Light Despondent Remixed

by Doctor Fluffy

02: City Of No Palms

Light Despondent Remixed
Chapter 2:
City Of No Palms

---

Got good intentions.
Isn't it enough? No, it is not enough.
The comprehension of letting yourself get charmed by a bluff is upon me:
There's nothing I can do,
There's always something I could do.
Where would I be if it wasn't for you?
So I just do what I'm supposed to do.
I watch you turn into
А siсkly biomass of black and blue.
Biting Elbows, City of No Palms

---

December 24, 2022
Dancing Day

Aegis wasn’t the only one who wanted an answer to that question. So, around Christmas Eve of 2022 or thereabouts, long after Kraber had joined the PHL, Dancing Day and her mother corner him in a PHL-held building’s library and demands answers.

He’s a few steps above a private in the PHL, now. His LMG (the very same one that Dancing Day remembers) leans against the chair as he pores over his book, some sci-fi from the fifties or sixties. He’s even got a pony friend in Aegis - a pony so very large that some humans could easily ride him like an earth horse. Currently, Aegis is lying on the floor, assault saddle and headset leaning against the wall, forelegs outstretched as he reads a book of his own.

They both look bone-tired.

“Why’d you do it?” Dancing Day asks, almost accusing him.

“What?” Kraber asks. He yawns and stretches. “What do you mean?”

“The HLF nearly had you kill me twice,” she says. “Why didn’t you?”

Kraber sighs and goes back to reading.

Dancing Day’s mother, Astral Nectar - a mare the color of red wine, with a black mane that had once been immaculately styled - trots up.

“Answer my daughter,” Dancing Day’s mother says, in that unique mommy way where she can make a question not a question. “As far as I can tell, we owe you our lives several times over - and we don’t know why!”

Kraber looks almost pained when he looks at Aegis, uncertain.

“Viktor,” Aegis says, “You don’t have to answer it.”

“Even if it’s not going to be a good answer,” Kraber says… “I’m going to be honest, sometimes I don’t even know.”

“What?” her mom asks.

Dancing Day’s jaw drops.

“Maybe I just imagined that for a moment, both of you could’ve been my family, and imagined that they wouldn’t have liked the person I turned into,” Kraber says. “Maybe I just realized what I was doing wasn’t right, and I just… lost the anger. I don’t know. I’m sorry for what I was like, I’m sorry for what I did, but… I just lost the ability to hurt a foal and her mother that day.”

“Whatever it is,” her mom says, “I’m glad you did. I just… I still have to ask. How did you end up here?”

“Oooooh,” Kraber says,” That is a weird one. I was actually writing up a film script for it…”

“The one where you wanted to be played by Sharlto Copley?” Aegis asks.

“Well who in the fok did you expect, Grant Bowler?” Kraber asks.

“Hold on,” Aegis says. “We’re probably going to need Yael for this. Mind if I head out for a bit? I’m going to need to give her a call.”

You aren’t the only one who decides to listen to Kraber. Aegis’ foals Rivet and Amber join in, along with a heavyset man with a bald pate like a bullet who introduces himself as Grayson. An ex-HLF woman named Elena. A number of PHL ponies like Babs Seed, Mixtape, Spitfire, Soarin', and many, many more.

Well. It seems Mr. Kraber’s gotten quite a turnout, Dancing Day thinks.

“Look,” Kraber says, “I’ll admit, I’ve tried to tell this story before. I’ve fokked up, I’ve missed certain details, I may not be as faithful as I hoped. So… here and now, I promise. I’m doing my best to get it right this time.”

Is this a reference? Dancing Day asks herself. This feels like a reference.

---

Kraber

August 5, 2022
Early Morning
7:23 AM

They got the call late at night or early morning, when the PER had taken half the town.

“-PER! Oh God, they’re everywhere! Someone! ANYONE! HELP!”

Defiance burst into life. People dug themselves out of beds, readying their rifles, shotguns, or the more esoteric weaponry they’d salvaged here and there.

Kraber was one of the first out of his tent. Unlike many of them, he hadn’t been sleeping. He’d just been reclining against a large, stolen pillow, reading a book, surrounded by firearms.

Well, it’s about fokkin’ time! he thought, shoving his arm through his LMG’s sling, and holstering his two pistols - a massive .50 Smith & Wesson revolver and a 3D printed .45 automatic with a double-stack magazine and a modified trigger guard he could press on to rack the slide. Then his pump-action shotgun.

The weapons clanked and juddered on his back as he dashed through the streets of the town, but he barely noticed. As much as it could be said to have streets. They were more muddy ruts between tents, scored through by tire tracks. All around him, he saw people doing much the same. There was Emil Geroux, a frenchman Kraber had met in Northern Africa, and one of Kraber’s closest friends, if not lovers. He was rushing out of a tent with an M4 in hand. Following him was an Englishman from Burlingham named Andrew Crossley, a blond, stubbly man of average height. The way the stories went, his girlfriend had been one of the first to be ponified.

He rushed by flags of nations destroyed by the Barrier, by mementos of lost cities, and even small monuments to Algernon Spader. “The man who saved the HLF.”

The man who stole them from Carter, Kraber thought. Besides, Spader was dead, and they followed Carter now. Or they would if he wasn’t in prison. It was sort of unclear at the moment who they followed, but Atlas Galt seemed to be the highest-ranking person in Carter’s absence.

And with luck, when they’d cast off some of Spader’s restrictions, they’d become something new. Something better.

Lovikov talked about that all the time. About unity. About working together with him for a common good, removing ponies from their world by any means necessary. And yet, there were those selfish kontgesigs who decided to work with ponies, or to follow Yarrow’s banner.

In Kraber’s mind, anyone in those categories equaled “fokkin’ moegoes who couldn’t see the invaders for what they really were.” The PHL, and those horsefucking traitors to the HLF like Romero.

By the time he and Emil made their way to Defiance’s fleet of APCs and other vehicles, Leonid Lovikov was already there in the driver’s seat of their favorite - a coal lorry as massive as could still fit on one lane of road. It’d been retrofitted with extra armor, homemade pneumatic spearguns, window-slits for weaponry, and a big snowblower on the bumper that could (and had) turn crowds of newfoals to red slush in the winter.

Lovikov and his friend slash lieutenant Rebecca Benning had added it on while they were drunk.

“Kraber! Emil!” Lovikov bellowed. His big frame barely seemed to fit in the driver’s seat, and his close-cropped dark hair seemed to scrape against the ceiling. “You ready to bring some hurt?”

“Aweh, my bru!” Kraber yelled, a huge smile on his face.

All around them were other HLF getting into vehicles of their own. Other APCs, some homebrewed and some not. A few lorries - or pickup trucks, as Americans called them - with mounted weaponry in the bed. Some motorcycles, too. Just behind them, Kraber could see Benning herself - one of Lovikov’s lieutenants.

She wore camouflage, and carried an AA12 shotgun on her back. She wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, and wore her short, fine black hair under a red, white and blue trucker hat. Going by what Kraber knew about her, she’d been essentially raised in American militia movements, never seeing real combat until the Purple Winter. She was in the passenger seat of one of the technicals, with Helen Blanchett behind the stolen .50 machinegun in the back. An HLF lieutenant everyone called Sully sat in the driver’s seat, a homemade hand-rolled cigarette lazily held between his fingers. He’d been one of the first people from New Hampshire to join with the Menschabwehrfraktion.

“Ready to roll, Vik?” Benning asked, a wide smile on her face.

“Aweh, you know it my suster!” Kraber smiled, climbing into the bed of the lorry. Crossley followed him, idly scratching his stubble.

“I have a feeling,” Benning said, still smiling, “It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

Kraber took the spot at the front of the lorry, LMG poking out just beside the lorry’s actual gunner, a sullen-looking chainsmoker named Dan.

Emil squeezed into the backseat of the truck, as a woman named Mariesa slid into the driver’s seat.

“So,” Kraber called down, “Wat gaan hier aan?”

“Town over in Maine’s got PER up its сра́ка,” Lovikov said. “Rumor is, the PER have got…”

Lovikov’s knuckles went white. Kraber could see Lovikov’s face in the rear-view mirror from his perch, and he couldn’t tell if the man’s face was apprehensive or bloodthirsty.

“They’ve got a weird earth pony helping them,” Lovikov said. “And they’ve got weirder newfoals after them too. So you know what that means.”

“Oh hell no,” Crossley gasped.

...Shieldwall! Kraber thought for about a second before any conscious thought was overtaken by a wave of white-hot rage.

“We’ll scalp and fokkin’ unmark that son of a whore,” Kraber snarled, surprised by the venom in his voice.

“Exactly,” Lovikov said.

The varknaaier’d been behind more PER atrocities than anyone could count. Kraber had been caught in the aftermath of more than a few. An airport in Egypt that had turned into a massacre. Destroying a dam, drowning hundreds of people and potioning anyone who’d come out of the waterlogged ruins. He’d destroyed bridges, railroad lines, and any arteries of transportation that he could, and potioned any survivors.

Kraber thought - but wasn’t certain - that Shieldwall had something to do with what happened to his family.

And then there was the question of what he did to you on potioning, if you were lucky. There were stories. About being Shaped into something else as you ponified. Not just a newfoal, or one of the grotesque new variants, but sometimes turned into something… other.

Kraber had seen enough to know that at least some of the stories were true.

---

It was by the time they were in the town’s outskirts that they heard the radio squealing in protest.

“Jag kan inte sova nej nej nej nej kan jy my help wie ek is vem ar jag HJALP MIG ben kim oldu sonra soğuk sonra s-s-soğuk sonra sıcak sonra soğuk sıcak laissez-moi mourir-”

It was like several people all clustered around a microphone. Whenever it switched languages, it’d be in a different voice. There was a buzzing, throbbing, almost rasping static in the background, and a strange distortion whenever the voice stuttered.

