Act 3 Chapter 47: The Reasons We Kill
When faced with the question of survival in dire times, the first inclination of many is to throw up their hooves and declare it all impossible. This is to miss just how much ponykind has already survived. Being undersized, friendly, prone to panic, and delicious are not good survival traits. Yet, we persist.
One might suspect there is a guiding hoof from the skies adjusting our fate to see us continue, but this is to miss some of the essential truths of ponykind. We are small, which means we must be cautious. We are friendly, so an enemy will never face one of us alone. We are fearful, so we prepare.
One day, we may even find a way to cure our tasty nature.
- The Scholar
I can’t remember what my head bounced off of that started the blood gushing into my eyes. Fortunately, the flow only lasted a moment before the wound healed, but I was left with a distinct ringing in my ears and stinging, blurred vision. The crack of the flak cannon on the roof pulled me back to myself just in time to hear Taxi shout something in my ear about ‘damned monsters’.
Swiping the sleeve of my coat across my face, I tried to clear my sight. All I could see were flashes of light where the headlamps caught shapes, before they were rushed under the tires; garbage cans, a stuffed doll, a mangled heap of flesh hanging from a fire escape. Something pinged off the thick glass and I had just enough time to pick up the general shape and size of the grenade before we were rocked on our wheels by an explosion that should have killed just about anything on the road. As it was, the blast didn’t even dent the hood.
We flew out of the other end of the alleyway into a long, empty street with what I suspect were once luxury shopping centers on either side. I was thoroughly lost, but Taxi still seemed to know where she was going. The flak cannon let out one last, almost apologetic sounding ‘snap’ and a blackened form splashed down on the sidewalk to our left, trailing smoke as it fell.
Bones swung down through the top hatch, his face blackened and his tweed coat shredded, making him look even more horrific than he already did by dint of his mere existence. Spitting a piece of metal on the thick carpet, he gave himself a shake; a rain of shrapnel fell around his ankles.
“Well, cats and jammers, I gotta say this is not the party I planned to check out at!”
There was a succession of extremely loud ‘kerclunks’ on the rooftop, followed by muffled gunshots and snarling like a pack of wild dogs was fighting it out up there to see who could rip us to shreds first. I leaned forward to get a look out the top of the windshield, but all I got a glimpse of was a leathery wing splayed across the glass for an instant before being withdrawn.
“Boarders!” Swift shouted, the Hailstorm’s turrets pointing at the ceiling. “We’ve got at least eight ponies or something like ponies on the rooftops nearby and four on top of the cab! Hailstorm is giving me reticles in the air! More incoming!”
“Last stupid thing they’ll ever do!” Taxi replied, snatching a pair of goggles I hadn’t noticed were tucked under the steering column and yanking them on over her head with one hoof. “Hardy! Light’em up! Everypony else, heads down!”
Shaking myself out of the concussed daze, I grabbed the grenadine launcher’s control stick in the crook of my leg and slammed the other hoof down on the big red button.
----
Now, I want to be clear that it did occur to me to question why Taxi had put on some tinted goggles before giving me the order to unleash the grenadine launcher.
Later.
It occured to me later.
Two seconds later, I was blinded, rolling around clutching my face as my scalded retinas burned in agony at the flash of light so brilliant I could feel the burst of heat through the windshield. It was followed, a second later, by near total darkness.
“Sweets! I’m blind!” I shouted, clutching at my seat.
“Is it permanent?” she demanded.
“I…” I hesitated, then let out a soft sigh as my vision began to return, first in washed out sepia, then flicking to color a moment later. The sensation of scorched retinas regenerating itched bad enough to make me want to claw them out again, but the feeling was blessedly brief.. “Just because it grows back doesn’t mean we get to treat me like a lizard growing back his tail!”
A smoldering corpse shape plummeted past the window and flew under our wheels, sending out a cascade of ashes. Ahead, I could see the remains of a brick wall glowing bright red and sagging slightly as the mortar holding it together disintegrated under the flash-fire of the grenadine blast. There was only silence from the roof of the vehicle.
“Swift? Damage report,” I said, turning to look over my shoulder into the back compartment. Mags was huddled in Bones’s forelegs, her pistol clutched in both claws, while Limerence sat with two knives levitating on either side of his head, watching the top hatch. My partner seemed unperturbed, turning in a little circle as the Hailstorm hummed in anticipation.
“No damage to us, Sir, but there’s nothing living on top of the cab anymore. I see some movement on the rooftops, but it’s not moving very far. Three signals. I’m pretty sure that blast either blinded or crippled whatever was out there.”
“Sweets, are we out of the null field?” I asked.
By way of answer, she reached up and touched the cloak control. The hum of magic pulsed through the vehicle. I quickly tapped it, shutting it off again.
“Kid, I need you to go clear those rooftops,” I said, “Anything that’s still alive up there is going to try to kill us at some point. Freeze the mutants and if they’re still ponies, make sure they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.”
Swift popped a salute, then flung herself toward the hatch, bursting out through it with her wings tucked in tight against her sides as she vanished into the cold and dark. Bones watched her go, then climbed the short ladder and carefully shut the hatch behind her. Turning to us, he shucked a cigarette out of his pack and stuck it between two teeth, but left it unlit.
“You know, while you were out yesterday growing back your skin - incidentally, you’ll pardon if I sound envious - I went for a little walk around the edges of the Heights. Got myself a look at some of those mutated beasties. They remind me of things the dragons experimented with during the war, body modification, transformative magics, and so on. Be glad the war ended, else we’d have probably ended up facing mind-controlled, mutated pony slaves years ago.”
“We are facing mind-controlled, mutated pony slaves now, so you’ll pardon me if I take less comfort in that than I might otherwise,” I mused, then turned to my driver. “Sweets, where are we?”
“Well, the grenadine launcher has one shot left, but assuming no further resistance and that the road is clear, I’d say five minutes to the target building.”
“Assume resistance,” I replied.
“Actually, I think you’d best start looking for a place to park,” Bones put in. “We can’t take this vehicle too close to the Office.”
“Ahem...We’re getting out of the heavily armored transport?” Limerence asked, incredulously.
“Bones, I planned on ramming this thing right through the front doors! Why are we altering the plan now?” I demanded.
