• Published 6th Nov 2016
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The Red Sun Rises: Homefront - The Atlantean



Crimson Dawn defends Equestria from King Sombra as Princess Celestia allies with an American fleet. All of Equestria must work to prevent Sombra from ruling the world and expanding his empire into that of Earth.

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17. The Battle of Canned Apple-lis Forest

“Why the hell can’t anything go according to plan for once?!” Crimson cried. “At least get me an idea of the battle!”

The Equestrian camp was in chaos. Unicorns kept ranks every so often, blasting everypony within range with a Changeling detection spell. The outer area was overrun, with tents burning and ponies fighting whoever the hell they thought was the enemy, which was anypony in a five-meter radius of the frightened ponies. With no way to determine friend from foe, it was every pony for himself. Changelings constantly charged the Unicorn line around the command tent, luckily held back by the tight wall of pointy keratin horns and magic spells. But that luck wouldn’t last long. More of Chrysalis’s minions smarmed the dwindling Equestrian lines, replacing every one down with three fresh drones.

The day had gone perfectly fine before then. Crimson introduced Crystal Snow to his officers, got Captain Reynolds to blockade the coast, and was halfway through putting all the redeployments on paper. Then he was ready to call it a day as Celestia’s sun came low on the horizon. The Harmony-damned Changelings came in at that treacherous time when you couldn’t see a thing because the silhouettes of trees covered them. And they fought through the night. Hours before the sun’s light rays even begun to curl around the horizon to give the sky a warm early-morning glow, the first layer of trenches was covered in a thick, growing layer of green and red blood. Captain Shadow lasted longer because his Unicorn magic identified the others, but he eventually retreated to the second trench line. Directly in front of the tents.

Behind the captain, ponies hurriedly threw together a third line, this time earthenworks. The hastily-made glorified hump in the ground would never stand against a Changeling assault, but they had to try. If only somepony could have said something about this before it happened, not during, he wouldn’t be in this awful position.

Squinting down his sights, he saw an exposed Changeling and fired a ball of lead into its shoulder and out the other side, right through one of those Swiss cheese holes speckled all over these guys. Damn. He cocked and fired the repeater again, this time impaling the head.

A shriek pierced the air and a small amount of smoke lazily moved with the wind from a five-inch gun on the bow of USS Ticonderoga. The five surface ships under her command fired as well, slamming their high-explosive rounds into the Changeling camp and advancing troops. Chrysalis’s drones went everywhere, their bodies more limp than sliced cheese. One shell split the air at astonishing speed, but was merely flicked on a different trajectory by a green blast of magic.

Crystal Snow saw it as well and bolted to the tent. A Unicorn buzzed the spell over her, letting the officer in. “Crimson! She’s here!”

“What?” The colonel hadn’t had a clear picture of the disintegrating situation all night, and the sudden news took him surprise. “Chrysalis?”

She nodded.

“Well, fuck.” Crimson quickly regained his calm outward appearance and tried to take control of the problem. “I’ll take care of her. Have Silver Comet get a rearguard action in place so we can get the hell out of here if we need to.” A screaming shell zipped overhead, nearly taking the tent out of its stakes. “Those things are gonna be the death of me! At least he’s helping.”

Crystal Snow found the real Silver Comet after a harrowing half-hour of dodging Changeling spells and whacking fakes. She told him the plan, which he hated, but followed anyway. A few ponies went with him, blasting Changelings into pools of green blood and black chunks. Crystal turned around to find a tall black bug standing over her.

“Ah, a Crystal Pony. One who has betrayed her kind.” The queen’s electronic-raspy voice was unmistakable. “You will be a great trophy to give the King of Shadows!”

“No, she won’t.” A cold, deep voice, hardened from years of war, boomed across the battlefield. Crimson Dawn had donned his well-maintained steel Atlantean helmet, scratched from the many melee battles from the Atlantis-Dominion War. Also covering the red Pegasus was a raggedy uniform he hadn’t worn since the Final Stand of Atlantis. He held his repeater with his right wing, while his robotic left wing carried his officer’s short sword, still in its hard leather scabbard. “She will not be brought before Sombra, and neither will anypony in this army. You will fail.”