“What the fok is that, anyway?” Kraber asked, more annoyed than anything. Before the barely decipherable babble had interrupted them, he’d been listening to a song he liked. Which was a nice change of pace, the radio around New Hampshire was usually fokkin’ vrot, repeating the same overplayed songs over and over again, or that horrible one with the FOKKIN’ MONKEY NOISE!

He thought some of the word salad was Turkish. ‘Cold then hot then cold again?’ he wondered idly.

“No idea,” Lovikov said. “Always assumed it was interference from some pony говно́.”

“Eu não sei quem você pode ouvir isso, mas você tem que pará-los! Antes que seja tarde demais!” the inexplicable broadcast continued. “They’ll use us up, they’ll use you all up!”

Kraber watched Emil jolt up. It wasn’t usually in English. Far as Kraber could tell, it could be in virtually any language.

“Ular bizni chirigan tomosha qiladilar. Chceme, aby to skončilo. Nekončí. Nechtějí nás přemýšlet. Navždy. Ti o ba wa. Nwọn wá lati mu o gbogbo.”

‘It comes? They seek to end it all?’ Kraber thought. He knew a small amount of Yoruba.

“Whatever it is,” Emil said, “I don’t like it. It’s… it’s unnerving as hell.”

“Maybe it’s ghosts or something,” said Mariesa.

Kraber gave Mariesa an irritated look. “perdedrolle is fokkin’ fye,” he said, sneering slightly. “I’ve seen ghosts before. They don’t talk over the radio like this.”

Mariesa gave him a flat, annoyed look.

“Oh really?” the man asked. “Where was that?”

“Back in Boston,” Kraber said. “I was pretty young, but-”

“Something’s up ahead,” Emil interrupted.

It was difficult to say what made them stop. Maybe it was the wrecked car in the middle of the road. Maybe it was the burning house.

Or maybe it was the mass of flesh that had simply melted across half the road, and reminded Kraber of molten wax, or rubber stretched almost to the breaking point. Legs stuck out in almost every direction, and it was covered in purple fur.

“What the fok?!” Kraber hissed when he saw it.

But he knew what it was. An Abomination. Going by a manual he’d found - and burned - it was essentially a blank slate newfoal. A mass of flesh that Equestria could use as clay, and reshape into essentially any kind of pony they wanted.

“What the hell is this?” Crossley asked. “Oh, that is twisted.”

Just on the other side of the street, a man lay dead, the barrel of a rifle pressed to his chin.

“Leonid,” Emil said through gritted teeth. “Step on it.”

On another day Lovikov would’ve chewed Emil out for the insubordination, but he didn’t. He floored it, and the lorry rumbled forwards faster than before.

When they got to the town center, they saw a child - probably barely more than a teenager - rushing across the street, screaming. A blank-flanked earth pony newfoal chased him, a manic grin on its face.

“I’LL MAKE YOU SO HAPPY!” it howled, its orange fur glistening with what Kraber hoped was sweat.

Kraber and Dan stood, unsure of how to react. With a sudden burst of speed, the orange newfoal rushed forward, pinning the child against the wall.

There was a thud, and the newfoal drove one hoof down into the child’s shoulders. “LOOKHOW HAPPY I AM!” it screamed “DON’T YOU WANT TO BE THIIIIS HAPPY?!”

The child screamed as the newfoal reached for a vial of potion, contained in the bandolier around its neck.

In that split second, Kraber fired two rounds from his LMG. Each bullet hit the newfoal dead center, and upon impact the newfoal exploded. One foreleg spiralled up into the air, and blood splashed against the rest of the street.

“FOKKIN’ KILL!” Kraber crowed, laughing slightly as he pointed at the spatter of blood that had been the newfoal. “OH, FOKKIN’ KWAAI, HE’S FOKKIN’ EVERYWHERE! FOKKIN’ PRICELESS!”

Dan - in between chattering teeth, and quick wheezing breaths - managed to choke out something that might have been “good shooting.”

The child glanced up towards their truck, and their eyes widened. There was a huge smile on their face, an expression of palpable relief.

They kept it as they picked themselves up and ran into an alleyway.

A rocket impacted the building ahead of them, and the lorry squealed to a stop. The blast was strangely purple, almost as if…

Oh no.

“Menschabwehrfraktion!” Lovikov yelled, walking out of the truck, shotgun in hands. “GAS MASKS ON, TAKE COVER!”

They scrambled out of the APC, finding cover behind various buildings. Kraber slid into cover behind a bullet-pocked car, scanning the streets of the town for any signs of PER.

Everything was still. He couldn’t see any signs of movement, save for the spots in the walls, or against the street where chunks of rubble and splinters of wood sprayed outward as bullets roared in the background of the town.

He could see a building nearby - a place with painted wooden columns that were almost certainly meant to mimic stone. There was a sign proclaiming it to be the town’s high school. It was a big, ungainly place that looked like bricks piled on top of more bricks, but it was without a doubt the safest place in the town.

There were several men and women keeping guard in front of the school’s pillars, each armed with black rifles, the make and model of which Kraber couldn’t quite place. The guards didn’t quite look military - their stances were too imprecise, sloppy. Their armor was a bit off, too. Some cheap kevlar that was… well, it was better than nothing compared to potion. And they weren’t covered up enough to properly fight against people armed with potion. They weren’t horrifically underequipped, but there was a lot of room for improvement.

Local militia, Kraber thought. No wonder they needed our fokkin’ help.

And yet: On the faces of one of the local militiamen Kraber could see apprehension. Fear.

We’re here to help, Kraber thought, Why wouldn’t they be happy to see us? Are the fokkin’ civs that ungrateful?

Behind him, the Menschabwehrfraktion were filtering out into the street, taking cover behind houses and other cars.

“Get in! Get in!” hissed one of the guards, red-haired, stocky woman with a Kalashnikov.

The Menschabwehrfraktion - at least, those who’d been in their coal lorry - rushed into the building.

Kraber felt incredibly out-of-place in the school, walking by posters for an upcoming school play, local events, and floor-to-ceiling curfew posters urging, if not begging children not to go outside alone.

I’d barely had Peter and Anka in school before…. he thought, and for some reason he felt overwhelmed by the thoughts of what might have been. Before they were ponified. Is this… is this the kind of place Kate would’ve sent them if we’d moved back to America?

It was almost overpowering, and Kraber could feel his breathing deepening. Growing the slightest bit more ragged.

“Hey,” Lovikov said, a hand on Kraber’s shoulder. “You alright?”

I MISS MY FOKKIN’ FAMILY, AWEH?! Kraber wanted to scream. ‘I WISH THEIR LIVES WEREN’T FOKKIN’ STOLEN! I WISH I STILL HAD THEM, JOU FOKKIN’ VARKNAAIER! I WISH THEY WEREN’T THOSE GODDAMN…. THOSE THINGS! YOU DON’T GET THEM BACK, MAAIFOEDIE, JOU JUST FOKKIN’ DON’T!

Evidently, some of that had shown on Kraber’s face, and he watched Lovikov take an involuntary step backwards.

“I’m lekker,” Kraber said, through gritted teeth. “Just. Fokkin’. Lekker.”

“You don’t sound fine,” Lovikov said as they tramped through the hallways of the school, Menschabwehrfraktion trailing behind the two of them.

Kraber stole a glance behind him, noticing Emil - who looked rather worried.

“Don’t worry,” Kraber said, “Give us time. I’ll work it off. Some people fok at funerals, I cut off heads, ja?”

---

December 2022
Dancing Day

“In retrospect,” Kraber is saying to Dancing Day and Aegis, and a bunch of other ponies and other PHL personnel who are filtering into his room, “I probably should have seen what happened next as a bad sign.”

---

“That’s the spirit!” Emil said, flashing Kraber a thumbs up. Lovikov even managed to flash Kraber a smile.

“Here,” said the woman with red hair, and she pointed them all to a set of thick metal doors, both painted red.

The school gym, Kraber thought idly, realizing just how damn packed the place was. Whole families had crammed themselves into the gym, along with adults, anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t raise a gun, and schoolchildren who might have been undergoing remedial classes.

Kraber had always been the kind of person who heard bad news more keenly than good. Ever since college. Probably before then.

And so, when the brave men and women of the Menschabwehrfraktion strode in, Kraber noticed that strange occurrence again. Anywhere from a third to three quarters of the men, women, and children in the bleachers stood and cheered for them, but the rest…

Some were tired. But others just didn’t look happy to see them.

“Is it just me,” Crossley whispered to Kraber, “Or are we not exactly welcome?”

“It’s not just you,” Kraber said. What am I missing here? Kraber thought to himself. Or, better yet, what are they not getting?

It was a hero’s welcome, certainly, but something was screaming at Kraber that something wasn’t right here.

Some of that sensation evaporated when an official-looking man with a receding hairline that somehow remained thick, wild, and bushy walked up to them. He wore a cheap suitcoat over a red-and-black flannel shirt. Rather incongruously, he had a Windham Weaponry AR hanging over one shoulder.

Behind him was a skinny man with an eyepatch and a beard that would’ve segued well into a goatee if not for the bald patch in the middle of his chin. The shotgun on his back looked much too big for him.

On some level, Kraber recognized that the man was far skinnier than him. Kraber immediately didn’t like him. Something about the way he was looking at Kraber - hell, at the Fraktion in general - made him feel flou. It reminded Kraber of staring down a hyena.