“Because I just remembered something Bloom told me a few decades ago about wanting to make sure The Office was defensible in case the dragons got ahold of a War-Scooter and tried to crash it into the building,” he grunted, nodding at the skyline. “This thing has a zebra spell-core in it, right? If those bastards managed to activate the building’s defenses, we’d be peeled and poached before we could reach the steps.”
----
It was about here I made a noise something like an Ursa minor stubbing his toe and banged my head on the window a few times.
----
“Egg Pony! Stop jiggling your brain box!” Mags ordered, stomping into the cabin and poking me in the nose. “You sneaky type! So sneak, yeah?”
I matched eyes with the tiny griffin for a moment, but she was irritatingly fearless for someone I could probably stuff in the glove box with a bit of struggle and a lot of squawking. After a few seconds, I turned to watch the passing buildings.
“Sweets, find us a spot to stick this damn thing,” I growled, slapping the dashboard.
Mags turned up her beak and marched back into the rear compartment, tail in the air, looking very smug.
“Uh...Do you mind if I destroy some property doing it?” she asked, peering out at the nearby buildings.
“We’re saving the world here Sweets! I don’t think anypony is going to mind if we smash a few pots and vases!”
“Right! Hold onto your flanks!”
Bones must have read her intentions a mile away, because he grabbed Mags with one leg, then threw himself into a seat and snapped a belt on in the two seconds it took me to realized I’d just said something incredibly stupid. Limerence was not so lucky and only had time to snap a thin, light-blue shield bubble around himself and grab for the ladder hanging from the roof hatch.
Taxi slammed on the brakes, then swung us into the nearest building. To be clear, she did not turn us into a garage, nor an alley adjoining the building; one second I was looking at the clear and open road, then I was suddenly staring at the oncoming plate-glass window of ‘Boffo’s Toys And Treats’. My last vision before we hit was of a teddy-bear in the front display with what my surprised mind registered as a very concerned expression.
The crash shook the cab like a bag of marbles being tossed down the stairs and Limerence was torn off of the ladder to be sent bouncing against the back of my seat. My teeth snapped shut hard enough I caught my own tongue between them. If I’d been Swift, I’d have probably nipped the tip right off, but I was, again, thankful to still be a herbivore. Even then, it hurt like a bastard.
The D.F.W’s back wheels bounced over the edge of the building’s display and darkness rushed over the cab. Taxi applied the brakes, though not before our arrival was heralded by the squeaks, honks, and screeches of toys dying under the armored vehicle’s monstrous tires. We slid to a sputtering stop with the headlights inches from a wall of yoyos.
Limerence let out a soft moan.
“Whooo! Again, says I! Again!” Mags hooted, cheerfully.
“I swear to Celestia, Sweets,” I growled under my breath.
“You asked me to hide the car. The car is now hidden,” Taxi huffed, picking up a small, black box with a diamond sticking out of the front from a spot on the dash and shoving it into her saddlebags, then slinging them across her hips. “When we get ten meters from here, the cloak will engage and when we get back, it’ll shut off. Meanwhile, to fliers, it looks like somepony just looted this place. Nothing interesting to anyone hunting us.”
“If somepony is about to be in an auto accident, you give them a second to prepare!” I barked.
“If I’d done that, you’d have had time to tense all up and might have injured yourself,” she said, coolly, then turned to look at Limerence who was nursing a slightly swollen cheek. “And you should wear a seatbelt.”
The unicorn shot her a half-hearted glare as he pulled himself upright, reaching under his vest to adjust one of his knives back into its holster.
“I cannot decide what is more likely to be lethal in the long run: my friends or their enemies,” he commented. “Still, what’s done is done.”
“I think it’s less your friends, more your job that might need re-evaluation, matey,” Bones replied, setting Mags to one side. “Be glad it wasn’t Sweetie Belle driving. She damn near killed half the Crusaders the last time we had occasion to put her behind the wheel.”
“Truly, I wish I could have seen the Crusaders at their height. My father was quite a fan of their work,” Limerence mused, turning to one of the overhead bins. He opened it and levitated out a long, familiar wooden stick.
“Is that your brother’s staff?” I asked.
“Eh? Oh, yes. He always said it was ‘the weapon closest to his heart’,” he said, turning the bo-staff over in his hooves, then giving it an experimental flick with his magic to make it spin. “Father insisted we be at least competent with the melee armaments of various species’ homelands, that we might never be far from something that could keep us alive. I prefer my knives, of course, but Zefu was a zony who enjoyed surprising his enemies in battle.”
“Surprise them? It be a stick!” Mags said, knocking on the wood with two knuckles.
Limerence snickered at that. “It is a griffin weapon. A lann cnámh in their old dialect. One would think you would know that.” Holding the staff sideways, he gave the end a light twist, then pulled. There was a twinkle of reflected light as one half of the staff slid away from the other, revealing several inches of serrated blade work. “One can use it as a weighted bo, or, in a pinch, it makes an excellent sword.” With that, he snapped the blade shut and swung it onto his back. His horn flashed, and the wood seemed to glue itself between his shoulder blades.
An orange head poked up in front of the headlamps, momentarily startling me before I recognized Swift’s cheerily grinning face. She gestured toward the back of the vehicle with one leg, and I nodded. Unsnapping my belt, I slid off the seat and trotted into the back, pausing next to Mags.
“You okay, kiddo?” I asked.
She nodded, stretching her tiny wings as she slid her gun back into its holster. “Am being good! I wait here, yes?”
“You seem more content with that than the last time I left you somewhere,” I said, peering at her.
“That be cuz he tells me what kinda poop you be going into,” she replied, pointing a tiny wing at Bones. “You listen to him, yeah? He be smarter than you, Egg Pony.”
Ignoring that little jab, I patted her on the head. “You wait with Swift. Don’t get out of the truck. Clear?”
“Am clear! All the food be in here, anyway, so why I wanna get out?”
I rolled my eyes and poked the hatch release for the tailgate. The hydraulics hissed as the door clanked open, then landed on the ground. Swift stood outside, looking pleased with herself. The Hailstorm’s turrets were both rimmed in thick icicles.
“All targets neutralized, Sir! There was only one pony but he...--” She hesitated, then her ears flopped against her head. “--he caught the edge of the blast. He didn’t last long and he burned up like the mutants when he died. There probably wasn’t much pony left in him. Sir, is...is there a reason the D.F.W. is crashed into a toy store?”
