Danielle withdrew from Sunset as she started cutting the air with her hand. She could think of no other word for the way her hand had sliced the air like paper, glowing with Equestrian magic as she went. With each cut another of Harley's bombs would shoot through the air, through the hole she made to somewhere Danielle couldn't see.
"Breaching team, get ready!" Sunset hovered a few feet above the ground, and the air around her was so hot Danielle could practically see steam rising all around her. "I'm sending you into the center of the prison! There will be wardens. If you are successful, return to where I sent you after two minutes."
She didn't say what to do if the area wasn't safe, and nobody asked. Danielle cracked her fingers one at a time, then slid a pair of brass knuckles onto each hand. The metal did very little compared to the strength of her bones, but it felt better to be wearing them.
"So much'a what an earth pony does is about what they think they got in 'em," Applejack had explained. "If ya’ think that ya' can't do it, yer probably right. But if ya' don't give up, anythin's possible."
What might've been a trite platitude when used by anyone else was actually true about magic. Danielle had shattered concrete, twisted metal into pretzels, and shot herself without more than a bruise. If earth ponies could do that, maybe they could work out a successful jailbreak somehow too.
Danielle stood in front, next to the other earth pony wearing a necklace. She heard a small voice beside her. "Name's Steelshod." He offered his hoof up to her, speaking quietly.
She had to lean way, way down to reach, but she did anyway. Someday I'm going to be grateful when humans do that for me. Unless she never got her cutie mark. Maybe she would never change. "Danni."
"You ever teleport across a continent before, Danni?" He spoke quietly, though when she was concentrating she could hear the little voice over Sunset and Harley and Elise as they placed, transported, and detonated a series of explosives.
"Harley took us a few miles to get away from Unity, when it…" She whimpered, trailing off. "Never further than that."
"Pale Mare take the ponies who did that," Steelshod said, his head lowered with respect. "We will be her hooves." Had she a pair of pony-sized ears, Danielle might've heard Steelshod low and gravely, like some kind of badass hero. Instead it came off like a six-year-old trying to do an impression of one, and she almost laughed. Would've, were it about something less serious. "I just want to warn you: it's even worse than short distances. Get ready."
She wasn't exactly sure what ready meant. Without anything better to do, Danielle tried to feel down to the earth beneath her. Unfortunately she was on the fifth story of a building, and so reaching down was pointless. How it had worked on Unity, which had apparently been flying some of the time, she had no idea.
Danielle concentrated on the necklace instead, pleading with nothing for the strength she lacked. Danielle wasn't afraid to pray, no matter how many would mock her for it. Getting strength from earth wasn't really like that, in that the earth always answered when she asked, if it could. There was no waiting, or second-guessing what something was supposed to mean. She asked for strength, and so it came.
The ground felt suddenly feeble beneath her feet, as though it might crumble away. Her clothes too seemed so thin and frail, ready to tear away with minimal effort. She was a rock, ready to be planted in the path of a river and divert it somewhere better.
"Now!"
Danielle was cast adrift on the void. Not zipping forward through space, passing through objects as it appeared when Harley moved her around. Pressure crushed against her chest, pressure so overwhelming she started to choke. Or would have, if she had a mouth. She had no body, no eyes, yet somehow she could still feel. She shot forward faster than she could comprehend, around the rim of a whirling sphere with gravity no longer strong enough to bind her. A vast emptiness speckled with stars surrounded her, the final destination of even a minor miscalculation of teleportation. Had Sunset's anger offset her spellcasting enough to send them flying off into space?
Then she landed. The teleportation brought with it the sound of a tremendous explosion, which sent anything not nailed down flying around them in all directions. Chairs and papers and desks slammed into concrete walls, and several of them stuck.
She was standing in a waiting room, or somewhere that had looked like one until just now. The plain, wide bars of LED light strips were all dark, though there was a faint red glow still coming near the base of every wall. It was enough to see by, though it kept the room in constant gloom. Computer terminals by one wall were dark, and a few trailed cables but no sparks.
However awful the jump had been, Danielle found clarity returned faster than the others described it. The strength of earth surrounded her now, not just from the necklace. She didn't even need it down here. A shame that pony magic arbitrarily restricted human users as much as pony ones.
There were four of them now—Sunset's two, plus Stalwart and herself.
"For Equestria!" Steelshod was the only one to shout, though even so his voice boomed through the room. It no longer sounded cute, even if there was something absurd in seeing something so small move so fast. He charged straight for a steel security door, slamming into it with his shoulder. Metal screamed in protest, at least until she followed his strike with a shove of her own, pulling in strength from all around her. Metal snapped, glowing briefly red along the seam as they tore it right out of the doorway. She felt only a brief sting, one quickly swallowed by the strength the earth shared with her.