“I’m Sadler,” the first man said, a relieved not-quite-frown on his face. “I’m in charge around here. We’re…. We thought we were done for, but then you answered, and…”

“At ease,” Lovikov said. “How many people have you lost?”

“The watchmen managed to ring the alarm and get most of us in here,” Sadler said. “But… but the potion, and, and the blood, and…” he started shaking. “Some of my friends didn’t make it. They kept telling me how much happier they were, how they wished they’d become ponies years ago, how they’d been stupid for, for, fuck, for not fucking trying it. Even if they’d been part of the Purple Winter before the War. And they, they were talking about being human like it was torture every minute of it, and they kept fucking smiling and-”

The skinny man with the not-quite-beard slapped Sadler.

“Right. Thanks, Bright,” Sadler said. “We were desperate for anyone to come, and…. And on behalf of my town, I want to say: Thank you.”

“Why are they here?” Kraber asked. “Especially Shieldwall? I mean, what the fok warrants-”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Bright interrupted, eyebrows narrowing as he stared at Kraber. Evidently, the feeling was mutual. “We’re human. They’re PER. It’s just common sense.”

“No,” said a woman - no, a teenager - with dark skin and darker hair. She looked almost like a Pacific Islander. Just sitting next to her was a slightly shorter girl with dyed-gray-blue hair that matched the color of her eyes.

“No, I heard Mr. Norton-” the teenager said.

“That fucker,” Bright sneered.

The girl with blue-gray hair sitting next to the teenager shook. “You mean my dad.”

“If Joe Norton was willing to do what he did to the rest of your family,” the teenager said, pressing forward in spite of the cries of fear, revulsion, and disgust at that name, the protestations that no, that couldn’t be Shieldwall, “Then he wasn’t your daddy. Anyway. I heard Norton and Shieldwall arguing, and,” the teenager continued, “Shieldwall said that… that they needed ponypower. For…” her face went blank. “I don’t know what they needed it for, but it’s definitely something big.”

“How big?” Kraber asked.

“Well,” the pacific-Islander-looking teenager said, deep in thought...

---

“And you’re sure Project Fillydelphia will work,” said Mr. Norton.

“Of course I am,” Shieldwall said, unaware of the teenager with the FN FAL sneaking through the bushes just behind them. “I designed it.”

“You’re sure you need all this ma - excuse me, ponypower?” Mr. Norton asked. “This quickly? I thought the whole point of Project Fillydelphia was to get more ponypower.”

Somehow, it almost offended her how normal the big, heavyset bald man looked. There wasn’t much distinct about him, not even the eyes. He had a flannel shirt, a shotgun, a beard, a green baseball cap. He could’ve been anyone from the town.

And yet, he’d quite literally dragged all but one of his children out on leashes, claiming that he’d promised them better lives. Regardless of what they’d said. Regardless of how they’d protested that this wasn’t what they wanted.

The only remaining child - Megan? - was hiding somewhere.

I could shoot them, she thought to herself. I could-

But that thought died in her head when she saw the armed guards that Shieldwall and Norton had. If she went for anyone, she wasn’t sure she’d make it.

“Yes,” Shieldwall said, “I am absolutely sure.”

---

“I’ve heard of Project Fillydelphia before,” Kraber said, and the teenager and her friend looked up to him with alarm. “The PER we’ve killed talk about how we can’t stop it, the fokkin’ praatsieks.”

Lovikov looked vaguely irritated that Kraber had spoken up. The look on Lovikov’s face seemed to scream ‘I was supposed to get the last word here.’

“But whatever it is, if they need ponypower for it,” Kraber said, “We can make fokkin’ certain they fail here.”

“Count us in,” the teenagerl said. Her friend with the blue-gray hair looked down at her, shocked. Then concerned. Then determined.

“Yeah,” the blue-gray-haired girl said. “Count. Us. In.”

“What are your names?” Lovikov asked.

“Megan,” the blue-gray-haired girl said.

“Dayoung Tengku,” the pacific Islander said.

Megan and Dayoung stood up, heading towards the HLF.

“You’re going to throw yourself into the fray?!” Bright asked. “Just like that?!”

“It’s our choice,” Dayoung said, her mouth pursed into a hard, straight line. “We’re gonna make those PER pay for what they did here.”

“The HLF could always use more manpower,” Lovikov said. “I promise, you’ll fit right in.”

Fate conspired against them.

“Yeah,” said Benning, “Gonna kill all the damn PER! Starting with this one!”

FOKKIN’ WAT?!

Kraber’s revolver was in his hand almost before he knew it, his gaze drifting to Benning, whose AA12 was pressed up against a pony’s skull.

The pony was trembling, too afraid to even speak.

“Whoa whoa whoa, WHAT THE SHIT?!” Bright yelled. Just in front of him, Sadler was backing away, with a moderately concerned and disgusted expression on his face.

Kraber recognized that look. He’d seen it countless times - someone who was, without a doubt, a kindred spirit, but didn’t have the balls to pull the trigger themselves.

Fokkin’ moegoe, Kraber thought. Or, for anyone who didn’t speak Afrikaans: Coward. Weak.

“Why didn’t you tell me jou had this fokkin’ filthy varknaaier in here?!” Kraber yelled. “Why in the fok wouldn’t you-”

Another pony walked out from behind the bleachers, a scared look on its face. It looked older, and had purplish fur. “Caramel Swirl, I told you not to leave the-”

She paled. “No… oh no…”

Kraber trained his revolver on it - or her? - in an instant. He felt himself smile. Fokdammit, I’m looking forward to this!

“STOP!” Bright screamed. “For the love of God, stop!”

“Why?” Lovikov sneered. “Why would any good human want to protect one of them damn gluesticks? The marshmallows? Why, it’s almost enough to make me wonder if you’re-”

“They’re not PER,” Sadler said, though he didn’t quite sound like he believed it. His voice sounded weak. “Caramel Swirl and Grapevine? The other ponies? They work the fields for us.”

Kraber could see the look on Lovikov’s face, and just knew he was on the verge of some kind of comment. If only because, so was Kraber.

“Why in the fok would you trust these goddamn things?!” Kraber yelled. “You’ve seen what their kind are doing outside! Give me one good reason not to shoot the fokkin’ geldos here and now!”

“Because the PHL pays us a lot,” Bright said bluntly.

“Will-” Sadler said.

“No,” Bright said, “I’m tired of dealing with this bullshit. We get it all the time from HLF, or bandits that took up the name, or drifters. Why do you think the grain, the fruit, the corn, potatoes, the vegetables are in such ready supply? Earth ponies make healthier, more bountiful harvests, and the PHL pays our town a handsome sum for employing them. You’ve probably eaten something that earth pony labor helped along.”

“I wouldn’t-” Kraber sneered.

“You would, and you probably have!” Bright yelled. “Food is food. I hated it at first, but you know what they say. The will of God has a way of making itself clear in situations like this.”

Kraber was about to reply, and then he paused to think about it. Have I? I don’t know where food shipments come from…

He shook that off. There were more important things to work about.

“They’re good po - no, they’re good people,” Sadler said. “During the town parties, they’ve made some of the best chili I’ve ever eaten-”

Bright shot Sadler a look that simply screamed ‘Really? Chili is the first thing you could think of?’

“-and they’ve helped out the town,” Sadler said. “Which is more than I can say for any of you.”

It was like someone had fired a gun into the air, and the entire gym went silent. ‘He did not just fokkin’ say that,’ Kraber thought.

Except he totally did.

“What the fok?!” Kraber yelled. Immediately, another gun was in his hands, pointed at Sadler.

“Why are you talking to them like this?!” Dayoung yelled. “Back during the Purple Winter, when the PHL, the National Guard had ignored places like this, they kept us safe! Algernon Spader kept them in shape, he organized the Bureau raids, he-”

“Spader is DEAD!” Benning barked. Her AA12 wasn't centered on the pony’s head, the little spawnling slowly backing into a corner within touching distance of his mother.

It wasn't exactly an easy thing to mention. Spader’s death remained a mystery to most HLF. One day, in the Rocky Mountains of all places, two hikers had found his body in a river, lodged between two rocks, burnt beyond recognition.

“And I'm sure he'd be happy with what cropped up in his absence,” Bright said, rolling his eyes. “Now. Are you going to help out, or-”

“But they came to help us-” started a gray-bearded man sitting near Bright and Sadler.

“And I haven’t seen much of that lately,” Bright said. “Are we going to sit here fighting over irrelevant shit, or are we going to actually save people? Because if we don’t, I’m going to shoot the woman holding a gun to our friends’ head.”

“You’ll die in moments if you try,” Kraber snarled.

“I’m sure that’ll be very encouraging when she’s dead,” Bright said.

“You sure you’ll get that same kind of enjoyment?” Kraber asked, smirking. “You, any other horsefuckers we take with us when we leave?”

“Control your men, goddammit!” Sadler yelled at Lovikov.

On Lovikov’s face, Kraber could almost see a brief look of… indecision? And then:

“As far as I’m concerned,” Lovikov said, “They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to. Protecting humans from invaders. From those who would protect them, too.”

“They’re valued members of our community,” Bright said. “Far as I’m concerned, they’ve done more than you. Are you seriously ready to kill us for not wanting them dead?!”

Lovikov answered by lazily tapping his fingers on the grip of his pistol.

“Well then, Dayoung,” Sadler said, looking at the Pacific Islander teen. “These are your heroes. I hope you’re fucking proud of them, motherfucker.”

Dead silence.

“You didn’t just say that to a child,” Lovikov said.

“I absolutely just did,” Sadler said. “What are you going to do about it? Especially you, Dayoung. Go on, tell Caramel Swirl and Grapevine to their faces you’re proud of this shit. Right after working as a teaching assistant to one of them, no less.”