“It’s...camouflage,” I replied, taking a few steps down to the floor of the store. “Look, watch the truck and don’t get out once the cloak comes on. We’ll be back in three hours, or we won’t be back. If we’re not, you get Mags and fly to the Vivarium. You still have the pylon key?”
She bobbed her head. “I hid it in Goofball’s collar.”
“Good. Should we fail, tell the Vivarium to hit the pylons. Use brute force. Start tearing up the city. I won’t let these bastards take the rest of the planet with them. Destroy everything. Blow up every pylon you can get inside. Any number of casualties is acceptable.”
“S-sir?” Swift squeaked.
“It’s the lives of everyone on the planet at stake, kid. Everyone. If life on this world is to continue, then you need to get back to the Vivarium and they need to take out this network of pylons. Can you do this?”
Her wings clamped down so tight the joints creaked, and she nodded, weakly.
“I’ll let Granny Glow know. She...she’ll make it happen.”
“Good.”
With that I put my forelegs around her neck, letting my haunches slide onto the carpet as I pulled my partner against my chest and held her there. Her wings sprang open in surprise, but she didn’t pull away. Instead, after a few seconds, she closed them around me like the warmest blanket in the world. Her breathing hitched, and she grabbed me tighter around the barrel, her short, spiky mane tickling my nose.
“Hardy,” she said, too softly for the others to hear, “-th-this was a terrible first couple months on the j-job.”
“I know. Pretty shit for me, too. Still, I’m glad it was you that Jade shoved at me. I don’t think anyone else alive would have come this far. You’re my partner, and ever shall you be.”
She sniffled a little and leaned back so she could see my face, keeping her wings around my shoulders such that I was surrounded by downy pegasus fluff on all sides. “I-is that ‘till death do us part’?” she asked. “Because Scarlet and Lily might want to t-talk about that…”
I let out a soft chuckle. “Heh...You think I’m letting you stay dead? Sweets has attachment issues, but remember who the obsessive is in our relationship. Now, go on. You and Mags tear into some of the chicken strips your mother gave you.”
“Y-you didn’t really know about those and just wanted to make me ask so you could look smart, right?” she sniffled, touching the brim of my hat with her toe.
“Ha! You’re getting wise in your old age. Keep a Ladybug on you so you can contact the Vivarium if things go really bad. We’ll be back soon.”
----
The weight of my silvered shotgun hanging from my shoulder was both a source of comfort and tension. Knowing you’re most likely about to spill blood never gets any easier, even if it’s justified. Ponies, at our core, are meant to be relatively peaceful sorts. War is a messy business; it makes a person late for dinner. That’s probably why we’d had so few of them down through the centuries.
Still, something in that part of the city felt desperately out of true. The brisk, icy wind turned, from time to time, and one could catch a whiff of sickly, cloying air as though up from a swamp. Parts of the area’s sewer system had failed, leaving gushing filth steaming in the gutters. Frost had started to gather on shop windows, and a few listless flakes of snow fell here and there, though not really enough to start to gather.
We moved, from storefront to storefront, under cover of Limerence’s silence spell, our hooves making no noise as we watched for some sign we’d been detected. If I’d been able to hear my own heartbeat, I’m certain it would have been pounding, but as it was I didn’t even have the comforting tromp of my shoes on the concrete.
My first sight of The Office was as a blot upon what few stars still hung above the skyline. Mist, or perhaps low clouds, had started rolling in from Uptown at some point, though it wasn’t thick enough yet to cut visible distance more than a few miles. It carried another scent, one separate from the befouling odor of the sewers: decay.
Everypony must have smelled it, but the only one to acknowledge it was Bones. He gave me a quick glance, then took off ahead. I lost track of him in the shadows of a deserted cafe across the street.
As we crept single-file down a thin alleyway between a furniture shop and a post-office, Limerence tugged at my sleeve. He pointed toward the ground near the end of the alley, where a dark brown stain had spread from one wall to the other, soaking into the pavement. Taxi hefted her P.E.A.C.E. cannon and tip-toed forward until she could touch the puddle. Lifting the sample to her nose, she gave it a sniff, then turned her eyes toward the sky and muttered a quick prayer, before wiping her hoof on the wall.
Limerence’s horn flickered, and he projected a thin, shining light up ahead of us, momentarily illuminating a circle on the next building. Three words were smeared on the plate glass window of a hoof-bag boutique in red-brown ‘paint‘: Death Lives Here.
I closed my eyes and fought to calm my breathing. A powerful wave of fear and the scent of my own burning flesh had risen up in an instant, leaving my chest throbbing as I wrestled the memories back down into whatever hole they spent their mornings moldering in. The wind shifted again, and the cloying stink of wet blood washed down the alley.
My knees, quite against my will, suddenly locked up. A rebellious quiver worked its way into my shoulders, and I shoved my hip against the brickwork. That smell was leaving me woozy and disoriented. Fear wriggled in my stomach like a whole pack of waltzing eels trying to escape through my navel.
A leg slipped across my back. One of those monsters must have snuck around behind us, swooped down, and was about to snatch me off the ground. I froze, still as a statue, and waited for death, which had surely come. Death was good. Death meant I didn’t have to be scared anymore.
Taxi’s hoof smacking me across the jaw wasn’t quite hard enough to dislocate anything essential, but it rocked my box good and hard. I stumbled, but she held me upright and grabbed my chin on the tip of her hoof, forcing me to look her in the eyes. Limerence offered her a questioning look, but she held up her toe and gestured him back.
Not dead. Not dying. No monsters. Not yet.
‘Gale, I know I’m asking this an awful lot lately, but we can’t afford this right now,’ I thought.
I sensed a faint disapproval from somewhere near my aorta.
‘There will be an invoice for this, eventually,’ it seemed to say.
‘I know I can’t keep this up, Gale. Three days. That’s all I ask. If I survive three more days, I’ll pay this piper, whatever it costs me.’
Adrenaline flooded out of my system, and I went limp for a second as my limbs seemed to unwind like those of a clockwork doll whose spring has suddenly snapped. Taxi caught me and held firm until I could stand again. I turned a weary expression on her, and she patted my shoulders, mouthing the words ‘Are you okay?’
‘Just flashbacks,’ I returned.
Bones stuck his skull out of the dark shadows at the end of the alley and waved us forward. His front legs were sticky with something red, but his hooves were clean as ever.
