• Published 20th Apr 2012
  • 2,849 Views, 28 Comments

Resident Pon-Evil - Operation: Equestrian Downfall - Delta 727



As Equestria falls into a zombified virus ruin, a group of soldiers emerge to stop the outbreak.

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Level 5: Lost and Found

Marigold and the former Delta Team have mapped out a plan to retrieve Marigold's Tyrant. As they move into position for the retrieval, they prepare for not only a bloody firefight, but their first mission on the path to their revenge on Harrow's End for their betrayl. As Delta Team is no longer their name, their name has been changed to their squad name instead: Harmony's Elements. As the Team's limerick name was used as simply a little more than Delta, this name became fit in their attempts to restore peace from Harrow's End.

*Begin Transmission*

Harmony's Elements were positioned outside the compound that held Marigold's Tyrant, and the stash of ammunitions that Harrow's SpecOps were storing, keeping it well guarded with several dozen SpecOps soldiers. Chainlink was already standing on a dumpster, a blowtorch in his hooves. He was welding away at the vent cover, and connected the glowing line of molten metal around the vent, allowing him to remove it, and pass it into X-Ray's hooves to place it quietly on the ground. "We're in." Chainlink declared.

X-Ray looked to Marigold. "Ladies... First?" Marigold gave the stallion an approving nod, grabbed Chainlink's outstretched hoof, and hoisted her way up into the vent. Next came Acid, Blade, X-Ray, and finally Chainlink. As they crawled in the tight vent, Chainlink whispered, "Why couldn't we have just found a unicorn to use its magic to get us in a little more... Quietly?"

X-Ray answered. "The unicorns... Were killed in the outbreak... They were the first to die as the magic... Seemed to attract the infected. They never stood a chance..." Chainlink was silent, but he gave an understanding nod. They came through twists and turns, their armor clattering on the metal.

"Won't all this noise give away our position?" Blade asked from behind Acid.

"No." Marigold said. "The air conditioning is on, and it'll muffle the sound considering these vents are very sensetive and old. Didya really think I would put us in here with sound that would make y'all sound like a herd of cattle in here?"

"That's strange. I can't feel any air conditioning..."

"That's because you're wearing a suit. We're almost there." Marigold stopped. She was right above another vent opening. She motioned her hoof behind her, and Chainlink grabbed two grenades from inside his belt. A flash grenade, and an explosive. Marigold took them both in her hooves. "Now the real fun begins..." She whispered.

She armed the two grenades, and bucked open the vent. The guards below jumped, and looked up just in time to see the flash grenade roll out and drop to the floor. They reached their hooves for their sidearms, but the grenade already went off. They instead placed their hooves over their ears, blinded an deafened. Marigold rolled in the next grenade, and the room burst into a cloud of smoke and shrapnel. "Get ready to get in there." Marigold warned.

As if on cue, four more SpecOps guards entered the room. In the smoke and haze, the team dropped in. The room was full of smoke, so the beating wasn't viewable, but there was several crashes, thunks, and gasps of pain from the guards. When the smoke finally cleared, Chainlink, X-Ray, Acid, and Marigold had already began to slip into their uniforms.

"Why didn't you all just leave me to stab them insead?" Blade asked.

"We couldn't risk damaging the uniforms. If a guard saw they were tattered, we would be exposed." Marigold explained as the team managed to hoist the bodies back into the vent and seal it. "Y'all know the drill. Blade, you take the hallway down that way," She pointed her hoof to a door to their left, "Chainlink, Acid, y'all come with me this way," She pointed her hoof around to an open door with a staircase leading down to ground level. "And X-Ray, you stay here and hack their cameras. Communications will be down. Hope you don't mind that." X-Ray trotted over to one of the nearby systems, opened its main panels, and started to do what looked like pulling a few wires and moving some parts around inside. A few hoofbeats later, he said, "I'm in... I have a view on the... Entire complex." Marigold nodded.

"We'd better get moving. I'll see you guys in the containment room." Blade said, and he exited through the door to their left, and was gone.

A voice came over the system radio. "What's going on up there?" It was a young stallion, and he was very agitated.

X-Ray answered as casually as he could: "Everything is... Fine. There was... A malfuncion. The system... Blew a circuit. I can easily repair it..."

There was a pause, and the stallion came back on. "Whatever. Just fix the system up there. You know the boss hates malfunctions."

"Of course she does..." X-Ray answered. "I already know-"

"The boss is not a mare. Don't you know that...?" The stallion spoke again. X-Ray had to think fast.

"Well... He acts like one sometimes... Does he not?"

The stallion paused again. "Yeah. You bucking got that right. Thank Celestia he's not there to hear that. Try to fix that circuit as soon as possible."

"No... Problem..." X-Ray finished. The radio speaker cracked, and the call ended.

"Clever thinking." Marigold said, her voice approving. "We need quick thinkers like you."

