier expand and envelope the world. That this is a crusade, and she won’t stop till every human on earth is dead or a newfoal, an automaton dead in mind, body, and soul.
And that makes the claw hammer in Kraber’s right hand shudder, and before he knows it, the head is covered in blood...
In the twelfth hour after death, the man rams a foreign object into his neck, performing a casual tracheotomy, and he’s so sure he will be a suspect.
It’s so amusing to feed a cupcake into the mouth, extract it from the throat through the hole he’s just made, and then repeat the process...
In the thirteenth hour after death, the man laughs like the clown, and brings down a chair on the pony’s head.
In the fourteenth hour after death, he flays strips from the pony.
In the fifteenth hour after death, it hits him once more, the enormity of what he must do and what has happened to him. He realises that somewhere, within just a few miles, there are some smiling, glassy-eyed zombies indwelling the corpses of his family. He knows he will be forced to kill, in the fullness of time. Tears stream from his eyes, but they don’t wash away the blood.
In the sixteenth hour after death, he knows what he is doing. All of a sudden. He is making them pay.
In the seventeenth hour after death, but the first hour after the clown has ceased to breathe, there is nothing left of it but meat and bones. All over the room, and the man’s clothing.
Nor is there anything left of the man.
In the eighteenth hour after death, something walks out of that house, with a bolt-action rifle, a lot of ammunition, and bombs made from household chemicals. It searches for someone, anyone willing to assist in its quest for revenge. Polo, over in Boston, he’s been talking about being harsher nowadays, and he thinks that some preacher man named Mike Carter’s a true focus for fighting this war. Let the klein kakfokkers burn…
It’s going to be fokking kwaai.
The thing that walks out is not the man.
During the Three Weeks of Blood, Erika Kraber will receive a phone call. It’ll be something asking about the status of her children. The podcast she makes in response will be the final nail in the coffin for this man - that his children are drunk up, that there is nothing left to get back.
What is left of the man dies. It may never come back, and there is nothing left inside him tying him down - he’d love to be with his parents. He really would. But he’s too angry about it all, too bloodthirsty to do anything but kill.
It walks out of the house, following fresh hoofprints into the thick, dark forest beyond the street, where trees stretch tall enough that the stars themselves seem to be caught within their branches.
He doesn’t take long from him to find them. Or for them to find him.
Ponies, many of them newfoals, slip out of the trees. They form themselves out from the cracks between bark, the shapes between branches.
The man smiles.
With each pony he kills, with each newly invented act of brutality and sadistic glee justified as ‘saving mankind,’ every self-effacing reason he gives for his newfound murderous tendencies, he kills a little more of himself.
The seasons change all around the man as he walks through the forest. There are ponies swinging from the trees next to him, hanging by their necks, a thousand torments visited on him. They are bleeding, missing limbs, strips of flesh crammed into their mouths, cutie marks ripped off, de-horned and de-winged, too covered in their blood, spit, and shit for the thing that was once the man to tell what color they are. One of them, tied to a tree that the man remembers from out west near Agua Caliente, has an adorable little wolf pup gnawing on its insides, spilling from a wet bloody hole in its stomach.
Wait. Torments visited on him? Something wasn’t right.
Yes. They all have his face. It is not an equine’s face and snout, it is his face, stretched grotesquely over the pony skulls, torn and bleeding, a ghastly smile on it. It is… No. They are turning to him. The man runs, backing away, trembling, finding he has no knife, no weapons. He has only his fists. No no no no, he whispers.
They are looking at him… for approval. Hoping for his pride, like the young fresh-faced recruits that have never been in a battle.
Oh, God. The thing that was once the man runs, trying not to scream, as the corpses hanging from those trees turn to follow him, still looking at him expectantly.
He finds himself in the main drag of Defiance, and…
Oh, mother of God.
On one side, Defiance is under siege. PHL forces are laying waste to it. Their armor glows crimson in the night, and they hold strange weaponry. He has seen the power of the stolen weapon he holds, seen how effective it is compared to the average HLF machinegun. But the HLF, those (kontgesigs) brave men, are fighting back, in Defiance (ha!). They’re opening up with their guns, which the thing that was once the man recognizes. They are realer than real. They are rusty, running the whole spectrum of colors of decay. The ammunition, the cases it spit out, are hand loaded, and look like they were stored underwater. The cases are a dull, waxy color, and the bullets they spit out are either oversized or pour in great torrents like rain from ridiculous, silly magazines of great and terrible size.
Because that’s how the HLF fokking thinks - maraud them with more bullets, or bigger bullets.
But the bullets are not worth shit. The PHL are shielded, so when they walk out of cover, from behind trees, it is as if they are immune. The PHL guns, though… they rip apart any HLF on the other end. And there are ponies nearby, wearing assault saddles. The thing that was once the man - Kraber, of course - thinks most of them impossible to aim. However, the ponies have some kinds of headsets that let them aim.