I will fail? Your pathetic attempt at an organized force is nothing more than a bunch of kids who go running back to their mothers as soon as the fighting starts. Only some kind of magical Deus Ex Machina can save you now.”

That’s it! “Are you sure?” Crimson pulled the trigger, putting a bullet into the Changeling guard next to Chrysalis. He fired again, but her magic deflected it into Crystal Snow. She fell with a cry that brought Crimson back several years. Fear flashed in his normally calm eyes, and Chrysalis knew she hit a nerve. The mare’s fall must’ve caused a flashback. She smiled as much as her oddly-shaped mouth could let her.

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Midnight Shadow hacked at every single Changeling he could find. He tired from the magical exertion, but never felt so alive. His every sense was heightened to an extent where he knew everything going on around him, seemingly slowing time down to fraction of its typical pace. With a maniacal laugh, Midnight whirled around and stuck his sword into a Changeling neck. Its green blood splattered all over his bloody head and body. Given a moment of reprieve, he wondered how long they’d been fighting.

The captain went back to hitting things with his sword. A Changeling body from one of the explosive shrieks hit him full in the face, and Midnight Shadow was knocked cold.

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Crystal Snow winced from the pain. A small hole went right through the side of her neck and warm, red blood oozed profusely out of it. She grabbed a rag from a dead Equestrian and wrapped it around her neck, using it as a loose tourniquet. She didn’t want to choke, just stop the bleeding. Right before she actually tied it off, her blood froze. It stopped as soon as a sub-zero wind chill hit her wound and continued when the temperature raised back a little.

My blood freezes at the first exposure to sub-zero air? It was a horribly chilling thought, to possibly freeze inside out. But she would’ve froze already if that was the case, so that left only one other thing: her crown’s jewels were only channels for the power she possessed over winter. She could use it if only she had the damned jewels! Or, if that means I’m best off during winter, I won’t have ice-queen powers, but I’ll be able to control the temperature. A much more reassuring though than the last one.

Glancing at Crimson, she saw his face still frozen in place, stuck in a time years before this. His flashback was going to get him killed if she didn’t do something. Queen Chrysalis stood there, taking her time to build up a spell that would surely kill the colonel. Her distant cousin. Crystal Snow would not - she would not - stand by while part of her family was killed off.

Noticing the movement out of the corner of her eye, Chrysalis turned to the Crystal pony. “Stop what you’re doing. I’d rather not kill you.”

“Then let me work. I’m patching a hole in my neck, no thanks to you.” Crystal retorted.

The Changeling queen rolled her eyes. At least the mare wasn’t going anywhere. With that wound, she wouldn’t even need a guard. “Take out the last of the resistance,” she hissed to a drone. Soon, she was the only one there besides the two incapacitated ponies. Chrysalis turned back to face Crimson, who had dropped his repeater and sword, staring in horror into the space.

Crystal Snow struggled to stand on her hooves. She panted heavily from the exertion, clenching her teeth together enough to prevent a scream of pain caused by moving her neck. “You will not succeed, Chrysalis.” Her voice was shaky, the queen noticed, probably from that bullet hole and being physically tired. “I told Princess Cadence I wouldn’t let some Harmony-damned asshole such as yourself walk into Baltimare if it was the last thing I do. And I intend on fulfilling that.”

Chrysalis, clearly pissed, turned once again at Crystal Snow - who timed it perfectly without even knowing. A five-inch armor-piercing round slammed into the unsuspecting queen’s face, shattering her skull and sending Changeling guts everywhere. Her decapitated body flew back at the recoil of the projectile, withering back down into the small body of a drone. The queen herself laughed hysterically behind Crystal.

“Did you really think that was going to work? I must say, you are one clever girl. But while you tied that ripped cloth around your neck, I had one of my drones replace me so that I may be safe from any antics one of you might’ve tried. My, my, my. I must say, this was a good game.” Chrysalis’s horn powered green. “However, I’m afraid you must die now.”