“All clear up ahead,” he said, or rather, projected. “You lot can still hear me under that spell, right? We can probably drop it, for now. There’s nopony outside of the Office, although I got a bit of movement from the upper interior floors. There are two empty guard barracks, with ten cots each. I think their perimeter guard was that group of corpses back with the truck.”
I nodded, and Limerence let his horn light die.
“What’s around the Office itself?” I asked as sound returned to my ears.
“It reminds me of a little military camp, though with all those explosions going on around the city, I’d say they pulled most of the active duty and just left the guards. Not the tightest ship I’ve ever seen, but then, P.A.C.T. were never army, much as they might have liked to play at it. I wish I could say that was all, but...”
“But?” Taxi prompted.
Bones glowing eyes darted off the way they’d come, and he popped a flask out of his pocket, took a quick blast, then stared into the open mouth of the container as though an easy answer might be in there.
“Damn,” he said, at last, his voice in my head so soft I instinctively leaned forward to hear him better. “I don’t know how else to say it. These bastards have been feeding the mutants. Best I think you just come and see, since we have to pass through to get up there. Be careful. I couldn’t find any snipers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”
Taxi’s teeth ground against one another loud enough to sound like a fork scratching a plate.
“Feeding them?!” she hissed.
“You heard me. The Office exterior is safe enough, so long as they haven’t changed the security protocols. If they have...well, I’m glad I got to meet my grandson before being pulverized.” Trotting out of the other end of the alley, he pointed towards another across the street. “Follow me. Keep to the darkness and try not to breathe through your nose.”
----
It was good advice and lasted approximately three minutes, right to the moment we came within sight of the camp.
Rounding end of one final alley which abutted two former luxury fur-salons - their windows shattered, walls riddled with bullet-holes, and their contents looted - I paused just long enough for the smell that’d been gradually creeping up to suddenly choose that moment to hit me in the face like a lead-weighted slugger. I’d smelled death plenty in my career, but someone usually made some effort to clean up after a corpse. Few bodies, in my experience, were left to sit where they died. Even fewer were left to be chewed apart by bored, magical predators in a public square.
The Office stood like a squat, black tombstone over a large courtyard, surrounded on all sides by what must have been a rather pretty public garden at one point, though there was nothing beautiful about what remained. Four walls of shops and cafes surrounded the garden with a thin street separating them from the plants and walkways. In the red light filtering through the thick clouds, the Office itself looked unsettlingly like a gaping hole in the air, with only a few lights inside breaking up the stark blackness of the structure.
A wrought iron fence, approximately twice head height with spiked tips lining the top of it, ringed the outside of the garden. I could make out some irregular shapes on top of those spikes, but it was unclear what they might be. Behind the fence, the camp itself was little more than a couple of green tents and sandbags. There was a small parade ground out front of the tents only a few dozen paces wide, an ugly slash across the greenery. Beside it were stacked piles of what might have been cages for animals, comprised of bars and thick wire.
A thick, black cloud buzzed like a living miasma, hanging above the camp and, in particular, the gate.
At the sight of it all, my cutie-mark twinged hard enough to send me shying sideways into the wall. I stood there, rubbing my hip against the bricks until the scorching sensation began to die down enough that I didn’t feel like I was being set on fire, again. Thankfully, my talent didn’t come with the smell of burning skin, but it still gave me a bad moment.
“Hardy? Your talent?” Taxi asked, softly.
“Yeah,” I muttered, pulling my hat off and fanning my thigh with it. “Haven’t felt something like that since...well, I’m sure I must have, but I can’t remember when.”
“Mine is...mine is doing something, too,” she muttered, then put a hoof to her forehead.
“You alright?”
“Just...just give me a minute.”
Limerence’s horn flashed, then he pulled back a couple of steps. “Detective, there is an active scanning field down there. Anyone who gets within ten meters of that fence is going to get pinged.”
“Shouldn’t matter,” Bones murmured, tapping my revolver through the sleeve of my coat. “Crusader was designed as a perfect stealth weapon. They didn’t leave anyone in camp. Too bad. I’d have liked to try to interrogate one of their officers.”
“I’m no strategist, but isn’t that a bad idea? Leaving the camp empty?” Limerence asked.
“You’re right. You’re no strategist,” Bones chuckled, patting my friend on the back. Limerence gave him an offended look, but my grandfather ignored it as he scratched at an eye-socket with the tip of his hoof. “The camp itself isn’t valuable. It’s what’s they’re protecting that’s valuable. Like I said, there’s movement inside the structure. I give odds that they won’t come out for us. They’ll wait for us to breach, then set up a line of fire somewhere inside. I’d imagine, considering their vanguard didn’t come back and hasn’t reported in, that they’re expecting a small army.”
“I’d hate to disappoint them,” I said, then glanced at where my driver was standing, only to find her absent. “Sweets?”
I looked back and forth until I spotted Taxi just down the street, heading for the front gate of the camp. She wasn’t precisely galloping, but there was a certain urgency in her stride that I tended only to see when she was angry about something. Her hooves clicked on the pavement as she marched along, eyes fixed on the gate or something near to it.
Failing entirely to heed Bones’s warning about potential snipers, I cantered after her, my armor squeaking loudly in my ears.
“Sweets, dammit, stop!” I snapped, grabbing her tail in my teeth. I wasn’t really prepared for her to drag me forward a few steps, so I almost landed on my chin when she did.
“You need to let go of me,” Taxi whispered.
I spat her tail out and worked my jaw for a second as the fetid stench from the camp sent my stomach into convulsions, before subsiding. We were directly in front of the gate now, but my focus was on my driver. Something about her was subtly different. Her shoulders were straight and squared, but nothing in her posture indicated tension; just readiness.
“Sweets, what’s going on?” I asked. “What is your talent saying?”
Tearing her eyes from the gate, she looked down, and I felt as though a rat with very cold feet had just scampered right up my tail. There was nothing truly different about her face, but if my own perceptions hadn’t confirmed it for me, the sudden sensation of my cutie-marks being doused in ice water would have. She wasn’t so much looking at me as looking through me.
‘That’s not Sweets.’
I scooted back on the pavement. Some instinctive part of my psyche knew I was suddenly in considerable danger. The tiger was in the cage with me, though I couldn’t see or hear it, just yet.
“Am I st-still talking to my driver, here? I’ve d-done enough of this possession crap lately...” I stammered, then trailed off. For some reason I couldn’t summon my usual glibness. Her eyes were glittering as she watched me, unblinking, barely breathing.