Anything on the receiving end of them is simply cut down. The HLF are not worth shit before a bunch of humans and ponies. A pegasus, this one strafing a row of tents with his machineguns, cries that he has run dry, and flies for a human woman with a large belt of ammo. Gingerly, the human feeds ammo into the pegasus’ LMGs (they look sort of like MG42s, actually), and he is off to fire again. A human fires a shotgun into HLF members, and off in response someone shoots off an HLF ‘panzerfaust,’ which is really a homemade graffitied rocket launcher made from odds and ends. The rocket races for the PHL man with the shotgun, and-
A unicorn mare blocks the rocket with a shaped shield spell, sending the explosion everywhere that isn’t the man, redirecting it into what is almost a work of art, the flames of the explosion scorching the HLF. The PHL have unicorns on their side, Kraber thinks. He can see them, even Marcus Renee, striding into the camp with a Remington ACR. There’s…
Oh fok, Colonel Renee is unstoppable. Nothing can stand against him! The bullets simply deform against his shield, and the chaos just can’t touch him. He’s looking over at Kraber, and there’s nothing he can do but run - he isn’t going to be welcoming. He wants to shoot him right through the face...
On another side, the Barrier is ripping through, and the HLF are running, screaming. They are leaving the weak and injured behind, firing at the barrier, only for the bullets to simply disappear into it.
There is no miracle. There is nothing awaiting the HLF but death as they stand and fire madly, or run. And, in one truck with a home-brewed tetanus-farm HMG in the backseat, the man sees himself. He is…
He is…
What is he? The version of him in that truck, it cannot be defined by what he is. Only by what he is not. He would like to look happy, but the veneer is cracking… fragmenting… there are holes in the facade, holes in the sky, behind. They are swallowing everything up.
He has lost his mind.
Lost his mind.
Lost. And broken. Through the cracks, he sees possibilities.
He pours bullet after bullet into the barrier, screaming, pleading, begging, a smile like a skeleton’s grin on his face even as tears pour down it. He has no other HLF in the truck behind him.
And yet, underneath it all, he looks resigned. He has given up on everything - on himself, on his conscience, on his life. On anything that tethered him to anything beyond the killing of ponies.
No, Kraber whispers. No! THIS IS NOT ME! I’m never going to become that!
“Oh, Viktor,” said the faceless newfoal stalking toward him, its eyes full of worms and maggots, covered in blood, its cheeks missing, its skin taut, hanging off it like a ripped and tattered too-big coat on a skeleton. “You already are.”
“No,” Viktor pleads. “NO! I can change! I can-“
“You cannot,” the faceless newfoal says, and its voice reverberates everywhere… except it is not one voice. It is a babble of several, out of sync with each other, coming from no discernible source.
Finally, Viktor realizes. It is his voice. It is Kate’s voice. It is the voice of Peter and Anka, of Dietrich, of Burakgazi, of Lyra, of Marcus Renee, of those two ponies he had spared. Wait, that makes no sense, they never said a w-
“It is too late,” the newfoal says, and Viktor cannot tell if it is sad. “There is nothing you can do… But that’s not so bad, is it? Those PHL are idiots!”
It is Verity’s voice now. The newfoal is mocking him, he is sure of it.
“They’re selling their souls to the devil. They’re-“
And Kraber is angry. Angry at this bitch that treats him so poorly each day, angry that he deserves it. Angry at himself. Angry at himself for the shit he’s done.
“FOK…. JOU!” Kraber yells. “NO! JY NIE DIE BEHEER MY NIE! EK BEHEER ME, JOU BLIKSEM! EK… BEHEER…ME!”
“The HLF does!” the newfoal yells. “They want you to jump, you ask how high, they want you to kill foals, they ask you how many, you murderer, you kiddie ra-”
“VOETSEK, JOU BLIKSEM!” Kraber yelled, kicking the newfoal in the face.
This was the worst damn dream he’d ever had. It was practically making his ears bleed, and his skull hurt like hell as he
Lying in bed now, lying...
FOK! That was the worst babbelas he’d ever had…
Slowly coming to, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling and barely conscious, Kraber massaged his skull with his hands, eyes watering as he winced. Ow.
He looked at the bedside clock, and saw the digital readout read % ! : * £.
Ah, half-past-midnight. Perfect sense, then. Though the sun wasn’t all that bright… Well, that was annoying. He couldn’t see it.
A whistle sounded outside the window. This one was a diesel locomotive, no doubts there.
A hotel, in the middle of...somewhere. He’d paid for the room. Paid with…
BLOOD
“Oh come on, that wasn’t even subtle! And for the record, it was dead people’s money!” Kraber gasped, finding himself in bed. A real bed, not a sleeping bag. He scrabbled around under the sheets, panting, gasping, grasping for his gun, finding it on the nightstand and…
And...