“As a matter of fact,” Dayoung said, “I think I am.”

“Oh what the fuck,” said the older, purplish pony - presumably Grapevine. “You’re dead to me, Tengku. Dead.”

“How could you?!” the foal - Caramel Swirl yelled.

“You’re the enemy,” Dayoung said, serenely. “Every time I look at you, I can’t unthink: These are the things that are destroying my world.”

The look on Grapevine’s face was quite indescribable.

They could’ve gone on for hours, or at least reams and reams worth of pages worth of back-and-forth dialogue. They could’ve argued until the PER were at the doors to the gym, having ponified around the school. The kind of stuff that would bog down fanfictions in days worth of dogpile editing.

If not for Emil, anyway.

“We’ll leave them alone,” Emil said, stepping in. His voice shook, but there was undeniable confidence in his posture, in the fact that he’d been brave enough to step into the middle of all this. “You hear that, all of you? We’ll leave them alone! This isn’t what we came to do!”

“What are you doing?” Viktor asked, biting back the anger. “We’re here to kill ponies and anyone that’d-”

“What needs to be done,” Emil said, as Lovikov stared daggers, and possibly a large array of other weaponry into the American’s back. “We’re sorry. We didn’t know what the ponies meant to you. But we came to kill PER, and if you say they’re not PER, then we won’t hurt them.”

He could make a truly great leader one day, Kraber thought.

“We…!” Lovikov started, ready to launch into a tirade. “Fine. We’ll do that.”

“But…” Benning said, not quite realizing that the ponies she’d aimed the AA12 at were long gone.

“I said,” Lovikov said, “We’ll do that.”

Dayoung and Megan stood up to follow him as he headed for the gym’s doors.

“Dayoung,” Bright said, “Megan. Are you sure you want to follow them? You saw what they did.”

“What they nearly did,” Dayoung said. “Besides, I… I can’t work with PHL. Not knowing what happens wherever ponies go.”

“But the PHL-” Sadler started.

“Where are they when this happens? Where were they when the Purple Winter happened? Where are they now?” Megan asked. “Hate to say it, but… Dayoung’s right.”

(As it happened, the correct answer was “pinned.” The outbuildings where the small detachment of PHL guarding the town’s ponies lived were being barraged by Shieldwall’s PER, including newfoals that were former army. But nobody had any way of knowing that.)

She was right next to Kraber when he thrust her hand up, a huge smile on his face.

“SHE’S GOT A KWAAI FOKKIN’ POINT!” he yelled.

And Dayoung smiled too. Her friend - Megan - made a shaky smile as well.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Kraber added, “I have to ask. Dayoung, what happened to your…”

“Dead,” she said flatly. “I hope.”

That told Kraber all he needed to know. The same went for Megan, going by what Dayoung had said about Norton.

“Then I promise,” he said, “We’ll take good care of both of you.”

A childless father and parentless kids, Kraber thought. Ain’t we a fokkin’ trio.

“Menschabwehrfraktion,” Lovikov said, sounding vaguely uncertain, and almost small or deflated. “Move out. We’re going to save this damn town!”

“Think you’ll be able to keep up with me, old man?” Dayoung asked, false bravado in her voice.

“...I’m 29,” Kraber replied after a pause.

Dayoung and Megan did a double-take each as they filtered into the Menschabwehrfraktion, heading into the PER-occupied downtown.

Sadler looked at them with cautious optimism as they walked. Bright stood at the door, a look of disgust on his face.

Kraber was just walking past him when he placed a hand on Bright’s shoulder. The skinny man (not that Kraber was one to talk with his rail-thin build) jumped in his buttoned work shirt.

“What do you want?” Bright asked.

“I have to ask,” Kraber said, “Because I’m genuinely curious. Would you really have shot Benning if she shot the gluestick? Even if you-”

“Caramel Swirl,” Bright corrected him. “And I have another question. Would you really have put off defending us from PER just to kill an innocent pony?”

Kraber didn’t have an answer for that.

---

In fact, by the time he was out on the main streets of the town, hiding behind a picket fence with peeling paint, he still didn’t have an answer.

Dayoung and Megan weren’t too far away, both hiding behind a car on another street. They’d parked the APCs and other vehicles nearby, creating a makeshift barricade.

“Fokkin’ showtime,” Kraber whispered to the gun in his hand, looking on with satisfaction as the runes etched into it began to glow faintly in the darkness that preceded dawn.

“I still say you should throw that thing in the Umbagog River,” Emil said, looking over at Kraber. “It’ll melt you. I… wouldn’t say you have long for this earth.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve bought into that kak,” Kraber joked. “Honestly, do we ever see people get melted from just being close to magic? I mean, when does that actually happen? It’d be just like the Queen Bitch to lie to us like that.”

Maybe Emil had swallowed ‘that kak, maybe he hadn’t. It wasn’t him who answered though.

“You should listen to him, Viktor,” Lovikov said bluntly, pushing the gun’s barrel down with one hand. “That’s PHL tech-”

“And yet it’s the only gun we have that isn’t a fokking overchambered monstrosity or surplus shit that isn’t worth kak against shields,” Kraber replied, hefting the weapon again and checking the sights. “But go ahead, if jou want me to use a gun with less than twenty rounds that the most dof fokking mall ninja would think was a piece of kak, go ahead.”

He glanced at Lovikov’s favorite BFG, a massive .50 caliber open-bolt automatic rifle made from large metal pipe. He’d lent his Kalashnikov to Megan.

It wasn’t as if this was the first time they’d fought about it. Lovikov wanted a pure, self-sufficient Defiance, with none of what he considered pony influence. Which included literature from Equestria, PHL-modded guns, or almost any media with ponies of Equestria in it.

On the whole, Kraber approved of most anything he’d say on that score…

Except for his LMG.

It was a PHL-modified Rheinmetall MG3, apparently an “MG2021,” whatever that was. Stealing it had been sort of an accident. Not long after a… well, a heated situation with the PHL and PER where his old Kalashnikov had been broken beyond even being used for spare parts.

And he loved the thing from the moment he used it to cut down newfoals. He’d added rails and a stolen reflex sight, along with a pipe bomb launcher underbarrel. And, thanks to PHL magic, the 7.62mm rounds hit like a truck.

“You fok with my favorite gun,” Kraber said, “And I will bliksem jou.”

“You wouldn’t,” Helen Blanchett said, staring at Kraber and managing the most impressive glare she could.

Kraber matched hers with a feral-looking snarl of his own. One that reinforced that yes, he absolutely would.

“Viktor, behave,” Lovikov said sternly. “Anyway, you know no one here is going on about it to upset you. We’re worried.”

“Yeah,” said Sully. “What if the magical radiation turns you blue, or mutates you into some sort of humanoid abomination?”

“Sounds fokkin’ lekker,” Kraber said with a mirthless smile.

“Sure,” Lovikov said with a raised eyebrow. “But this is real life, Viktor. Mutations don't give you superpowers, not even extreme ones. They just hurt you, make you sit in a bed bleeding and crying and screaming until you finally expire. No one here wants that for you.”

“Yeah,” added Jones, a Mainer who looked to be almost as wide as he was tall, “You don’t want to end up like Zollikofer.”

The less said about what happened to Zollikofer, the better. It had been in an abandoned town taken over by PER, and the Swiss man had found a PER gun, turning it against the varknaaiers and practically vaporizing newfoals…

Until the gun had turned against him. The rear section had exploded, and he’d woke up the next day with patches of fur, slowly ponifying over the course of a few days. He’d shot himself, of course.

It had taken multiple attempts to end it for him. Multiple successful attempts.

“Now that is fokkin’ uncalled for and jou know it,” Kraber growled. “This is completely different. I’m sure the PHL’d have no reason for their fokkin’ lekker guns to turn you into one of the fokkin’ gluesticks.”

“We all saw the Caspari Video, Viktor,” Lovikov said. “We know what magic does to people. The very presence of the gluesticks is inimical to us.”

“Jou know,” Kraber said, “That always bothered me. Never seemed too scientific. Do we know how much magic will kill someone? PHL are near foktons of magic every day, and you never hear about them getting the Rot or becoming a Slow Newfoal.”

“Slow newfoals are extinct,” Lovikov said, derisively. “They couldn’t have survived nearly this long. Everyone knows they would’ve died during the Purple Spring, and that strain of Potion was phased out anyway.”

“Clearly, you haven’t been hearing the stories I’ve heard from the Pacific Northwest,” Kraber said.

“Stop trying to distract me,” Lovikov sighed. “We’re not getting rid of that gun, are we.”

“Nooit,” Kraber said. “If you didn’t want me to use it, you shouldn’t have been asking me to get rid of it here.”

Lovikov stared at Kraber for a second, his face unreadable.

“Fine,” he said, after a few seconds. “Kraber? Fire at will.”

Kraber looked at his LMG. For a second, he could almost imagine that it was glowing. That it was a bit brighter than it should have been. And he smiled.

“Oh…. yeah,” he said, poking himself from behind the fence, staring through the gun’s reflex sight for a target.

The PER had taken control of an old mill building on the edge of town, and had turned it into a fortress in the meantime. Barricades of every kind dotted the stretch of road between the HLF and the mill - spikes of earth that looked to have punched up from the ground like bone under the skin, odd constructions that looked vaguely military, wrecked cars, and absurdly enough, gray-green vaguely box-shaped walls that looked inflatable.

But, just behind these walls, he found a PER man wearing a curiously medieval helmet, clad in kevlar that was almost certainly magically enhanced. He was talking to his friend, a purplish pegasus mare with an ugly burn scar and half of her mane missing. She was conspicuously not wearing a helmet.

Kraber strained to hear their conversation. It was more from curiosity than anything.