Someone started shooting, from several different sides at once. She felt the impacts like flies striking her chest at high speeds, piercing her clothes but nothing else. Harley's promise proved good: while she wore the necklace, the ties that bound her to the earth couldn't be shattered by little bits of metal, no matter how hard they hit her.
There was little time to assess the situation. Past the door, soldiers crouched around corners and behind fallen desks, firing with large black rifles. Most of them wore masks, covering their eyes and the rest of their faces too. They had a few more seconds to shoot before the ponies crashed into them.
Danni struck a man twice her size with a kick that sent him flying across the room into a wall. His partner turned his gun on her, and emptied the magazine point blank into her side. This time it hurt, about like what getting hit with a paintball felt like. She gritted her teeth, yanked his MP5 out of his hands, and broke it over his mask.
Screams and gunshots continued in the confined space as the unprepared soldiers were beaten to a pulp. Danielle wasn't sure if she killed any of them, though she tried not to think too much about the sounds bones made when she struck them. For all that she was smaller than even the shortest soldier, they might as well be made of balsa.
"Block those doors!" Steelshod eventually shouted, gesturing to a pair of sturdy steel doors at the far wall of the waiting room. "Spy said any reinforcements have to come from the surface, and they'll come through there!"
Danielle was privately annoyed that she hadn't been given all the spy's information, but resisted the urge to start ripping up furniture. The doors swung inwards, so it wasn't hard to choke them with an absolute mountain of desks, chairs, and scrap metal ripped right out of the walls. She tossed all with equal concern across the room, before joining the other humanoid-shaped earth pony in dragging the fallen soldiers into a side-closet. Most were bleeding, and some moaned as they were moved. These people need a doctor.
She thought that, but she knew they wouldn't get one as she twisted the long handle into a knot, crushing the locking mechanism, stretching the door a little into the wall for good measure. We only have a few minutes until reinforcements find a way here that doesn't need the lift. At first there would be soldiers, but sooner or later something would arrive that could get through their makeshift barricade. There were numerous more advanced defenses: turrets emerging from walls, an array of cameras and suspicious-looking vents, but none of them were doing anything.
"Sunset is coming in!" Had it been that long already? Danni covered her ears just in time for another explosion, this one accompanied by a gentle breeze of warm air. It didn't bring crushing force to knock things over, as the last one had.
"Report!" Sunset stayed in the air, expression urgent. She wasn't wearing anything enchanted, at least not that Danni could see. She didn't seem to need it.
Steelshod stopped right in front of her, but he didn't do anything formal like salute. "We got fifteen guards, princess! No idea what happened to the scientists, but we haven't seen any of them. Atrium is secure!"
"Advance into the prison." She didn't waste time with formalities. "Elise, explain what we're up against!"
The earth pony was the only one who looked out of place. Even pathetic-looking Jacob had grim determination on his face and that robe on his shoulders. Elise only looked ashamed. "Cells are stacked three high. 'Earth ponies' are on top, with only acrylic on all sides. The cells don't have doors—each one has a latrine and a food-delivery system and nothing else. They have to be opened slowly, with a bulky machine. It was… They thought it would prevent a large jailbreak. There are automated defenses, and several ways to destroy the prisoners if a breach was detected."
They started moving forward, the whole group orbiting around Sunset Shimmer like planets around a star, even if it was Elise who knew where she was going. "We should have stopped them with the bombs we sent. Your first priority should be the inner six cells in every block—these don't have any airflow other than the ventilation system, which we severed."
"Are there more guards waiting for us in there?" Steelshod asked. "If we got fifteen?"
Elise shrugged. "Don't know. Probably not, though. We relied mostly on automated defenses, since anyone who spent time near the infected would be contaminated eventually."
Sunset gestured at another set of sturdy steel doors. She ignored the others obviously leading to medical labs or living quarters, except to run her hand along them as she floated past. Where she touched the metal melted away like chocolate, trapping the occupants inside. They would hope so, anyway. "Clear it, Steelshod! Sweep to the end and meet us back at the entrance!"
Danni joined him at the front as they shattered another set of doors, thundering past them and onto the plain concrete floor.
If the violence she inflicted on jailers was difficult for her, then seeing the cells for the first time was agony. The jail itself seemed to be a single unbroken room, gently round and spiraling upwards. The outer wall all the way up was transparent, and covered with thousands of transparent cells. There was a stench about the place, of rot and pain and unwashed animals, with emaciated forms she could only see as outlines through the front of each cell. There were no obstructions, none except for a massive machine resting on the tracks. They found a terrified technician cowering behind it, unarmed and with his face covered by a mask.