Well, this was anticlimactic. He was just aiming the Smith and Wesson at a picture of the gondola at Wildcat, the ski area he’d wanted to visit later in the winter - and had, once, a long time ago, one of the winters he was at college. A generic picture, yeah, but it wasn’t worth shooting. He checked his phone, also on that nightstand. 1:20 PM. The stuffed animals he kept in his backpack, Ambassador Nikai, Joanna, and Spitz were on the bed, which was… how’d that happen?
What the fok just happened?
He struggled to remember the events of the previous day.
Maybe… maybe the small, dark-colored mare writing in crayon on the wall could answer that question. What was she writing? Couldn’t be that important.
‘We are… something.’ he read.
“Hello?” Kraber asked, looking down at the mare. “Could you-”
“Change the war, Viktor,” she said, and Kraber saw what she’d been writing: ‘We are in hell - HELP US!’ Her head - flashing between hundreds of equine faces, some human, some not - snapped back in the direction of Kraber. “SAVE MY SOUL!”
The faces flowed across her skull like clay, some of them bearing wounds that Kraber knew himself to have inflicted… or would inflict, quite possibly.
And some of them… some of them were Pinkie Pie.
But others, looking at him, exuding howls of misery, were those of Peter, of Anka, of Kate, of cousin Richard…
He staggered back, and rushed through the door, only to find a long hallway, lined with many doors. He tried each and every one, staggering down the hallway. Each and every door, locked.
Many rooms. Many locks.
He looked behind him from time to time, and no matter how far he walked, there was always a wall at his back. He never saw it move, but it was always at his heels.
The only path available to him lay along the corridor… treading a carpet red and wet as wine.
The walls were lined with paintings. Places he’d been since the War’s outbreak - Istanbul, Israel and Jerusalem, Iskenderun, Innsbruck, Graz, Fethiye, Kas, Cyprus, Syria, Gaza, Cairo, Libya… in all of them, he could see dead ponies. In another, this one copied almost verbatim from a newspaper, Today’s Zaman, he could see himself and Burakgazi, sitting in that cafe with the delicious baklava… and in a window, in that picture, he could see himself on the Sorghum in the hallway to the radio room, staring down at that dead foal.
And, to Kraber’s shock and horror, the Kraber sitting with Burakgazi stretched, and turned to look right back at him, confused.
Desperate not to think about that, Kraber turned and walked away. There was nought to do but keep going, take that hallway, and turn. There was a staircase behind the door at the end, and he turned and walked down, opening the door at the foot, only to find…
To find…
The same fokking hallway. And behind him, blocking all retreat into the past, a wall.
He kept on traversing the corridors, stuck in a loop without end, until, strangely - the door at the end, the one with the stairs had snapped closed. He tugged on it, quizzical, only to hear a sharp rap...
...and found another door hanging open. Bereft of options, and knowing that he simply had to go in, he headed for that door...
...and he felt tired. He felt old, more than anything. Fok’s sake, he was thirty-six! But… thirty-six was older than he had any right to be. Older than the age itself had any right to be. He’d seen over a decade of battle, of the world gone to shit, all but for one island.
He’d seen everything. He’d seen Converted militia, he’d seen his pozzy destroyed, he’d seen Barrierfall in Britain… he’d seen the Avatar of Albion himself at the height of his glory, the battle in the sky between him and that hondenaaier Solamina… God, that battle...
He held his Bren gun at the ready, focusing himself. He was already dead, and the dead didn’t get distracted by anything. The dead had purpose, and they fulfilled it until some fokker was lucky enough to send their body the same way their soul had gone.
He steeled himself. He was ready. There was a Webley riding his hip, and a sword at his back he'd taken from a Knight who'd never need it again. Lucky he'd learned how to handle one-
This wasn’t right. He’d had sword lessons from Burakgazi, but he’d been shite at them!
...and now he was talking to the Undead, the tall man’s face obscured by the same death mask gas mask they all wore.
“Kraber, isn’t it?”
“Ja, sir. Joined when I heard South Africa was gone. People kept saying I was lucky. If I'm fokking lucky, my family burned in the Barrier and didn't get ponified by the PER."
No word. No anything except madness and thousands of homeless people struggling to live and all the while wondering what would happen when the Barrier finally reached them… except it never had, and instead there had been war, and a chance for even the Dead to seek revenge. Stuck in Britain, with only the khakis and a few million from other places, with nowhere to run.
’This is what would happen, isn’t it? No ability to trust ponies till it’s too late and we’re down to millions instead of billions,’ Kraber realized.
And yet, instinctively, he knows that’s not what happened here. But it could be. Not Britain, but somewhere... Whatever it is… it still left him without a family. Dear God, why can’t he see visions of happy things? It’s always got to be horrible fokking doom.