“Tellin’ ya,” the man said, “Featherdown, you have to wear a helmet.”

“It throws off my hearing and my maneuverability,” said the pegasus, evidently named Featherdown. “It’s so annoying!”

“Rather lose those than be dead,” the man said.

“I’m a pegasus, if I lose those I am dead!” Featherdown replied.

Well, Kraber thought, aiming for the kevlar-clad man, Guess that makes the first target.

He aimed for the man squeezed the trigger so softly that the first blast on the PER encampment below came almost as a surprise to him.

The 7.62x51mm round punched through the man’s upper chest, hammering into his body armor and then his throat.

It was difficult to explain next. Just about everything in the vicinity of his shoulderblades fell apart, blood spraying everywhere, chunks of viscera exploding out from where his neck had been…

Coating his friend Featherdown.

She stared at her friend’s lifeless, fallen corpse for a nanosecond too long before Kraber’s MG2021 ripped into her skull, not just punching through it but exploding it.

Then he turned it on the factory. While the armor and barricades might have been able to withstand some of the 7.62 rounds, the rest of the place- the tents, the camp followers in dresses, ratty t-shirts, jackets and jeans - was absolutely not. Three bullets punched through a glass window, and Kraber heard a sequence of screams within a second of letting his finger off the trigger.

“Support teams!” Lovikov called. “Open fire, rapid!”

All around them, HLF troops burst out from windows, from behind cars and other debris, firing into the PER. Years ago, some of the ex-military HLF might have called it inhumane to catch the PER with their pants down like this, but nobody cared about PER to say as much.

HLF rained explosives - some homemade, some not - and bullets down on the PER camp below them. There was no finesse. There was little fire discipline. There were only bullets, roaring down on their improvised like an avalanche.

“KNOCK KNOCK, VARKNAAIERS!” Kraber cackled giddily, as he inched the barrel to the right, raising it very slightly as he squeezed the trigger.

The LMG scythed through the camp, cutting a bloody swathe through the PER. One bullet cut through an inflatable barricade tent like it wasn’t even there, (and compared to the velocity, density, and PHL enchantment of the bullet, it pretty much wasn’t) and Kraber laughed hysterically as blood spattered against the wall behind the inflatable cover. He heard a scream - and then, another, as someone behind the inflatable barricade fell to the ground screaming.

Buggery-fok, did I just nail two of the kontgesigs in one shot? Kraber asked. It wasn’t like it was the first time that’d happened, but it was worth another try.

He aimed for another pony. This one wasn’t armored, and going by the placid look on its face, it was a newfoal. A generic, this time - the kind that potion created en masse, the sort that were building blocks of the Solar Empire’s army. The sort that was mostly useless after Conversion without training or weaponry.

And there was another newfoal standing in front of it, SMGs strapped to its back.

Kraber stared through the reflex sight, aimed, and fired. The round punched through both of them, splattering blood against the wall of another inflatable barricade. Or had he hit another in the tent, going by the blood spattered against another wall?

“FOKKIN’ KILL!” Kraber yelled, aiming for the main drag of the camp. The PER looked to be falling back behind trees, behind glowing pony-made shields. Magic kak.

Kraber watched one PER soldier, wearing what looked like a junkyard for armor and aiming an old bolt-action that was almost certainly magicked to be deadlier than normal. They were smiling as they stood behind an orange-tinted magic shield, a newfoal unicorn standing just to his side.

He was smiling by the time Kraber jerked the LMG towards the shield and opened fire. Some of the bullets shattered against the shield harmlessly…

And two of them didn’t. They punched through the shield like it wasn’t even there, shattering the PER man’s jaw and neck. His corpse tumbled to the ground in an awkward, ungainly spiral, blood dripping from the toothy space where his head had once been.

The unicorn gaped in horror, and Kraber turned the LMG to him.

The next two rounds almost split the unicorn in half. Lengthwise. Two twitching, bloody, not-quite-halves fell to the ground.

“GET THOSE BATTLE NEWFOALS OUT THERE!” someone yelled from within the foretress. “I’LL BE DAMNED IF WE LET THEM TAKE US!”

It was like an electric current had passed through all the HLF in the vicinity.

Battle newfoals!

There was a low moan from in the camp, and the earth seemed to shake.

And then it came. An abomination. A massive animal covered in shaggy fur, its hooves pounding against the pavement. It looked like a pony, if somebody had stretched a pony over a rhinocerus’ body and shoved in so much muscle that the thing looked almost deformed.

Several ponies sat atop its back. One held reins in its mouth, driving the abomination towards the HLF line. Another pony, this one a Natural, stood on all four legs with a machinegun trigger in its mouth. There was another still, a unicorn newfoal with its horn in what looked like a pipe, a long beam of light lancing out from it. Behind it, another unicorn pony barked out directions and pointed towards the HLF lines.

And there were two more of the same behind it.

“NEWCALVES!” Emil shrieked at the top of his lungs. “IT’S A FUCKING NEWCALF!”

Behind the newcalves, though, he could see more strange creatures. Things like ponies with gorilla-like forearms and massively oversized horns that reminded him less of unicorns and more of narwhals. They were living artillery pieces. While the Solar Empire called them Megacorns, the typical HLF word for them was “Gorilla-horse.”

One of the gorilla-horses dug its forehooves into the ground, gritted its teeth, and a beam of raw concussive force exploded out from its massive spearlike horn.

THWUOMMMMVVV

The beam lanced through the town, bowling trees over and punching through the wall of one house

Damn, Kraber thought, looking at the swath of rubble and splintered wood, Huh. Back when I played Titanfall 2, this would probably be a good time to voetsek.

So he ran. He pelted through the streets of the town, making a left turn and rushing into a house. It looked like it’d been abandoned in the wake of the PER attack.

As he rushed through the house (it looked like once it had housed a large family) he took stock of what he saw around him. A TV, a phone, (Defiance already had plenty of those) and…

Some canned food? Just lying there?

Kraber quickly shoved it into his backpack. The dogs would probably be able to sniff it out to see if it had any potion, but for now, Defiance always needed more food. Besides, they were providing a valued service! They sure as fok deserved payment!

As he ran out the door, through a bedroom at the back of the house, he also snatched up a clock-radio. Defiance also needed electronics - for IEDs, and any other machinery the fledgling town’s engineers could throw together.

He slid into cover behind one of the walls in the bedroom, and scanned the backyard behind him.

This just ain’t my fokkin’ day, he thought.

He could see some newfoals that looked… morbidly obese? No, overinflated, that was the word. The skin was pulled far too tight over their eyes and mouth, giving them ghoulish-looking smiles and red rings around their bloodshot eyes.

Splashers!

Guarding them were a set of newfoals with pipe SMGs in their assault saddles. And, flying just nearby, were a squad of pegasi with gas masks that fed into small canisters on their backs, along with nozzles mounted on bands that encircled their forelegs. A human with what looked like an autoshotgun, too…

All guarded by a unicorn.

‘They’re flanking us! Kraber thought, before his thoughts turned to disgust at the mutant newfoals the human and pegasi were guarding. When Kraber wasn’t willing to chop them limb from limb, he had a kind of… angry bemusement towards battle-formed newfoals. It was the best way he could describe it.

Before the War, it was “become a cute, happy little pony!” And now, they turned you into a goddamn monster that looked like Tim Burton’s or Jhonen Vasquez drawing a horse. They turned you into raw material, into war machines, into abominations that Kraber still couldn’t quite believe were able to function.

Why the fok do we even have the square cube law? he asked himself. More importantly, how the fok does the Solar Empire even spin this? It’s not like those monsters could fit into society… Not without a reconstitution camp, anyway...

So, who to take out first? The unicorn? Almost certainly. Unicorns could turn any engagement into a nightmare. The splashers? No, that was just-

Wait a minute.

Kraber recalled a tidbit from a long time ago. Wasn’t potion flammable? And the splashers typically carried volatile chemicals. If one explodes…

The unicorn was keeping its shield to the front. Moving with a large dome shield was hard, and it would certainly raise eyebrows. It was projected in… almost a quarter-sphere-like shape… in front of the unicorn.

He’d also left a small gap between the bottom of the shield, and the ground. A small gap that would presumably widen when he passed near a tree stump, about ten feet away from him. Towards the edge of the backyard.

Can’t mess this up! Kraber thought, sliding the glass doors leading onto a porch behind the bedroom, and placing a homemade HLF claymore mine made from an old lunchbox just next to the glass. The lasers would be uninterrupted, of course, but he’d need to get far away if he didn’t want to get cut to pieces.

Any second now…

He slid the door open, quiet as possible, and aimed the pipebomb launcher down.

This feels so wrong, aiming a grenade down he thought. Any second now… any fokkin’ second-

The unicorn at the lead raised the shield ever so slightly when they came to the stump, and Kraber pulled the trigger.

The pipebomb launcher made an electric crackle, the spring shot forward, and the pipebomb plummeted downwards. Right towards the stump.

Kraber could see the look of dawning horror on the unicorn’s face as the pipebomb - moving too fast to dodge - slipped under the shield. And then something strange happened. It tumbled over one of the stump’s roots, improbably bouncing up…..

Right into the unicorn’s jaw.

THOOM

The unicorn exploded into a pink mist, fire licking at the grass. The splasher behind him simply vanished in the conflagration, the volatile chemicals in its stomach catching fire.

THOOM

“FOKKIN’ LEKKER!” Kraber crowed as he watched the small, purple mushroom cloud.

Now, time to run.

Kraber whipped out his .45. He wasn’t exactly expecting to hit anything, but it made for a great panic-fire gun.