Crystal Snow now stood defiantly between the zoned-out Crimson and Queen Chrysalis. She picked up the repeater with her hooves, fumbling with the heavy device. How does he wield this thing with just his wing? Crystal thought as she dropped it on the ground. Chrysalis promptly flung it and the sword away with a levitation spell and a witch’s cackle. Behind the queen, a familiar-looking aluminum-coated face snuck up. He tackled the queen, bashing her head with a fair-sized boulder he’d picked up. Silver Comet!

With a final, agonizing roar, Chrysalis fired up a teleportation spell and Silver Comet jumped off before she finished it. The queen disappeared back to her camp, where a couple drones took a look at her head. The lieutenant’s boulder broke her skull in more than a couple places, fracturing it all the way down to her newly snapped collar bone. The Changeling queen would not be going into battle for a possible year if she healed properly. Time to retreat and recover. The Equestrian army would have to pay with their lives later.


Crystal Snow slumped into the hooves of her comrade. Silver Comet held the mare for a while as the field nurses tended to the more critically wounded. As he watched, the forest fires ignited by missed attack spells dwindled and died out. The red glow over the once-beautiful woods faded out with the later dawn, Celestia’s sun slowly rising to the east. Out at sea, the human warships loaded helicopters with medical supplies, flying the stuff to the battleground along with doctors and nurses. The proud flag of the Equestrian army flapped in the light southerly breeze, tattered as it was. Apparently, somepony had pulled the flag from under rubble and raised it on a makeshift flagstaff. Below it flapped the Atlantean flag, Crimson’s flag.

Crimson snapped his head around in wonder. “What the hell happened?”

“Sir, you went into a flashback of some sort. If Major Snow hadn’t stalled Chrysalis and her goons for as long as she did, you’d be dead, and we’d be prisoners. As it was, I was lucky to save her life.” replied the lieutenant.

A weary Captain Midnight Shadow limped up the low hill to the group from his position in the second trench layer. He just woke up from the Changeling slamming into him because of a high-explosive five-inch round.

“Sir,” he shakily saluted the colonel. Crimson returned the salute, then walked over to the Unicorn.

“You have no idea how relieved I am to see you alive.” For a moment, the two embraced in a friendly, brotherly way. Midnight was about to respond when he saw a certain pink Unicorn on a stretcher.

“Oh, no. Not Strawberry!” He ran to his sister as fast as his tired legs could carry his slightly-dizzy self. “Strawberry Sunrise, don’t you die on me!”

The mare looked at her brother with her right lost-in-space eye. Her left had been destroyed, and even now gunk oozed from its socket. Both of the lieutenant’s ears were lost, but still retained some functionality. Her entire body was soaked in blood, both her own and Changeling, but nurses cleaned it up as fast as they could.

“Thank, you, Midnight,” she said softly, longingly, lonely. Her hoof reached up to her brother’s worried face one last time before it fell down and her head slumped.

“No! NO! NOO!!” Midnight cried, not in agony from his many wounds, but for the loss. A nurse from Ponyville, Redheart was her name, listened for a heartbeat and found none. She looked up at Crimson, tears in her eyes, and shook her head slightly. The colonel knew then his captain’s answer.

Lieutenant Strawberry Sunrise, sister of Captain Midnight Shadow, had died. One of the beat-up stallions carried next to her body looked up to the two officers and said, “Sirs, she did a hell of a job. Her one spell alone prob’ly saved fifty of us when we retreated to the sec’nd line. Seein’ her like this now, I can only imagine the loss. Just give’r a medal, sirs. She deserves it.” He saluted and was carried on.

Crimson brought his head up to stare out to sea. Aboard Ticonderoga waved Captain Reynolds, and Crimson waved back. He then turned to fixing his army. Even Chrysalis couldn’t completely destroy it, as a few regiments here and there still had enough strength to fight, but replacing those lost would take time. Time he did not have. He carried his eyes to the north, wondering if he would ever march upon Sombra’s hold and end this war before there was nopony left to fight it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Author's Note:

I lied. I had so much fun writing this, I stayed up late so I could get it out before school starts, or at least have it ready for when I come home. I'm sorry writing is so much fun!

Feedback appreciated!

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