"Not knowing is the worst," another man - a Frenchman named Pierre Dupont that he had joined up with in the early days - said quietly. Yeah - that was true.
’No,’ Kraber realized. ‘It’ll be worse. Not like there’ll be ponies willing to help… We’ll have made PER of all of them.’
"This is why we have purpose, brothers," the Undead assured him, and Kraber believed him. The Undead had always inspired that. "Kraber, I want you to lay down suppressing fire. When they're suppressed, we'll charge."
"Excellent," Kraber said, smiling.
The Undead turned to look at the approaching group of militia ponies, as though waiting for the perfect moment. Kraber trusted the man - he was as nuts as the rest of them, but he was a good leader.
"Now!" the Undead called suddenly.
"Booyah motherfokkers!" Kraber yelled, and his Bren Gun barked out a deep staccato rhythm, the heavier bullets simply cutting the ponies apart. Three ponies from the head of the militia group dropped, spurts of blood exploding from the impacts. The rest of the ponies take cover, suppressed, though a bunch of spells flew in the direction of the Dead Men. One impacted on the rubble near Kraber, and then he cursed, grabbing at his gas mask. The fokking convies had broken it! Ah, fok, he needed a new one now!
"Right!" he said angrily, drawing the sword and looking at the Undead. "That's it! Tell me it's time, sir!"
"They're suppressed, Kraber," the Undead said, and Kraber figured the man was probably grinning. "Everyone, charge!"
And, right as Kraber stepped forward, opening fire...
...he was somewhere else.
He was in a line with a hundred other soldiers, each of them standing to attention. Their uniforms were jet black, with bulky body armour and full face masks. No two soldiers were identical though - each of them had messages painted onto their armour in whites and reds, and all of them had at least one trophy. Some of them had small repurposed pieces of golden and silver armour attached to their body armour. Others had necklaces of teeth, and a handful (he felt almost sick) had skulls on spikes attached to their backs like grim banners.
He himself had seven tails that he had ripped from their former owners sewn onto the cloth of his black long uniform overcoat. Each one was a great commander of the Equestrian Royal Guard, and each had fought well. These trophies were testament to his skill.
They were, in a way, the reason he was here at all.
"Each and every one of you has served humanity to the fullest," a voice was saying. He could not see the speaker, but he felt a (strange and unnerving) combination of fear and pride at that voice: it was soft, almost whispered, and yet it echoed and filled the room where they all stood. "You have sacrificed in the name of Earth. You have given your blood and your toil to her, and you have been rewarded with life at the close of this war. We stand victorious over the bodies of every pony that has stood in our way. The Tyrant is dead at our feet."
Kraber swelled with pride. He had played his part in this victory. He had stood his ground against the horde. Though the final battle had been one man's victory, every soldier here had fought hard to win him the time to fight that victory.
"Those ponies who resisted are dead," the voice continued. "Those who were amenable now serve to rebuild what their Mistress laid low. Their freedom is a small price to pay for their lives."
Kraber thought about the many ponies who toiled outside in the work camps even as the voice spoke. He scowled at the thought of them. Many of the little varknaaiers had claimed to not support what the Tyrant had done - but if they didn't support it, where had they been when mankind had burned? Where had they been when less than three million of them finally broke the Tyrant's last assault? And when their champion had marched into Equestria and slain Sol Invictus and Commander Sparkle and thousands of others alone, a tornado, a hurricane... when the last chance to step forward and make their difference had come... where had they been?
One of the indentured ponies, an overly-large stallion nearly the size of a small earth horse with strong, hard eyes, had yelled at Kraber and some of his colleagues as they patrolled the occupied lands. He had screamed about having a family, about how this wasn't fair or just.
"So did I,” Kraber had said, too quietly for him or the stallion to hear any emotion in his voice. Not that it mattered. He had shot the stallion and crucified the corpse at the head of the work camp entrance as an example. There would be no dissent. No protest. No anything. These ponies had had their chance to make amends for their kind, had had their chance to stand by the human race in their hour of need, and they had never come. Mankind, alone and confined to one island, had stood against the tide and, though they had suffered more than anything had any right to, they had survived.
This was their retribution. And, much as some people over in London grumbled about it, they needed the work camps. The country’s industry was shot, they needed minerals and iron to rebuild anything like pre-war infrastructure. How many of those people were using devices or vehicles built with metal from work camps? he wondered. Fokkin’ hypocrites.
"Some," the voice continued, shaking Kraber from his reminisces, "may say that we have won. That now we may rebuild our shattered world. And it is true - there is much work to accomplish." There was a pause. "The Converted, our erstwhile kin, need to be tended to. We must salvage what we may of them that they might once more become as part of us, and that they might rule over the ponies of Equestria and keep watch over them - in time, maybe even guide them to become more than they are, and if nothing else, keep them from ever again standing against us." Another pause. "But we are not done."