One…

He fired at the human, the .45 round impacting their helmet. While it didn’t pierce the armor, it left them stunned for a few seconds. Enough to make them charge him, submachinegun ready.

Two…

He was dashing towards the edge of the bedroom. He turned and fired, the .45 round harmlessly whiffing into the grass as the newfoals and splashers rushed after him.

Three…

Another .45 round. This one hit a newfoal in the leg, and it tumbled to the ground. Its fellows, caught in the blood frenzy, barely noticed - they ran over the once-human mutant.

Four…

Still another. It missed again. A purplish crossbow bolt harmlessly twanged by his head, embedding itself in a wall about six inches from his head..

Kraber got to the kitchen, and dove behind the counter - the very same one where he’d found the canned goods earlier.

“Oh for the love of God, who fokkin’ sprung for the cheap-ass-” Kraber started.

BOOM

KRAAAAAAAAANCH

“MY SPLEEN!”

A piece of shrapnel flew through the kitchen, embedding itself in the house’s front door.

Kraber peeked out from behind his hiding place, to see the lacerated bodies of the Solar Empire squad lying on the floor, the bedroom scorched and cut to pieces, and a hallway that was much wider than the original owners probably intended.

“Fokkin’ lekker,” Kraber said, walking down the hallway as soon as he was certain none of them were left. As soon as he was on the porch, and saw a pegasus, one wing shredded beyond repair, lying on the porch.

He emptied two rounds into the FOKKIN’ VARKNAAIER and left, heading into the backyard of another house with a missing wall.

They don’t give a fok about us! the thought raced through Kraber’s head. They just see us as a problem to be solved!

As he dashed into the house with an entire missing wall, he saw it. A darker blue earth pony, and with a green-streaked black pompadour. Standing behind a magic pony shield, next to a homemade turret.

“THIS FOR EVERYONE YOU’VE FOKKED, YOU SON OF A BITCH!” Kraber yelled, ready to fire a pipebomb over the forcefield wall.

It was fokkin’ Shieldwall!

---

December 2022
Dancing Day

“You were face to face with Shieldwall?!’ Dancing Day gasps. “And lived?!”

Aegis just raises an eyebrow. “I mean, he’s here, so…”

“Ja,” Kraber says, “I did. Twice.”

“Must not have been easy,” Grayson says. “I mean… damn.”

“So this isn’t the time you got him on his stomach, and-” Elena starts.

Kraber pushes himself back against his chair, shocked. “No. Nooooooo…. No. Just no. That’s not for like a month.”

---

Shieldwall’s eyes darted towards Kraber. “YOU!”

“FOKKIN’ ME!” Kraber roared back. “There’s one person you and that pink mank genaaide bergbok didn’t get, and that was a big mistake on your part! CAUSE YOU! PISSED! ME! OFF!”

Shieldwall scowled at Kraber.

“This has been a long time coming,” Shieldwall said. “I’ve got one chance left for you, Viktor. Surrender now, and maybe we’ll be good to you. Maybe I don’t take you apart, piece by piece.”

The sound of machineguns, explosives, and more esoteric pony and HLF weapons rang out all over the town.

“I can see you’d be a pony of many talents,” Shieldwall said. “It’s never too late to forgive, Kraber.”

Flashes of his home. Of the potion, fragments of cake everywhere. The purple ponification potion on the ground. The message that he hadn’t gotten on his phone, the recording.

“It’s not too late to throw away this petty little grudge,” Shieldwall said.

”VIKTOR!” Kate was screaming. “They’re killing us in here, they’re…”

“Try it, mommy! It tastes good, and it makes you feel so good!” Peter laughing, almost tittering. Almost certainly ponified.

“Mommy! Where’s daddy?!” Anka. Screaming at the top of her lungs. “What happened to Peter?! What the heck happened to Peter?!”

“He’s gone, Anka! Stay BACK! Stay back, all of you!” Kate. Yelling. “I’m getting your shotgun, Viktor! No matter what, I just want you to know we’ll always love you!”

“You can put it all behind you,” Shieldwall said. “You’ll get to be with your family, now. I’ll even make you a Cocktail so you can get the form you’ve always wanted. I’m sorry you think you deserve an apology, Kraber. But you’ll change your mind when you take the potion. When you-”

“I’ll always love you, Viktor! I’ll always-”

A noise that Kraber could not describe. A sound halfway between a choke and a death scream as the potioned cake was forced down her throat.

“MOMMY!” Anka. Screaming.

“Oh, you’ll be happier soon enough when we get you out of that ugly human body and make you into a pretty little filly! How can you be happy with that body, yuck! Human bodies are icky and big and ugly and...and mean! Humans are mean! And you’ll all be one big happy family when we're done making you happy little ponies! ” Pinkie.Mocking his daughter. “When we get your daddy, anyway. Wow, he must be a terrible father if he can’t be at your birthday!”

Kraber had thrown his phone against the wall when he heard her say that.

“Aren’t you glad you won’t have to deal with a daddy like that? And he’ll never be such a terrible parent again!”

Kraber had then destroyed the rest of his phone by hitting it with a chair.

“DADDY!” Anka. Yelling again. “Daddy, where are you?! DADDY, WE-”

And then his daughter had screamed, too.

Then there was a splash.

“He’ll be with you soon.” Shieldwall. Almost certainly.

“Yupperoonie!”

Kraber shook with rage as he stared at Shieldwall, who stood just down the street from him. He hadn’t even heard what Shieldwall was saying.

“-what do you say?”

Kraber was silent for a few seconds.

“EAT MY DICK, JOU SHRIMP-KONT MAAIFOEDIE HONDENAAIER!” Kraber yelled, and fired the pipebomb. “COME HERE, JOU FOKKIN’ POES KAKKER NAIPOES, I’LL RIP JOU TO FOKKIN’ PIECES!”

“SPUTTER NEWFOALS!” Shieldwall called. “CHARGE!”

A stampede of newfoals wearing cheap, homemade assault saddles designed to give ponies a way to fire a gun without breaking their tongues or teeth. Each of them were armed with SMGs little more than pieces of pipe and pistol mags.

“Sorry to put this off, Viktor,” Shieldwall said, “But I’ve got places to be!”

Much as Kraber would have liked to think he could take them all, he probably couldn’t.

Kraber dove behind a wrecked car listing on its side finding himself sitting next to Emil, Crossley, and an HLF woman he didn’t know. He thought her name was Martineau, but he wasn’t sure.

“It’s Kraber!” the woman said, ducking and flattening themselves against the wall. “Oh, thank God!”

Kraber smiled slightly, and poked the MG2021 over the edge of the car, aiming for the sputter newfoals. They were running straight into the HLF lines, smiling widely as they bit on the mouth triggers for their SMGs. Long, barely-controllable saturating bursts ripped through the town, bullets embedding themselves in sidewalks, in wrecks, in houses. And, judging by the screams he heard, some unfortunate HLF.

God, I miss fighting PER that only threw vials and bodies at us, Kraber thought, just as a tree exploded behind him in a flash of purple. More fun, I didn’t think I was going to die, and I could just pile the varknaaiers up!

He looked towards a nearby tree, and then suddenly froze.

“FOK!” he yelled, pointing to two shapes that’d been behind the tree. Just behind it, he could see two shifting, warping shapes that looked almost like they’d once been people…

Well, they weren’t quite there yet. They were melting like candlewax, their bodies horrifically twisting into something inhuman. Their legs and spines bending in ways that bodies absolutely should not bend.

“You keep focused on the newcalf! I’ve got your back!” Kraber yelled at three others behind the car, letting loose a short burst of 7.62 in the direction of the two ponifying humans.

They fell like marionettes with their strings cut, blood oozing from their bodies - as if the potion was somehow pushing it out like water from a faucet. Not far away, the newcalf rampaged through their lines, machinegun rounds and pencil-thin beams of light ripping through HLF and trees alike. The gorilla-horses anchored themselves to the ground, making pained grunts that sounded far too deep to come from any set of lungs, and fired off massive beams through the streets of the town.

And the sputter newfoals kept coming. There were PER humans behind them, men and women armed with cheap rifles and submachineguns.

It was just then that Kraber realized his LMG had run dry. Fok! he cursed, sliding against the wall of the foxhole. He opened the LMG’s cover, ready to slide a belt into the feed tray.

A 5.56 round impacted a house behind Kraber and his two friends, leaving a much larger hole than it should have.

Magically enhanced, Kraber thought. Probably.

His face settled into a smirk.

Eh, mine’s bigger.

“Die, you defilers of nature! You rapists!” screamed an earth pony with two pipe SMGs on his saddle.

Something broke, deep within Kraber.

“DON’T YOU… EVER… FOKKING CALL ME A RAPIST!” Kraber yelled, nailing the earth pony in the balls with his revolver, leaving the new gelding screaming, hooves pressed to the bloody ruin of his crotch.

The bullet tore through the earth pony’s testicles like they weren’t even there, continuing on and ramming into a PER man’s left leg, exploding everything between his kneecap and the pelvis.

“CALL ME A DEFILER OF NATURE TOO?!” Kraber roared, twisting to the right and firing his massive revolver again. It split a PER man’s skull in half, vaporizing everything above the neck. Blood sprayed outward, spattering the trees red. “PISS UP A FOKKIN’ STICK, KONTGESIGS!”

“Ponify me!” the PER man screamed as he thrashed on the ground, his blood staining the pavement and grass. “I… have to be useful… to Queen… Celestia-”

A red pegasus mare flew over, a tuft of purple cloud held in her hooves, ready to ponify him. Kraber fired the revolver again, exploding the mare’s head before she could get anywhere near him. Good.