“I shine,” she replied. Her voice sounded odd, off kilter, and far too monotone for Taxi.
I stared at her blankly for several long seconds.
“What?” I said, dumbly.
“The other is gone, for now. She is not needed. Now, Justice...look up.”
“W-what?”
“Look up!”
----
To be clear, thus far, this was only the third or fourth weirdest thing Sweet Shine had ever done in my presence. I’d seen her destroy at least two hotel rooms with an explosive cake. I’d witnessed her high as a kite and chewing on a yak’s leg. I’d seen her climbing a radio tower to hang a declaration of peace-to-all-nations from a truly massive flag she’d apparently sewn in her spare time.
I’ve known since we were small and before I thought of her as my driver that Sweet Shine was not a normal pony. It’s on the tin. That said, even if she’d laid me out, kicked the crap out of me, and probably shortened my lifespan a few years with worry on a few occasions, I’d never felt endangered by her. Sure, I’d seen her kill Stone Shine, but that was an act of something like mercy. She’d even been careful not to take lives in the fight against the Cult of Nightmare Moon.
More than anything, I think the knowledge that she would kill if pushed had been subsumed under years of comfortable coexistence, a bit like living in a shark tank. The story of how she lost her cutie-marks was unavoidable if you were part of the department, but it’d been elevated to easily dismissed legend. She didn’t bring it up and nopony with half a brain was willing to poke that particular sleeping bear.
It was undeniable fact, however, that Sweet Shine killed an entire building full of mob enforcers, alone, armed with only a knife, after sawing off her own cutie-marks. Even after she’d told me the general outlines of the story, it was maddeningly short of specifics. It left open a heap of questions I didn’t really want to answer, but there was one that remained chief amongst them: how had my driver recovered from what her father did to her?
Stone Shine tortured her. He’d abused her mind and body in ways most adult ponies wouldn’t have survived. Despite what he’d done to her memories, Taxi was a ferocious fighter when provoked, and had been ever since we were both kids.
Strange, then, that she came out of all of that after a few years of therapy as a largely functional mare. Her talent still gave her fits, but so long as we were together, she knew I wouldn’t lead her astray; my own talent, much as I might hate it sometimes, keeps me on the straight and narrow.
That left the killer, the pony who’d murdered her father, Astral Skylark, and who knew how many others.
Where did the monster live when there was no one who needed killing?
----
My teeth were chattering as I wrestled my gaze away from Taxi’s. It was very much the sensation of forcing oneself not to look at a poisonous viper inches from your nose. Turning my gaze upward, I swallowed a sharp breath. My stomach lurched.
Heads.
The objects on the spikes were heads.
My back legs scraped at the pavement until I could get them under me. I scrambled a few steps away, momentarily forgetting my driver was there as I found myself staring into the glassy eyes of a dead stallion, his blackened tongue protruding from his muzzle. An ugly, glowing green scar was cut into his forehead.
Slowly, the eyelids of the dead pony blinked as his pupils swiveled to look down at me.
The severed, mounted head blinked, again. Gradually, the other heads took notice as well. Their empty gazes swung down to peer, owlishly, in my direction.
I opened my mouth to scream, only to have something hard and cloth-covered shoved between my teeth. It tasted of old tobacco. Realizing it was one of Bones’s legs didn’t help my desire to shriek. I just stood there, making a muffled whimpering sound, unable to move. My knees were locked tight, and all I could do was wheeze into my grandfather’s femur.
Limerence broke the spell by stepping in front of me and blocking my view of the heads. He sat, took my face in both front hooves, and put his forehead against mine. I felt his horn warm up, and then my body started to relax. My legs went rubbery, and I sank to the sidewalk.
“Be calm, Detective. Breathe.”
“B-but there’s-”
“Shhh...I know. I will disenchant them. Shut your eyes.”
Much against my will, my eyelids snapped shut.
He let go of my face, and then I heard him moving, followed by a soft buzz of magic.
“Necromancy?” Bones asked, his mental voice carrying a dangerous note.
“Of course,” Lim replied, matter-of-factly. “A spell to allow the caster to see through the eyes of a corpse. I suppose this would be the reason the building is poorly guarded.”
“If I find the pony that did this--”
Limerence cut him off. “Then you’ll leave them alive until I’ve extracted every last iota of magic from their bodies, else nothing you do to them will make one bit of difference. We face a necromancer. They tend to think of violent death as an inconvenience.”
The sound of spellwork faded and died.
“You can look now, Detective,” Limerence murmured.
Bones pulled his slightly damp sleeve out of my mouth, and I sat there, eyes still closed, struggling not to hyperventilate.
“You need to open your eyes, Justice,” Taxi said, still in that frighteningly emotionless voice.
I blinked a few times as my breathing worked its way back to normal. The heads were still mounted on their spikes, but the runes had gone dark and they were no longer staring at me. I did my best to relax, but there are some circumstances where the best a person can manage is not losing bowel control.
“Are you alright, Detective?” Limerence asked.
“I...I think so,” I replied.
“Then you’ll have to excuse me a moment.” Turning on his back legs, Lim trotted to the gutter at the edge of the sidewalk. Leaning over, he delicately held his mane out of his face with one hoof and quietly puked in the drain.
“Sometimes forget you younguns haven’t seen much death, yet,” Bones murmured, shaking his head.
Limerence held up a leg, then heaved again, and once more, before unfolding his kerchief from his pocket and carefully wiping his mouth with it.
“Death is not at issue,” the young stallion replied, looking down at the cloth, then tossing it into the gutter. “I have seen death. I have seen much death. That? That was not death.”
“T-those weren’t--” I started to ask, but Limerence shook his head.
“Those were the remains of living souls, Detective,” he murmured, then coughed and straightened his collar. His lips were drawn into a thin line as he said it.
I was in no condition to process evil on that scale, but my heart rate seemed to be roughly back to normal, at least for a taster of what I suspected were things to come. My stomach was empty enough that I didn’t feel the need to have my lunch join Lim’s, but existential terror doesn’t produce near the same reaction in me that it did in him. Casting one last look at the heads, fighting the impulse to recognize any of them or count how many of them might be foals, I tried to bring the goal back to the forefront of my mind.
‘Get inside. Destroy the Scry. Don’t let anyone else die. Right. Good.’