Kraber frowned. Not done? Had they not fokking suffered enough? This was insane. What was this? What was that voice? What was he remembering...?
"I have stepped into the darkest chambers of Canterlot," the voice continued, and Kraber's eyes narrowed in hatred at the very mention of that place. "Within those cursed halls I have seen a device. A thing that has shown me other worlds. Other Earths, other Equestrias."
Kraber frowned in confusion. Other Equestrias? Other worlds? What was this kak?
"I have seen a thousand worlds where the Tyrant marches," the voice pressed on. "She goes by many names and has many forms: Celestia, Astra Solamina Maxima, Ra-Abaddon, Solaris, Corona, The Dark Star, Stella Imperatrix Supremus... but whatever the name, she is the enemy of humanity, our darkest foe."
And now the owner of the voice stepped into view at the head of the line of men, and Kraber swelled with pride (and his heart almost stopped in his chest). The figure wore a full set of ornate, pitch black knightly armour. Slung over his shoulder was a sword as long as him: the blade was tempered steel and the hilt looked almost as though it were made of black marble. No face could be seen, but two burning, almost glowing eyes could be seen behind the slit in his helmet visor. Seven locks of mane hung from his belt, one for each of the Elements of Order and one for their foul Mistress.
This was the man who had slain the Tyrant, the man who had led the last armies of Mankind for four years alongside Constantine the Mad. This was the Nameless, the Avatar. And Kraber was terrified: was this a vision of a world where everything that could have gone wrong, would go wrong?
Had already gone wrong?
And was this man he was... this... other him (and that was as crazy a concept as any)... was he the man Kraber would become? No, no. That wasn’t right. He’d left - things had changed too much for this to happen. But still, it felt too close for comfort.
Kraber blinked as the Avatar approached him.
"You have all served with distinction and valour," he said, and Kraber felt the urge to bow his head. He resisted and kept looking directly ahead. "There is not a warrior here who has not proved their mettle on the field."
Kraber swelled with pride (this... person's praise was terrifying...) and tried his best not to grin beneath his own mask.
"I have brought you here to offer you a special honour," the Avatar continued. He paced along the line and Kraber stifled a sigh of relief at his passing. "Those other worlds are a threat - this Equestria came to our home and threatened it with war. This Equestria reached beyond the veil of the multiverse and nearly destroyed us. There is no way of knowing whether others will seek the same thing. Therefore... we shall go to them."
What?
"We shall seek them out. We shall find every threat to mankind across creation, and we shall crush them. Every Celestia - every Solamina, every Solaris, every Corona, every Stella Imperatrix, every Ra-Abaddon. All of them will die beneath our blades."
Fok no. Fok that fokking shit right the fok now.
"It will mean suffering and pain. It will mean hardship and the burden of responsibility, the likes of which you have not yet come to comprehend. It will be a life of unending war. You may never see this world again." He paused. "I will not ask any one of you to commit to this life. Only those who accept this burden will face it. Do you accept it?!"
Every warrior was silent for a moment, but Kraber needed no time to think (...don't do it, jou fokkin chopkont, don't you even fokking dare...). He had lost everything already. There was nothing left but duty - and vengeance.
"I accept!" he yelled, stepping forward one pace. The Avatar looked at him, but Kraber did not falter.
"I accept!" another man, Eric Smith, yelled a moment later, also stepping forward.
"I accept!" came the voice of Manfred Stein further up the line.
One by one, every warrior in the line stepped forward, each one accepting the hardship promised by their leader. Though none could see his face - though none of them even knew what he looked like under that armour - Kraber imagined him grinning.
And yet he felt so cold...
"Good," he said. He stepped up to Kraber first and placed a hand on the man's chest.
'For God’s sake! THINK!' Kraber screamed wordlessly at the other him. ‘Think about what the fok you’ve agreed to! About… Ask yourself! Please! I’ve done this - I might be younger than you, but… I swore to do this! I swore to exterminate all those fokking gluesticks, go in skop skiet and donner and fill them with lead, and it’s destroyed me! No family! No friends but fokking kontgesigs that just want to kill and kill and kill some more! It’s hell!’
"You have all suffered, brothers and sisters," the Avatar said. "But now we shall deliver that suffering tenfold. Each of you shall become like me. Each of you shall have magics and augmentations that make you the equal of the worst of the Tyrants. I promise you Viktor - one day, with Excalibur as my witness, you will have as many manes on your belt as I do mine - all of them."
That kind of power... the power to slay Elements... to slay Tyrants...yeah. That sounded good. But then his conscience stirred...
‘One question,’ he thought, and he was surprised to hear the words coming from the one he saw below...
“Question,” he, the self from Maine and the Sorghum said through Kraber - the other one, thirty-six or thereabouts - and he was surprised to hear… himself. It was him talking, his own voice overlaid over his own. “What if we find a Celestia that has not done anything? One that knows nothing of us? One that is... dare I say it, innocent? Are you truly guilty if you haven’t done anything yet? Perhaps… we could teach her what she would do. And help in our crusade.”