"In surveillance... I need to be..." X-Ray said very casaully. He stayed behind to work on the surveillance system, and Marigold, Chainlink, and Acid began to move through the open door and down the staircase, but X-Ray stopped them with a call of Marigold's name. "Whatever you do... Stay safe..." He saw them off and closed the door.

---

They were in. Marigold, Chainlink, and Acid were moving through the main storage area, and walking past several other SpecOps soldiers, afraid that one wrong move could expose them and they would be filled with bullets so fast that they would become short-living ponified pencils. Marigold leading the way, Chainlink on her right, and Acid on her left, they faked a casual conversation about work. Marigold did most of the talking, while the other two simply threw in a comment or two. Passing around a large crate that said, 'Danger: Highly Explosive', they had reached the living quarters. A group of stallions were sitting at a round green table, playing a game of Canterlot Hold 'Em, a popular card game among bored soldiers. Since they had no betting chips, they were betting bullets between each other. Two or three of them had a small or regular sized pile, enough to fit about two magazines, and one had enough to fill a whole boxgun clip.

When they sneaked in through the door at the far end of rows of beds, which were flat mattresses on rectangles of metal bars and four legs, they had reached the large, buckhead door that would lead into containment. Marigold proceeded to speak into her radio.

"Blade. They're all yours." A few seconds later, she turned to look through a glass pane in the door to the living quarters. Looking at the guards, she saw one of them jerked their head back, and a gash appeared in his neck. In shock and confusion, the other three stood up. Another stumbled to one knee, and an opening appeared through the front of his face and out the back of his head, splattering his mask in blood. The third jerked sideways and lay still with a large cut across his face, and the fourth with the large pile of betting ammunition was kicked into the wall, and screamed in pain as a very large gash slashed across his chest and up through his neck. If any of the ponies were still alive, they would have bled to death by the time a shadowy figure exited back into an open vent. "It's clear." Blade's voice came on the radio. "Make your move."

X-Ray's voice came on the radio. "The room... has two lines of catwalks on either side... SpecOps patrolling them... About six are on the ground... And unarmed... This shouldn't be too hard... Will the door... Be sealed?"

"Perfectly shut." Chainlink responded. "They won't be getting in for backup anytime soon."

Marigold turned back to the door and nodded at Chainlink. The buckhead door was two large panels of metal split down the middle, and a small keypad next to it. Chainlink placed a large paste-like wad in the split next to the panel. "Stand back." He said. He pulled a detonator from his belt, and pressed the button. A loud hissing broke out, and then a loud explosion. The panel sparked and malfunctioned, and the door proceeded to open. SpecOps in the next room were unarmed, and began to scrabble for guns. The team rushed in, and Chainlink gave the door an enormous buck with his back hooves, sealing it back shut.

The room was mostly bare, with a few control panels similar to the ones in the surveillance room. As was spoken before, two catwalks lined either side. Before any of the three had a chance to shoot, a figure on the left catwalk busted through a door, killing the catwalk guards with a single thrown grenade and flinging the bodies over the rail, their bodies thunking to the floor and their hooves clacking in the fall. On the opposite catwalk, guards were flinching around as if they were being bucked around by something invisible, minus the trails of blood staining their outfits, and gashes appearing on their bodies while they struck out blankly with their hooves. Eventually, every last one of the ponies on the catwalks were all dead.

The six stallions on the ground were a different story. "They're mine. I'm gonna enjoy this..." Chainlink pulled his Ravager, and ran in. The stallions attempted to flee, but Chainlink quickly struck them down. He kicked one in the front leg, and shot him through the head as the SpecOps went down. He swung back his gun, bashing in the skull of another that tried to jump him, and bucked another that cowered by a crate, crushing his ribs into his lungs. The final three pulled pistols, and they all dropped dead after a short spray of bullets that entered at numerous points into their bodies. The floor was now with several stallions lying dead in their own (And several others') blood.

"Where's the Tyrant?" Blade yelled down from the catwalk. "Shouldn't it be in he-?" Blade nearly finished as a large portion of the wall broke open, and a large, deformed pony in a black trench coat and legskirt split down the middle lumbered in. It was twice the size of the other ponies, and it lacked ears and a muzzle.

"Ah! There you are, Daisy!" Marigold walked toward the Tyrant. "I've been looking everywhere for yo-" The Tyrant struck Marigold away, slamming her into a nearby wall. She slid down it, and went limp, her legs sprawled out in front of her, and her mane ruffled over her neck.

"The SpecOps have programmed it against us...!" X-Ray nearly yelled.

"Well what the buck do we do now!? It's under their control!" Chainlink yelled back.

Acid spoke next. "We have to weaken it to get in close, and I can program it to show the SpecOps as hostiles, and it'll follow Marigold's commands again! Aim for the head! The trench coat is bulletproof!" She then proceeded to aim around her pistol at the Tyrant, and fired exactly three shots into it before it charged.