The sound of clattering hooves on pavement snapped my head around and I saw Taxi, already through the gate and moving through the camp toward a long trench dug off to one side. I wrangled my legs into motion and stumbled after her. Through the gate, the permeating scent of death and decay was even stronger.
“Sweets, stop! Come on--”
“Justice. See this. It will give you conviction.”
I dug my hooves into the pavement and slid to a stop some meters from the ditch.
“I don’t need to see a heap of bodies,” I said, softly.
Sweet Shine or Shine or whatever she was, turned to me, then moved closer.
“Then you will not be prepared to leave a heap of bodies behind you,” she whispered, before grabbing my mane in her teeth and yanking me forward. I struggled, but it was like fighting a tidal wave. My hooves slipped, scattering gravel as she pulled me toward the ditch.
“Dammit, Bones, help me!” I yelped.
“Help you what? You want me to brain her?”
“No, but--”
That ugly burn in my cutie-mark had intensified until I was ready to scream, but I could only moan as she dragged me toward the pit. She had me, and whatever freakish well of strength was driving her didn’t seem to have a limit. The smell was bad enough, but I couldn’t force my eyes closed even as she hauled me to the edge.
----
You’d think I’d have seen enough bodies to stop being shocked by piles of them. How much variance could there be? One pile of corpses is much like any other.
Unless of course it isn’t.
----
They didn’t eat the heads.
I don’t know what cruelty must have lain in the hearts of those creatures, but they’d carefully preferred everything below the neck, and not one of those remains lying in the ditch was without a terror-stricken expression frozen on their grey faces. Little was left besides scraps, but the bastards had made certain their prey suffered. I stood there, and slowly felt the fear slip back into the rear of my mind as something else took over.
My shoulders relaxed.
The bodies were chewed, and most of the meat was gone, leaving skeletons and scattered ribcages. There must have been a reason they left the skulls intact. Why? Possibly poor interactions with the spell conservancy, or potentially issues with digesting brain matter.
Irrelevant.
So, they’d kept the ponies in the cages, then shoved them into the pit for the mutants to eat.
Why these ponies in particular? Random? No, they were all adults. No foals amongst their number. Relatively even gender spread.
The bones of several looked strangely deformed, as though something had begun to alter them and somehow been unable to complete the job.
‘These are failed transformations,’ I thought.
Failed transformations fed to the successes. That made sense according to the philosophy of the Family. They’d fed the ancestors who failed to whatever it was that lived in the pylon in the basement of their mansion.
‘Why have them eat the weak? Better question. Why are there no other species besides ponies in this ditch? Surely they had no compunctions about killing children or non-pony species.’
The transformation magic relied upon eating meat. It was triggered by it. If Swift hadn’t had Tourniquet to drain off the excess magic in her system, mightn’t she have continued along the path until she was fully transformed?
Why did she dislike Essys so? Targeted conditioning? No. Food for the conservancy. Eating those with magic in their bodies must speed the transformation. Eating those made of magic, even moreso. Why not unicorns? Why not unicorns? Swift said she thought the Warden smelled delicious. Was it only self-control keeping her from trying to eat the Warden of Tartarus?
‘There are no other species here, because no other species is infected with the arcane conservancy that causes the mutation. With the raw magic in the bodies of those transforming as an incentive to both eat and fight, those who survived the pit were the best killers. Eating the skulls would mean eating the spellwork itself and might interfere with their development, so they left the weak alive, to suffer in fear as their half-mutated bodies were devoured by their...friends.’
It was so neat. So tight. So interwoven.
So...wrong.
My breathing slowed, and I swear I smelled, for an instant, the ocean. It was clean and clear, as though everything had crystallized in that single moment.
‘I will deliver them,’ I thought.
“Now, you see, Justice,” Shine said as I stepped away from the pit and turned to the Office. On the middle floors, I could see a few vague shapes moving behind the glass. It was hard to tell what they might be. Of course, it didn’t really matter. They were all going to die, anyway.
“I see. What do you need?” I asked, softly.
“Melee weapons. The other’s cannon is poor in close quarters, and I cannot kill them effectively with just her hooves.”
I called over my shoulder. “Limerence?”
“Do you mind if I don’t come any closer?” he asked, standing at the edge of the camp, one hoof with a piece of cloth over it pressed against his nose.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Give Taxi your knives.”
Lim’s voice quavered. “Detective, this is all very strange. I thought we were sneaking in. I don’t understand what’s going on-”
“You don’t have to understand, Lim,” I said, sharply. “Give her your knives.”
“My...my knives?” he stammered, putting his leg across his chest.
“Yes. All of them. Keep the staff.”
With a skeptical look, he lit his horn and tugged the buttons on his vest loose, revealing a strange jacket of some sort that was lined with two rows of blades, short and long, in clasped sheaths, everything from a few dozen scalpels to something that might have been a dirk. There were too many of them to count. Carefully unzipping the front, he shrugged out of it and levitated the whole thing the few meters between us to lay at Taxi’s hooves.
Without a word, she snatched the jacket up and pulled it over her shoulders. I moved to her side and pushed her mane out of the way so I could adjust the straps on her back to fit her thicker frame. She held her braid out to one side, then pulled a long, sharp-looking hunting knife from a scabbard on her side and offered it to me.
I stared at it for a moment, then nodded and quickly applied the edge to her braid, sawing it off with one swift motion. It fell across my hoof, and I sighed, pocketing it. If she died, it would be good to have something to lay on her grave.
“Bones?”
The skeleton was standing back there, watching us, a cigarette glowing between his teeth. “You find what you need in that hole?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. Can you get the front door open?”
“Doubt they changed my codes, though I won’t count those chickens before the eggs are hatchin’. What’s the plan?”
“I’m done planning,” I replied, turning to the imposing edifice of The Office. A straight concrete path wound down to the dark entrance “Lim? What’s this place used for these days?”
“My research indicates the bottom floor was a small shopping center,” he said, giving the pit full of bodies a wide berth as he moved onto the sidewalk up to the still turnstile doors. “It is or was until recently the ‘Crusades Memorial Center’. There is a plaque inside with the names of several former servants of the crown. Above that, the Dunder Hill Law Firm, who you will be unsurprised to hear are a subsidiary of Umbra, Animas, and Armature. The top floors are owned by a...well, a shell corporation whose primary purpose seems to be to own this building.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if Apple Bloom still owned it through some crazy heap of paperwork back in time,” Bones commented. “It’d be like her to lease a building below a portal to one of the nastier levels of Tartarus to a bunch of starched up lawyers.”