The hand of the Avatar was retracted, and Kraber sensed he was pondering the question honestly.
"There is no such thing as innocence, Viktor," he replied grimly. Oh no... "Only degrees of guilt. And you... all of you... shall be the iron fist that punishes it in the name of mankind."
Kraber looked into those eyes - those fiery eyes, eyes that had seen death and promised more... and he believed.
“NO YOU FOKKING DON’T!” Kraber screamed at the other him. “I fokking hate Celestia, I don’t like ponies any more than you… But think! He wants you to attack ponies that haven’t so much as heard of us!”
The other him - this broken, terrible man with seven pony’s tails sewn into his coat - was impassive as he faded away.
“For God’s sake, was I always?! This! Much! Of! A! CHOPKONT?!” Kraber yelled. “YOU’LL REGRET THIS, JOU FOKKIN BLIKSEM!”
“Hrm?” the other him asked, and-
-The vision blurred, faded into blackness like smoke and fire, and Kraber thought he could hear a voice screaming in the darkness, the sound of battle behind him. And the voice, though deeper and colder and raspier than he hoped to ever be his own voice sound, was him.
"I am Viktor Kraber! I am the slayer of the twelfth Celestia, the fourteenth Pinkie Pie, the thirtieth Sparkle, the butcher of the Legion of Nightmare Corona and the doom of General Aegis the Giant! I wear the skulls of Kings, the manes of Gods! I am the iron fist of the Avatar! I am death! Now FACE ME AND BURN!"
The warrior - the him that was the iron fist of that dark knight - was changed beyond all recognition. He wore some kind of advanced plate armour that wouldn't have looked out of place in a gothic science fantasy. It was massive, bulky and yet moved as fluidly as cloth. Runes glowed all over the armour, and the flayed skin of a pink pony was hung from one great pauldron, while a symbol that Kraber didn't recognise was hung from the other.
This... this was the darkest point. The very pits of evil. A man who had seen things Kraber couldn't have dreamed, and never blinked. A man who had walked the spaces between worlds as the herald of doom. This was a man who looked at all the horrors Viktor had performed in his time with the HLF, every butchery, every murder, all of it... and he called it a slow Tuesday.
“Aegis is my china, you kontgesig!” he heard someone yell - a woman who was and was not him. “My china! SHUT YOUR FOKKING FACE!”
“You realize that you’ll die if you fight me,” he felt himself say. There was pity there, but no remorse and an edge that promised only death.
“Ja,” said the woman who was and was not him. Victoria Kraber, he supposed. “But it’s me between you and him, or his foals.” She looked up at the other him, defiant, light machinegun held out. “Come at me, jou fokkin kontgesig.”
There she was. Facing an unstoppable engine of destruction, just a machinegun and a scant few grenades, looking out at a burning landscape, and daring him to kill her.
Kraber wished - desperately - that he could be so brave.
And, as the other him, the monster that had strode between worlds, looked upon her, he wished he could be anything but that, and found himself screaming that
“WON’T BE ME!” he screamed, and he was surprised to hear his own voice, his own heavily Cape Town-accented voice, the one he cultivated after hours and hours of watching District 9 and Elysium on his laptop and at movie night at Defiance’s bioscoop. The one that was, thankfully, not entirely an affectation.
“It already is,” Victory said. “None of you… save for a few… ever go pony. It would be so much better for them! Not like it’d be any different from what you already are… but at least you’ll be free! Untainted by morality or conscience!”
“DON’T JOU FOKKIN QUOTE TRAINSPOTTING AT ME!” Kraber screamed. “HOU JOU FOKKIN’ BEK, JOU FOKKIN KONTGESIG! EK SAL NOOIT DARDIE! I’LL NEVER BE THAT! I’LL-”
“But you already are!”
And suddenly, a hallway opened up behind her, lined with doors, the spaces between them splattered with bloody splashes. Kraber looked back - all he could see was a blank space.
“These are your choices, Viktor,” Victory taunted him. “No matter which door you do, it’ll probably end the same way! Dead! Ponified! A monster!”
Newfoals, unicorn, earth pony, and pegasus alike formed themselves from the stains in the wall, stretching their way out, dripping blood onto the floor from massive wounds.
“Dead! Ponified! A monster! Dead! Ponified! A monster! Dead! Ponified! A m-”
Kraber looked down at Victory and sighed, bending down on one knee, arms outstretched, as if he was about to hug. “There’s only one thing I can choose, I think.”
“I’m glad you-” Victory started, right as Kraber picked her up, suplexed her, and threw her at that bare patch of wall.
There was an audible crack.
“NEVER! FOKKING! BE! YOOOOOOOUUUUUU!” he screamed, and punched her in the face. Cracks spread out from where her snout had rammed into the wall.