“YOU MONSTER!” screamed a purple, blank-flanked unicorn, crouched by a tree. He couldn’t have been more than a teenager when he’d been ponified. “He just wanted to serve his rightful ruler, and-”

“Shut,” Kraber said, “The fok. UP.”

He fired the pipebomb launcher under his MG2021. Like many members, he’d attached spikes to both ends of his pipebombs.

It tumbled through the air, tail over teakettle, and finally embedded itself in the unicorn’s throat.

“I was gonna blow up the tree,” Kraber laughed, “but that’s fokkin’ lekker!”

Gasping, choking and wheezing, he tried to telekinetically pull it out. Newfoals rushed to the unicorn’s aid, bringing willing hooves and magic to stem the blee-

!!CRACK!!

The pipebomb exploded, vaporizing the newfoal teen’s head.

The tree and newfoal did not become one of the largest frag grenades in the history of the Conversion War. But they came admirably close.

Nails, shrapnel, and bits of a wooden house nearby exploded outward, ripping through flesh and bark alike. All around, sputter newfoals and PER screamed as the tide of debris shredded them.

“FOKKIN’ KWAAI!” Kraber cackled, looking over the mass of screaming, bleeding PER.

He slipped another belt into the LMG’s feed tray, and hosed the varknaaiers down.

“DIE!” he yelled. “FOKKIN’ DIE, GODDAMN YOU! I JUST WANT A TALK WITH SHIELDWALL, IT’LL ONLY HURT FOR THE REST OF HIS FOKKIN’ LIFE!”

One PER woman just down the street suddenly screeched in agony, clutching at her cheek - except, as Kraber now saw, she had no cheek left. Instead, blood was welling up from from a gash that extended all the way down to her neck. He could see her teeth through it, even! With a single bullet blasted a complementary hole through her brainpan.

“WHICH WON’T BE VERY LONG!!” Kraber yelled.

Just nearby, he saw Dayoung and Megan behind another car. He heard the reliable, regular FWAM-FWAM-FWAM of Dayoung’s FAL, picking off sputter newfoals and PER with headshots.

And the heavy percussion of the Kalashnikov that Megan had borrowed from Lovikov.

Dayoung kept her mouth set in a determined, flat line. Megan had a sick grimace on her face as she opened fire with the heavy assault rifle.

“Jou doin’ lekker!” Kraber yelled, flashing them a thumbs up. “Just keep doing what you’re doing!”

And yet, despite all the spilled blood and wounds that should have killed anything with a sense of pain, the newfoals affiliated with the PER kept on coming, limping onwards on mangled stumps, blood, tears and spit flowing together as they fought into their death-throes.

Let them come! Let them fokking come! He’d rip them apart, make them pay for what they’d done! MAKE! THEM! PAY!

“DON’T DROP THE SOAP IN THIS LEAD SHOWER!” he roared.

The frenzy ascended mountains of violence. Kneecaps were shattered and limbs split, faces while ground against blood-stained rocks.

Ain’t I forgetting something? Kraber asked himself, then turned to his left to see the newcalf charging the four of them.

“FOK ME IN THE-” he yelled, and dove to the right, Martineau and Emil diving to the left. Crossley was slightly behind them.

Too far behind.

The newcalf barreled into the car with an almighty sound of metal wrenching and glass shattering. Crossley hadn’t quite gotten out of the way when a bit of shrapnel tumbled into the back of his calves, and he collapsed to the ground, gasping and wheezing.

He fell to the ground, struggling to pick himself up. It didn’t work. Both legs gave out under him, and he fell on his face.

The newcalf circled back to Crossley, and he screamed like Kraber had rarely if ever heard a man scream.

There was a twang, and Crossley twitched. There was a sound that made Kraber think of a balloon being popped.

And Crossley began twitching in his armor. Under the man’s homemade anti-potion mask, Kraber could see his eyes bugging out, pushing themselves so far out the sockets they looked like they’d press against the plastic of the mask.

“HELP ME!” the blond man screeched. “IN CE…. IN CE…. IN GOD’S NAME, HELP!”

Kraber stared through his reflex sight, and fired off a single round. Crossley’s head exploded, and he fell still.

“We helped him!” one of the ponies on the newcalf screamed, turning the machinegun towards the car they were using as cover. “WE WERE HELPING-”

“HOU JOU FOKKIN’ BEK, JOU VARKNAAIERS!” Kraber roared, turning the MG2021’s muzzle to the charging abomination.

The newcalf staggered, juddered slightly under the hail of bullets, but Kraber’s PHL-enhanced LMG didn’t seem to be causing anything above minor annoyance.

And then Lovikov stepped in, holding a ridiculous-looking rifle like a pipe with an oversized banana-clip jammed in the bottom. Kraber knew the things - a .50 BMG, open-bolt automatic monstrosity with an anemic fire rate but high stopping power.

“YOB TVOYU MAT!” Lovikov yelled at the top of his lungs.

“Holy shit, he’s insane,” Emil breathed, staring at the heavyset Ukrainian as he began firing.

Even as Kraber swept the LMG across the street, it was impossible not to want to see Lovikov opening fire on the massive thing.

Typically, you needed a heavy hunting rifle round to punch through a newcalf’s hide.

Lovikov had an open-bolt monster loaded with wildcat rounds, most of which were armor-piercing.

They tore through the newcalf’s hide, puncturing the thick leathery hide… but, Kraber noticed, not coming out the other end.

Must be doing some fokkin’ lekker damage in there, Kraber thought approvingly.

The newcalf staggered under the hail of bullets. Blood oozed from its massive wounds, and then one of its front legs abruptly stopped being a leg.

That was as best Kraber could explain it. When the newcalf’s bleeding right front leg hit the earth, it flopped and buckled bonelessly. The thing - a look of surprise or relief on its face - careened off to the right, its skull smashing against a tree.

There was a crack, like a watermelon being dropped from a great height.

“GET UP!” the natural-born pony on its back screamed. “BUCKING USELE-”

Emil shot him through the throat with his M4.

The newcalf tried to get up, of course. It staggered on unsteady legs, unable to support its own weight.

The ponies standing on its back turned to Lovikov. They swiveled the machinegun and the odd laser-like device they called “Celestia’s Spear” towards him.

Kraber and Emil were far quicker, filling the FOKKIN’ GLUESTICKS with lead before they could even get a bead on Lovikov.

“LO-VI-KOV!” Emil cheered, and Kraber found himself joining.

The heavyset Ukrainian jammed another magazine home, and fired again, the heavy rounds puncturing the thick skin of the newcalf.

“LO-VI-KOV!”

It blinked at Lovikov, and for a second, Kraber saw something in its eyes. Something like pity, remorse, or anticipation.

It didn’t last more than half a second. Lovikov’s oversized rifle chewed the massive thing into paste, painting the street in blood, bits of bone, and viscera.

“LO-VI-KOV!”

“BROTHERS AND SISTERS!” Lovikov howled, “TONIGHT! WE TAKE BACK WHAT IS OURS!”

“WE TAKE IT BACK!” Kraber yelled, hearing himself chorusing with the other HLF.

“They’ve got another wave coming!” Emil yelled. “Think we can take it?”

Kraber answered the only way that seemed appropriate to him.

“JOU FOKKIN SCUM BLIKSEMS!” he yelled, firing into the mass of sputter newfoals. One hand on the LMG’s jacket, he swept the thing across the battlefield again.

“GET INTO COVER!” a PER man screamed, an SMG in hand. “NEWFOALS, EVERYONE, GET INTO-”

For a fraction of a second, Kraber had a thought as he looked to the PER man.

‘Should I, or shouldn’t I? he thought, as one of his shots drilled through the back of a newfoal’s skull, leaving it crumbling to the ground in an awkward quadrupedal pirouette.

‘Ah, fok it, Kraber thought, aiming the LMG a millimeter or two upward. “JOU! HOU JOU FOKKIN’ BEK!” he roared, letting loose two rounds into the PER man’s jaw.

Everything under the PER man’s nose was red for a fraction of a second, and then there wasn’t anything left. There was a riotous splash of red over his vest, the trees, the houses, a newfoal next to him.

He made… noises. Pitiful, wailing, throaty, warbles.

“KORSO, NO!” someone screamed, and Kraber looked up, tracking the source to a flock of pegasi above…

They wore bandoliers of purplish-colored crossbow bolts, with SMGs similar to those used by sputter newfoals sitting below their wings in assault yokes. Small, boxy devices he knew to be crossbows were strapped just above their hooves. Each of them wore gas masks with dark lenses, and wisps of purple flitted around them.

He watched one of the pegasi tap a hoof to the bandoliers, sliding a bolt into the far-too-small crossbow and fire. The bolt punched through the jawless man, and he began to contort and spasm under his armor. His eyes bugged out, and his skull sounded like a bag full of sticks being crushed…

Kraber watched as the man’s skin melted like candlewax, as fur sprouted from beneath the skin so quickly he swore he saw blood. One eye’s pupil was bigger than the other, shaking slightly and looking towards the ground, like it wasn’t quite in the socket. Probably because it wasn’t. His chin stretched forward as his nose pushed itself further and further into his face.

Never get used to that, Kraber thought, biting back a wave of nausea. For a moment, he wondered about shooting the man - trying to see how much the potion could put together until the body simply failed. Meanwhile, Kraber would laugh hysterically as the potioned screamed in agony.

Ah, fok it. We have bigger things to deal with! he thought, aiming for the PER pegasi in the sky.

“Potioneer pegasi, two-o-clock!” Lovikov yelled, switching to a pump-action shotgun he’d picked up from somewhere.