“You will need this,” Taxi said, passing me her P.E.A.C.E. cannon.
I hefted the heavy beast across my chest and wiggled the strap over my shoulders. Tipping the chambers open, I quickly read the ends of the first three chunky grenades in the drum: flashbang, smoke, and magical overload. Perfect breaching rounds.
“Bones, you’re leading the way. Get us to the main door and get it open,” I ordered.
“Thenwhat? Come on, colt, fill me in. We want to sneak in, there’s about six places we can do it.”
I turned my collar up against the frosty air and shook my head. “We’re not sneaking anywhere. This isn’t a stealth mission anymore.”
The glowing lights in Bones’s eyes vanished for a second, and I realized he’d blinked at me.
“Junior, this is a might queer, even for me. You can’t be meaning to walk right in the front…door...”
Taxi had already started moving toward the building, but paused to wait for me to catch up. We walked, side by side, until Limerence darted up and joined us, followed a moment later by a reluctant Bones. Lim kept shooting sideways glances at my driver, but she didn’t seem to notice. That, or she didn’t care.
I kept my eyes moving, looking for potential ambushers, but Taxi seemed completely assured of herself. She made no attempt to creep or keep low, electing instead to march purposefully along with her gaze locked on the doors. Being as it would have been awkward to watch my best friend wandering into a sniper’s fire without at least providing the possibility that I’d take the first bullet, I stayed at her side.
The wind was picking up, wailing over the camp and offering some slight relief from the smell.
We stopped at the foot of three short flights of stairs headed up to the turnstiles, which were both locked shut. I couldn’t see any sort of keypad or mechanism to open the doors, and the glass seemed thicker than what even our weapons might penetrate, short of the Crusader. I glanced over at Bones.
“Can anypony inside see us out here?” I asked.
He shrugged, his spine rattling softly. “Through an inch of rocketproof, bulletproof, military-grade glass? Probably not. The building has an independent generator, though. Power might be off in this part of town, but if there are cameras, they can see us.”
“Why the severed heads if they have cameras?”
“Those are not for the guards inside,” Limerence murmured. “They are for the necromancer. Still, that leaves us with the questions of whether he told them, and exactly how many we face inside.”
Taxi’s lips peeled off of her teeth into a nasty snarl. “Nine creatures. They have no minds. The firing line is across from the stairs. Four are on the balconies above and five behind cover below. Eight more on the floors above.”
“If I ask how she knows that, is the answer going to keep me up nights worse than not knowing?” Bones asked.
“Yes,” I said, then pointed at the doors. “Stack up and prepare to breach. I’ll send in some smoke, a flashbang, and something to disrupt their casters. Then we wait until it’s quiet.”
He shifted his weight, then sighed and trotted up the steps. “And I thought ponies were nuts when I was your age.”
Stopping in front of the doors, he edged sideways, then counted three glass panels down, and two to the left, before pressing the bottom of his hoof against a seemingly innocuous section of wall. It beeped, softly, and a panel slid open to reveal a keypad. He pressed a few buttons, then stood back as a crystal jutted from the wall.
“Now is the moment of truth, kiddies.”
A thin ray of blue light ran over his body, starting at his hooves, then moving to his head.
“May I ask what that is?” Limerence inquired.
“Skeletal scan. You can fake a magical signature if you’re willing to saw off a horn, and hauling around somepony’s eyes for a retinal is easy, but you have to carry a whole body for this one. Let us hope she didn’t decide the pony needed proper marrow for this, or we’re in deep.”
After a moment, the machine seemed to consider, then a soft, feminine and slightly robotic voice said, “Welcome, Agent Egg Head. It has been thirty-seven years and sixteen days since your last activity. Office systems are presently compromised. Internal defenses: down. External defenses: down. Contingency system: down. External communications: down. Emergency communications: down. Armory self-destruct sequence ninety-two percent complete; four prototypes unaccounted for. Vault defenses compromised; portal is open. Please report to Agent Blooming Death that repairs will be necessary.”
“Will do, Ms. Strong,” he muttered, then looked up at us. “Sorry, the girl who recorded the voices was named...eh, never mind.” He prodded a few more buttons, then stepped back and moved around to one side of the sliding glass doors. “Alright, once I hit this button, those doors are coming open. Since you’re not standing in a puddle of your own pee, I’m assuming you know what you’re doing. You want to give a speech or something, first?”
Taxi drew a knife from her harness and stuck it in her teeth, blade side out. She pulled another and held it in the crook of her leg, then nodded at me. Her glazed eyes were still empty.
My cutie-mark burned. My heartbeat was steady.
‘I will deliver them.’
I hefted the P.E.A.C.E. cannon and moved to the opposite side of the doors from the keypad, then disengaged the giant gun’s safety.
“Do it.”
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There's a point at which you just see everyone that signed on as unrefutably shoot first, and shoot again if alive.
This fully reached the point that everyone thats signed on gets whats coming to them. and 5 shots left, going to be interesting when he shoots the next one.
Wow.
You always deliver.
I haven't read the story yet but I admire the fact that it has over 1M words.
8845241
OP always delivers.
8845243
Give it a go. It's more of a serial than a cogent story, although it *does* have a coherent narrative that is carrying through the whole thing.
-Chessie
I've been reading this story for a while now, never left a comment or anything. But I gotta say, this has become one of my favorite stories of all time. It always helps make my day when I see a notification pop up. Cannot wait for the next one.
Sidenote, have you thought about adapting it to non mlp and potentially publishing it or something?
8845308 I am actually intent on writing a proper book. Don't worry, the writing style, insane characterization, world-building, and all other such stuff will probably translate over into most of what I write.
-Chessie
Wow. All I can say is wow. A cliffhanger, but a good place to break. Right now everybody is okay for certain definitions of "okay." Taxi seems to have reverted to and gone all "River Tam." These "Reavers" will not know what hit them. I wait in anticipation of the next exciting adventure and will stay tuned. Awesome, Chessie, just awesome.
8845446 I mean, you'll have to get used to the cliffhangers. Those tend to come at inconvenient moments and quite regularly.
-Chessie
Christ alive...you just keep finding new and interesting ways to demonstrate "shit's fucked up" in this story...