“This isn’t either world! Maybe I’m a monster, but I’ve still got time to change, I hope… But I’m not a fokking monster! I’m ME!” Kraber yelled. Victory weakly punched out at him, and Kraber kicked her hoof out of the way. “ORE WA VIKTOR KRABER DA!” A punch, even as the newfoals tried to grab at him with that peculiar hoof TK, or with their horns. “ORE WO DARE DA TO OMOTTE YAGARUUUUU KIIIICK?!” he curled his toes, like he was playing football again, and drove his foot up into Victory’s face.
“I’M NOT GOING TO BE SOME FOKKING MONSTER!” a punch to Victory’s face.
“EK! GAAN! TE! WEES! ME!” Water spread out from one crack in the floor when grabbed her by the neck and rammed her down into the concrete. He could see a sink on the wall - why was it there? - and he ripped it off the wall, bringing it down on Victory’s head.
“VIKTOR MARIUS FOKKING KRABER! IVAN BLISS! ME! ME! ME!” He punched her in the throat, and the floor exploded into a geyser of saltwater, and they were all washed away, blasted down the hallway.
“WHOEVER THE FOK I AM!” he held Victory’s head under the water, watching the bubbles as she drowned below him. “Ek sal iemand anders wat!”
And Kraber was floating, far away, in a turbulent sea, doing a breaststroke up to a rowboat.
He panted, raising himself up onto the boat, and laid back gasping and wheezing, coughing up seawater.
No…
Tears?
And suddenly - far too suddenly - the sea froze. Not as ice, no - the waves were held, suspended and sculpted into bizarre shapes and his boat stood at the peak of one wave, above a strange sculpted vista of waves.
He reached one hand into the water. It was not frozen, simply… held in place.
“Mr. Kraber,” someone said, “Your mind is a hellspace where logic and reason fail.”
“Thanks for the fokkin’ compliment,” Kraber said, realizing himself to be sitting back against a pillow on the boat. “So… you are?”
“A princess, maybe...” the voice said, and Kraber could see a ghostly equine shape forming itself from the water and dreamstuff around him, climbing from behind the boat onto the .
It was a (green? No, blue!) mare, with a living mane. Stardust rose from it...shimmered in it...she was…
“Luna?” he ventured, guessing at a name.
“Meh, as good a name as any…I...We greet you, Viktor Kraber...”
Yes, yes it was Princess Luna before him now. Probably.
“Ah,” Kraber said, both feeling the warm lassitude of a dream that leads you not to question certain absurdities… and simply too exhausted to question it.
“That is all you say?” ‘Princess Luna’ asked, confused. “I have… We have seen you before.”
“Wait, you have?!” Kraber asked.
“You are like a beacon of nightmares,” Luna said. “They hang over you even while you are awake… We had expected you to react poorly to my presence.”
Above her, the sky cleared. Not revealing a bright sun, of course, but the clearest, crispest, most beautiful night sky he had ever seen, with millions of points of light against the sky. And a moon, a beautiful white-blue orb that lit up the unearthly vista of frozen waves.
But - beyond the moon - he could see Earth, improbably huge compared to the moon, with a great purple orb that resembled a tumor swallowing it up...
“Well, I’m…” he yawned. “Tired as fok. I’ve had a terrible fokking day. Besides, of every horrible fokking hallucination I’ve had, it could be worse,” Kraber said, willing a bottle of bourbon into his hand and drinking the whole thing in a gulp. “Plus, a good pony gave me a rather sterling recommendation.”
“Mind if I ask who?” she said.
“Oh, this Night Guard mare named Nebula,” Kraber said. “Great…” he yawned. “Great mare,” he said bitterly.
“Are you mad at her?” Luna asked.
“No, no,” Kraber sighed. “This point, I’m just fokking mad at myself.” He looked down at the floor of his boat. “...I need a hug.”
“I have seen your mind,” Luna said. “I can-”
“What, you’ve seen I’m a kontgesig that deserves to die or get ponified?” Kraber interrupted.
“No,” Luna said, “Most of all, I have seen the guilt. It’s killing you.”
“That doesn’t seem like something a regal alicorn princess would say,” Kraber said.
“I was being literal. I mean it is slowly eating away at your will to live, and you’ll commit suicide if you don’t do anything to assuage it,” Luna said.
There was a brief pause.
“What is that one quote from that game you liked? From almost ten years ago?” Luna asked. “There was… a floating city, nothing like Cloudsdale…”
“Are you reading my mind?” Kraber asked. “Fok, I’ll have to talk to those tea party guys from Defiance about government overreach-” and then he realized, no, he wouldn’t. Again. Ever.
“I can, but I swore not to unless absolutely necessary,” Luna said. “It would be a violation of privacy. Or just a simple violation. Rather, it echoes in your mind. I can pick those up, and not much else.”