Chainlink and Acid dove out of the way, and X-Ray jumped down to fire toward it. A couple of bullets hit it in the back of the head, but the rest all sparked off the trench coat. It turned and grabbed him with two grotesquely large hooves. "It's... Got me!" X-Ray called out.

"Pull your pistol!" Acid yelled. "Shoot it in the eye!" X-Ray pulled his sidearm from its holster and sent a bullet just to the left of the Tyrant's right pupil. It leg him go, and staggered backward. "It won't be enough to stop it! Keep shooting!" The entire team opened fire, but the Tyrant simply struck out in rage, knocking over a stacked crate in it's wrath.

The Tyrant recovered itself, and grabbed Acid, causing her to drop her pistol. "Shoot it!" She yelled. No one fired, worried that they would hit Acid.

At that moment, a transparent figure appeared on the Tyrant's shoulder. It stabbed a long blade into the side of its neck, and the Tyrant let Acid go with a loud roar of anger, subduing it to the ground.

"Reprogram it, Acid!" Blade yelled. "It won't last for long!" Acid trotted as fast as she could to a panel below the Tyrant's left hoof. She entered a code, opened a small injector hatch, and poured in a vial of something unknown from her belt.

"Remove the knife!" Acid called up. Blade pulled out his blade, and the Tyrant breathed rather slowly, seemingly calm. "It's back under our control, but now it will only respond to Marigold."

"Marigold!" Chainlink yelled. At that momemt, the Elements galloped to the body of Marigold against the wall, as she was already beginning to recover, holding her head in her hoof.

"Wha-..." She began to speak, but X-Ray put a hoof on her shoulder. "Do not talk... You are... Injured."

"Ah'll be fine." Marigold said, rising to her hooves. "What about Daisy?" She looked over to the Tyrant, which had risen to its hooves, frozen, staring off into the distance. "Daisy." She called it's name, and it turned it's head in her direction. "It's functional. Who's ready to leave?"

"Daisy?" Blade asked.

"Well sure, I thought it'd be a perfect name for her. Why, something wrong with that?" The team said nothing. "Good." She turned to Daisy. "Could you get that wall down so we can go home?" The Tyrant marched over to the far wall across from the hole it had come in from, and bucked it down with one powerful hoof. The team slipped around it, and exited into the open air. "Good girl! Momma's so proud! Police station." As she said it, the Tyrant moved off in the direction of their makeshift base. "Thanks for the help, Acid. I couldn't have gotten her back without you."

"Anything to give us an advantage. Are you alright?" Acid asked. "Can you walk?"

"Oh, ah'll be fine. I've taken worse hits than that."

"I can only... Imagine..." X-Ray said. "Now let's... Go home. We have a new pet that may need a little... House training..." It was the first time anyone had ever really heard him sound amused. "I'm sure we would all like... Our old uniforms back..."

"Oh! I almost forgot!" Marigold said. She pulled a small switch from her pocket, and turned it. She raised her hoof, and then dropped it. When it fell down to her flank, the compound exploded, bursting in one large explosion, then hundreds of smaller ones as explosives and bullets went off inside, and the faint screams of SpecOps soldiers as they were burned alive or, ironically, shot. "Can't let Harrow keep this building standing, now can we? Ah, I love the smell of sabotage in the morning. Oh, wait. It's evening. My bad!" She chuckled, and the team turned for the police station refuge bunker.

On the way, Acid spoke. "Wait... How did you get those explosives in place if you were with us the whole time?"

Marigold simply chuckled again and said, "Like I said, I'm a mare of many surprises."

---

When the team finally managed to return themselves to the police station, Daisy stood, stationary, in the corner. The team all sat around the table, their face masks removed. "Ah, it's good to be home and back with my darling Daisy again!" Marigold said, filling five glasses with a sparkling liquid from a bottle with a Griffon on the label.

"Wait..." X-Ray said. "I... Recognize that label..."

"Ah'm sure you do!" Marigold replied. "Some of the strongest stuff out there. Ah guess that's why they call it, "Griffon Tears."

"Leave it to X-Ray to recognize a bottle of alcohol..." Blade muttered. X-Ray barely glanced at him as Marigold began pouring the drinks.

When all the glasses were full, they all picked one up in their hooves. "To our victory in the recovery of Daisy and the glorious sabotage of Harrow's End!"

As they all raised their glasses, Chainlink spoke. "You know, X-Ray, this drinking thing reminds me of how you hacked Canterlot to get rid of your overdue bar checks! You plan to pay Marigold here back for her hospitality this time?"

"Shut up..." X-Ray said quietly, but in an amused voice for the second time ever. The team laughed, clinked their glasses together, and drank to their success in hopes of many more to come.

*Transmission Ended*