If Bones could still access something of The Office systems, even if its the door, would it be worth trying to reinitialise anything, or would those be down as alternate sets of deadmans boobytraps, the enemy has already compromised them and are just waiting to activate them one way or the other to make things most unpleasant?
If there are 4 prototypes missing is the Gun one of them, or are they something new and most unpleasant at all?
The Griffin gets to play the Bard with his Bo Staff?
Well, it looks like Taxi's Mark decided "Screw it, these fuckers need death.". Bout time.
Mutants, necromancers, and grenadine launchers, oh my! I couldn’t help but think of that Western music “wah wah wah” bit playing as Hardy, Shine, Bones, and Lim walk side by side towards one hell of a fight that would make even the hardiest of Old West sheriffs run screaming for the hills.
Now just gotta wait for the next chapter. Coming soon on Starlight Ovet Detrot:
pandoraboxx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/resized_twbb-meme-generator-there-will-be-blood-oh-yes-a-whole-fuck-load-of-blood-b905a7.jpg
Every chapter either has me sick, scared, laughing, or something in-between all those. Good writing. Can't wait for the next chapter.
Messed up...but I like it. Keep up the great work. I'm giving you a thumbs up. Can you see it? No? How 'bout now? Still? Well...uh...just trust me on this one. My thumb is pointed upward for you right now.
Sooo, The Scholar is a cannibal... Didn't see that coming.
When Hardy was looking into the pit there, I was getting some strong Rorschach vibes from him. I like it.
And Swifty was as adorable as ever.
Looks like these guys in the Office are about to get the living shit kicked out of them. God I hope one of them is Broadside. Also, what did the computer mean about that self-destruct sequence? 92% complete? is it still in progress? That seems like an important bit of information that the computer should have mentioned.
I wonder about the family. How much karmic debt can you really rack up when they have been raising each other from birth to consider everything done so far to their fellow ponies to be "acceptable"? And this has clearly been going on for generations.
The concepts of right and wrong are so different these ponies might as well be an alien species from another planet serving what normal ponies would consider unfathomable ideals or gods (likely both).
So is the karma meter and the possibility of redemption even a "thing" at this point for any of them, or is "kill it with fire" all that remains for any family member? And what does that say about those would wield that fire, to purge? That ponies pushed far enough become like what they battle? Will our team of heroes be required to be purged themselves when it's all over for being "contaminated"? Will any pony try to recover their inherent "ponyness"? I hope their not too far gone.
Because of this line
and the spontaneous singing that ponies do, I am now imagining all the ponies (Mindless or not) in Detrot singing along in a massive chorus to a darker version of "Deliver us" from "Prince of Egypt".
It is gradually becoming both grander and darker the more i think about it. Like the good guys are singing it with hope, the bad guys are singing it as a challenge and all the mindless ones are singing it because they just want to be delivered onto death.
I'm imagining it in like a movie and the scene is always jumping from the good guys struggling to Hardy and co cutting a swathe through the enemy and then to the evil ponies looking on from up on high, back to Hardy and then to the mindless biters and back again.
It is fun and scary and manages to lay a serious tension over the whole scene.
8846482
Heh. Actually I was having some Batman Flashbacks myself. I think a few songs from The Dark Knight would be Very appropriate for this chapter.
-Angel of Team Angelfang
8847049
Oh. Well, sure! Just one thing, though -- is it all right if I catch up with the rest of the story before doing that?
8847371 Oh! Yes, of course. I do love having people read through and add things. I fixed the issues you pointed out, incidentally.
-Chessie
Why is it that an 8,000-word chapter never seems to be enough. I can't wait for more.
Death had descended into Detrot once more and it will not leave again until it has its due.
All who stand against it, shall perish.
All who cower and hide from it, shall perish.
All who do evil in its presence, shall perish.
All those that cry out for retribution and justice, shall be answered.
All those righteously fearful and true ponies, shall be spared.
For this Death is unstoppable. It is unavoidable. And above all, it is the fury of Karma incarnate.
ALL HAIL THE SHINE!
8849494
You'll be seeing a few from me at times, lol
8849553 I will survive, I'm sure.
-C
I see what you did there.
8850814 Heh, you're the first!
-C
All right then... you've delivered on your promise of escalation and they haven't even gotten into the Office yet. (Hopefully when they do I'll actually be able to read it in a timely fashion.)
On top of everything else, this definitely seems to mark that slightly uncomfortable point when the heroes in whom we're invested toss aside most traditional ethical considerations because the situation has just gotten that bad....I mean, that actually pretty much happened shortly after the Darkening if not long before, but it's never been vocalized as clearly as here.
Something about this just keeps me reading, even though I've read enough stories like this to see what's coming next. Of course Swift can't help but give a funny goodbye one liner, of course they're feeding the mutants their maltransformed friends to further fuel the magic and suffering.
But I guess there's some sort of spark in your writing. I wish I could figure out what it is. Maybe it's why the end scene gives me flashbacks to the slow motion action montages of Deadpool
8867994
Considering I was watching Deadpool while writing the end scene, I don't think you should be surprised.
-Chessie
I'm imagining this song playing when the doors open, and all hell breaking loose while they walk in calmly delivering their justice.
8871643
Makes sense
Damn son can't b'lieve you still rolling the train along. good stuff mang ^^
8876628 I hope the train ends soon. The story has a sort of a life of its own.
-Chessie
i.imgur.com/cvHXJdn.jpg
Drew a Swift to calm the irresistable impulse to draw some ponies. powerful
8879474 Awww, I love that pic! That's adorable!
-C
Finally caught up! Holy shit has this been a rollercoaster of a ride...
I woke up after reading this and my dreams calculated that an orbital siege platform was the only way for the story to end happily. Ether that or Time Turner.
I do like OSPs.
8885742 Errr...Orbital Siege Platform might be a little under-powered...
-Chessie
8886257
Yes. The fact that I dreamt those two things is a testament to how bad things have gotten.
>>Chessie
Well, I will now!
I do wonder if she gave anyone else goggles or not.
The concerned face of someone who sees Justice swiftly approaching!
That describes sooo many beings ...
Uh, no, Hardy, it's perfectly clear.
Missing a space. Also, obviously, the "what" is to begin dispensing ballistic justice.
Yeeeeaaah, some lizards may be able to grow back lost limbs, but losing said limbs is still very traumatic for them both physically and mentally.
out of true? Out of tune?
Now to turn on audible and picture WoT as ponies and have some confusing dreams