“Okay,” Kraber said. “And, I have no idea what quote you mean. I once had to ghostwrite an assignment for a chommie back in Boston, and it was really hard to find the right one.”
“Well… this seems similar. That’s water, and the game said that baptism changes people,” Luna explained.
“Except I’m Jewish,” Kraber said. “We don’t believe in easy forgiveness. It doesn’t quite work-”
“It still applies,” Luna said. “You know what you have done or would have done, so in that sense, you are a new man, or might become one. I know you can change.”
“I can?”
“You already have,” Luna said. “Today, you saved plenty of ponies and human alike-”
“But the hallucination said I was already-”
“It’s just a hallucination,” Luna said dismissively. “It’s not real. It’s just guilt, not what’s real. Some of the places you saw through the holes and cracks in your mind are, in fact, real, but you said… you said you’d be you. Which meant you’d make your own decisions, forge your own path as a good person. Am I correct?” she asked.
“I think so,” Kraber mused. “Wait, are you a hallucination?”
“Maybe! But you did so. You ignored a superior, saved a hospital, and evacuated those survivors from that rig. You joined in an offensive against a Bureau. You befriended one of my nightkin and did a good deed for a lost mare. You cleared a hospital of PER, risked your life to save the city from that abominable newfoal. You were willing to listen to that pegasus mare. While you may have no restraint when it comes to PER-”
“Is that a bad thing?” Kraber interrupted.
“It depends. But trust me on this,” Luna said. “There is good in you. I believe you will rediscover it and nurture it not too long after you wake-
-up.
Wake up
Wake back up in that same hotel room. 12:30 AM… just like the last time he thought he’d woken up.
Wake back listening to that same diesel locomotive whistling outside, again...
Wake up with his stuffed animals on the bed…
He looked up, surveying the area. Nothing on the wall, thankfully. No hoofprints or anything. Nopony had been in here.
He yawned, stretching, arms against the bed.
Where was he? Well it sure looked like a hotel room. He’d lined all his long guns - the new Fostech, his MG2019, Sylvia’s rifle - up against one wall, ammunition on that little writing desk that all hotel rooms seemed to have, right next to his pistols.
‘Okay. Don’t… don’t panic, Viktor. All the places you could’ve woken up, this is one of the best so far.’
It could have been just like that one time in the desert when he’d found everyone in his tent ponified and had to stab his way out, grabbing a Kalashnikov. He still had that gun lying around, he thought. Could have been anywhere in Defiance.
But he wasn’t in Defiance. He was here instead. With a real bed, all this space to himself, a shower which he was going to use in a few. He checked his phone.
Alright. So he peered at the stationery on the desk. Okay. Kearsarge Inn, North Conway, NH. He sighed, and switched on the TV. He needed to get his mind off things. It was wandering… okay, more like running around screaming.
Fokking hotels, he muttered. He decided to flip through the channels, and look for something good. Maybe some cartoons.
As his mind stirred, he vaguely remembered his breakdown outside the electronics store in the outskirts of Portland. Of pulling himself together and catching another bus… or had he hitched a lift? Taken a train? It was fuzzy.
“You have to get out soon, he thought, and was pleasantly surprised to hear a voice other than the newfoal inside his head - he’d come up with that idea on his own. It made sense, honestly. Now, if he got out and blended in, the first thing to do was make sure nobody saw him as an outsider. Make sure nobody thought he was anything out of the ordinary and called the cops…
...and besides, he was a bad person, he was a villain, and villains blended in better than heroes...
Where the fok had that thought come from?
Oh fok. Right.
More memories of his breakdown came rushing down like tears in a waterfall.
He was a bad person. He couldn’t deny it any longer. He couldn’t deny that he’d shot kids, he’d broken families, he’d committed atrocity after atrocity and laughed, he’d killed PER-
Abruptly, his guilt faded as he thought that. And yet... he’d caused just the same kind of trauma that had been visited on him. He’d been in a world where every pony was the enemy, where they were always chaotic evil and they deserved what was coming to them. A world where he didn’t have running water. A world where the apocalypse was not just upon them, but had already hit.
Outside, he could see another world. There was no place for him there-he killed ponies, he couldn’t think of them as anything else, other than targets, try as he might.
He looked down the barrel of his revolver.
Still, the world outside seemed happier. Why not give it a try? Someone - who was it? His wife? Someone kind - had told him there was good in him. Maybe.
He wasn’t sure he believed it.
Still - worth a shot to go out there and try and find it.
He packed his MG2019 back into his old duffel bag, and set off into a new world.
Kraber’s first act upon entering this brave new world was to eat two orders of apple butterscotch pancakes for breakfast. He’d decided on a little eatery down the street called Peach’s.
Afterwards, he walked over to 18C for a large order of some french toast ice cream.
He was very hungry.