Danni ran past him as the other earth pony on two legs took him captive. On and on she ran, and it wasn't just the awful smells that assaulted her. It was the voices too, the faint moans of prisoners on end cells where air was shared with the central passage. Many of them were calling for help—her help. The cells went on forever, seemingly thousands spiraling along in an unbroken sheet that wrapped up and up until the cells ended in construction equipment and unfinished stone. There were no soldiers hiding here either, at least not that they could see.
"Celestia help us." Steelshod slumped briefly against some kind of drilling machine, staring back into the room in horror. "How could… how could ponies do this?"
"I don't know." Danni walked past him, to the industrial level she suspected had been used to grade the sloping floor so flat. It had a massive steel blade, twenty feet long with a gentle curve towards the top. "But I know how it's ending." She yanked. The level protested a moment, listing towards her as bolts screamed in agony. They burst, and several tons of sharp steel came loose in her hands.
Danni had seen thick acrylic before, during family vacations to the aquarium. The cells seemed to be made from the same stuff, though this was cloudy and unpolished instead of the clear stuff used for display. It was still thick enough to contain fifty feet of water… or a single pony. She advanced on the wall, toting her makeshift weapon. The incredible weight made the concrete floor crack a little where she stepped, though thankfully the ceiling was at least fifteen feet, plenty high enough that she wouldn't catch her weapon if she was careful.
"That won't work!" Stalwart trailed behind her, his voice sympathetic. "I know you want to get them out, but you can't possibly cut them each open one at a time! There's no way we can hold out that long!"
"It doesn't make sense that we can stop bullets." She grunted, adjusting the incredible load she carried. Even with the necklace this thing was a strain. Not on the magic coming to her, but on her body itself. She felt a little like a straw being forced to contain a river. The water itself strengthened her, kept her strong against an ever-increasing flood, but she shivered to think what might happen to her when the flow finally stopped.
It doesn't matter so long as it lasts. Danielle didn't know what drove her, but she didn't stop to think. If she thought about it, she might doubt she could do it. If she doubted, it wouldn't work. Stalwart retreated from her, along with the other earth ponies. Even Steelshod seemed to be watching her, pointing at something she couldn't see for the benefit of the last earth pony, whose name she didn't know.
"Get away from the exit!" she bellowed, and found her voice carried perfectly well through the tight space. As perfectly as it ever had. She made sure the ponies near her had obeyed (they had), then brought her blade down as though it were a sword. Glass shattered, though not with the sound she was used to. It sounded more like huge sheets of ice crunching together. Instead of lancing across with cracks, the area around her strike went cloudy with the stress, and a few massive square chunks tumbled down.
That was the first step. Danielle let the huge chunk of steel fall to the ground at her feet, making sure that she was well out of the way when it hit. Of course, her work had only begun.
The shouting and moaning of ponies trapped within the prison faded to another sound, anticipation. Could they feel what she could? They would.
"See?" Stalwart called, from a little further away than before. "Maybe Sunset has a plan? You can't do that for all of them!"
"You can't fill a basket with apples by kicking a tree." Danielle dropped her brass knuckles then advanced into the opening she had made. It was big enough for the three ponies in exposed cells to escape, but she didn't help them yet. There were still thousands imprisoned. "You can't burrow instantly through rocks. Magic breaks the rules, Stalwart. Nothing says we can't break them a lot." She braced herself against the solid stone uncut behind her, settling her hands on the surface she had cut. The glass was about a foot thick, and probably sharp too. Not that it could cut her now.
I'm going to get these ponies out. Before someone comes to stop us. These weren't just Equestrian captives. These were fellow humans, the only half of the ones who had gone missing. The ones who had found a prison waiting to keep their powers in, instead of new friends. It wasn't fair.
She let the magic consume her. Her body lost focus in her mind, and instead she saw larger things. Tectonic plates as they ground together, storms that could crush whole cities, and the constant violence that was at the heart of the planet. Compared to all that, what was a little plexiglass?
Danielle screamed, then charged forward as though the wall were a curtain. It didn't break instantly away from her arms, as everything she thought she knew about force suggested it would've. A deafening bang shook through containment as a wave rippled through the glass, a wave that shattered as it went and ripped glass away from the stone. Whole chunks of it fell forward, before sliding down the gentle slope. It took nearly thirty full seconds for the cacophony to stop. Closest to where Danielle had been standing, little of it was even attached to the wall anymore, but covered the ground in an ocean of broken shards.
Danielle felt something painful around her neck, a little explosion from beneath her shirt. Her shirt caught fire and she tore it off, even as she stumbled away from the cells. The Equestrian necklace was a flaming wreck, and it came off from around her along with the shirt, still in flames.
It felt like crossing the finish line of a race. The incredible effort of the event finally over, her body was free to relax. She barely managed to stay awake long enough to hear the cheering. The world got bigger, sounds drifted out of focus, and everything went dark.