He fired into one of them. It staggered - if that was the right word - and corkscrewed into a tree with an unsettling crack. Blood poured from every joint of his barding. Kraber laughed, realising that the buckshot rounds had gone right through one of the ‘sweet spot’ gaps in the pony’s barding, and ricocheted repeatedly off the inside of the armor plates, multiplying the internal damage to ludicrous levels. His organs were most likely paste.

“ATTACK!” the pegasus mare at the front yelled, firing the SMGs in its assault yoke.

Kraber ducked as the bullets peppered the ground, fragments of pavement and bits of dust dancing through the air where the bullets hit.

“Merry May!” he heard that same pegasus mare yelled. “Release cloudburst!”

Cloudburst?! Kraber thought, alarmed. They’re going to release potion clouds!

Most of the HLF kept gas masks on hand, just in case, but quite a few simply didn’t. Not enough money, for starters. If the pegasi made potion-clouds, and turned the things on the HLF… well, a lot of them would die. Visibility would be shot. If they took off the gas masks, they’d be fokked.

“TEAR THEM UP!” Kraber yelled. “We can’t let the varknaaiers get clo-!”

It would be difficult to say later what made him stop. The slight crack that Kraber heard through the cacophony of the battle shouldn’t have been audible, and maybe it wasn’t. But either way, he saw a leaf move strangely just behind them.

What was that?!

He heard the whipcrack of a crossbow, and then saw Martineau, the woman who’d been standing next to him and Emil make a strange, horrible noise Kraber could only describe as a “gasp-scream.” Then-

“KIll me!” Martineau screamed, her back arching at an impossible angle. “KILL ME!”

“SHE’S PONIFYING!’ Kraber yelled, frantically noticing the thick wooden shaft embedded in her chest, dripping with something purple.

The fokkin’ potion!

“KILL ME!’ the woman screamed, her back still impossibly arched. “FOR THE LOVE OF-”

There was only one thing that scream could possibly mean, and Kraber felt himself sweating under his armor, and the drysuit he wore to repel potion.

“Aweh,” Kraber said, forcing some calm into his voice, and turned the MG2021’s muzzle on Martineau’s face.

Two rounds burst out the muzzle, and everything above her neck exploded outwards. Kraber’s armor was painted red and gray in the splash of brains, blood, and viscera.

He stared, for a second, almost transfixed at the scattered remains and strands of muscle where her neck used to be moved in the wind - no. Not wind. They all moved in different directions, waving more like worms, stretching forward by millimeters.

Kraber felt almost sick as he saw it. No matter how many times he saw someone ponify, it always found new ways to shock and horrify him.

“Oh, shit,” Emil hissed. “PHANTOMS! WE GOT PHANTOMS!”

‘So they’ve thrown the fokkin’ monster newfoals at us, the sputter newfoals, and Phantoms,’ Kraber thought. ‘If the camp doesn’t have Shieldwall, it’s gotta have some important kak.’

“HOLD THE LINE!” Lovikov yelled from somewhere, as Emil reloaded.

“Fokkin’ phantoms!” Kraber yelled, scanning the terrain for something that suggested a phantom. A leaf that didn’t sit right? A branch that was bent? A breeze that wasn’t a breeze? A patch of air that seemed lighter than it should be? Fokdammit! It was always so much easier to spot invisible varknaaiers in videogames! he thought.

He and Emil scanned the surrounding area.

“STOP FOKKIN’ TOYING WITH US AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN, JOU FOKKIN’ DOPKAAS!” Kraber yelled.

There!

A tree branch. Bent… not quite right.

Kraber and Emil opened fire, their rifles deluging round after round into the general area of the branch.

It fell to the ground, harmlessly.

...shit.

And somehow, over the sounds of battle all around him, he heard Emil scream at the top of his lungs.

The world slowed down. He twisted back towards Emil, seeing the runnel in his friend’s suit. He saw the bolt embedded in the dirt. He traced the path of the bolt, turning back towards the fallen branch….

And seeing movement. What movement, he wasn’t sure, but something was coming. Right. At. Him!

“JOU FOKKIN’ HOLNAAIER POES!” Kraber yelled, ripping the bowie knife out of his shoulder holster.

He admittedly wasn’t sure what’d happen next, but that’d never stopped him. He shifted to the right, leaning on that leg, dipping downwards faster than he could completely perceive. He held the knife in one hand, white-knuckled.

And then he thrust forward, the curved tip of the knife meeting something in midair that should not have been.

“RAAAAAARGH!” Kraber yelled, holding both hands around the knife as it skewed back in his hands. Blood sprayed all over him, splashing his suit. “HOW JOU LIKE ME NOW, JOU PIECE OF KAK!” he laughed, forcing the knife deeper and deeper into the body.

The pony was silent.

Newfoal, then, Kraber thought idly, and ripped the knife out.

He could see a large red, bleeding scar in midair, the cloth of the pony’s invisibility flightsuit torn beyond functionality. It was hard to describe - he could see something like a glass outline of a pony, except some parts were more opaque than others.

It keeled to Kraber’s left.

“NO JOU FOKKIN’ DON’T, JOU SHRIMP-DICKED FOKMAGGOTS!” Kraber yelled, driving his boot forward, straight into the pony’s skull.

It tumbled to the ground with a sickening crack, and was still.

“JOU FOKKIN POESNEUS!” he yelled, stamping on the neck for good measure.

CRACK

He was rewarded with the crunchy sound of vertebrae collapsing.

God, I love that sound! Kraber thought. FOKKING ponies.

Satisfied for the barest instant, Kraber turned back towards Emil, back towards the PER camp trying to find a fresh target.

OH FOK NO!

The runnel in Emil’s armor had gone much deeper than either of them thought. Kraber could see pinkish fur bursting out from the hole, which looked much, much wider than it should have been. Emil lay back against the wall of a store, back arched in a silent scream. A horn had already begun to cut out from behind the gas mask, and Kraber stood in stark horror, trying not to imagine what his friend looked like under the armor.

He didn’t have to. Before Kraber’s eyes, a pink unicorn newfoal was stabbing his way out of the empty drysuit and bulletproof armor. Like a butterfly ripping itself from a chrysalis.

“Poeskak!” Kraber breathed, staring at what had once been his friend. “Emil, I’m so sorry!”

“Emil?” the newfoal asked, cocking his head, his horn glowing with a blue aura. “I’m Pas de Deux now! Won’t you dance with m-”

Kraber easily sidestepped the clumsy bolt of magic, pistol in one hand, and fired. The revolver bucked in his hand, and the bullet obliterated the skull of the thing that had once been Emil. For a fraction of a second, the newfoal’s skull was intact… until it wasn’t, as the skull sprayed outward in great meaty chunks, spattering against the trees and Kraber’s armor.

“I’m… so… so sorry,” Kraber whispered, as the still-smiling husk went ‘splat’ on the pavement.

The corpse still twitched, like the body was unaware the spirit had left. Emil had been… well, he was a wonderful dancer, and such a great kisser. He and Kraber had shared many a night together, looking up at the stars, sometimes falling out the tent and rolling down a hill… and he had been able to make dishes slopped together from forest mushrooms, stolen butter, and meat of unidentifiable provenance feel utterly delicious.

He’d been a kind soul, except when it came to ponies.

When off the field, he’d been almost saintly. On it, he’d been a nightmare.

“GODDAMN HOERKIND PONIES!” Kraber screamed, thumbing a spare round into his magnum, Kraber quickly scanned the battlefield, and came to a delighted conclusion: the enemy wasn’t advancing anymore. They were falling back. Trying to consolidate their defenses.

He smiled, despite himself. If this livestock wanted to wade into the meat-grinder, then he was happy to oblige. This was gonna be perfect.

Oh, so many ponies were going to die…

Kraber rushed across the street, finding himself in an alleyway between two houses. When he found himself on the next street, he found himself stopping, disgusted.

‘Well,’ Kraber thought, ‘Fok me in the ass.’

It had been a bloodbath. No two ways about it. More battle newfoals lay dad in between the wrecked trees, and one of the gorilla-horses lay dead at the walls of the camp.

There were more than a few dead HLF at Kraber’s feet, though. People who’d taken crossbow bolts to the face, been filled with lead… people who’d been ponified, and shot midway through the transformation. It was a gruesome sight.

We always lose so many here, Kraber thought. He felt…. Off, somehow. Weak.

He saw a PER pony behind a house, firing off the SMGs in their harness. Beside them, a human looked to be loading some kind of fat crossbow with another bolt.

Kraber felt his lips curl up in a sneer under his gas mask.

Sies, Kraber thought. Ponies. Humans. Working together like that? With the FOKKIN’ GLUESTICKS THAT’D TURN US INTO FOKKIN’ ZOMBIES?!

In that moment, it was too much for him to bear watching these two working together. Rage enveloped Kraber, and he opened fire, chopping them to pieces with 7.62 rounds.

‘Nothing good,’ Kraber thought, ‘ever came of it.’

“Damn,” someone breathed, and Kraber turned to see Dayoung and Megan, in cover behind a car.

“So,” Kraber said, almost conversationally, “How’s the first day on the job?”

Dayoung didn’t answer. Neither did Megan.

“Look,” Kraber said, “It gets easier when you think about who’s on the other end of the barrel.”

He raked the LMG side to side, scanning the street for signs of movement. It was just then that he saw it - a human with a purple armband, clutching a rifle that looked too smooth somehow. He was wearing an odd patchwork of armor, some looking almost medieval, some almost modern. A large paintball pistol - likely loaded with ponification splats - rode his hip.

The human didn’t say anything as they readied their gun. He was fast, his reflexes possibly enhanced somehow by whatever the PER had put in his armor.

But then, Kraber had an LMG already pointed in the man’s general direction. He didn’t need speed. A long, saturating burst exploded out the MG2021’s barrel, gas jetting out the holes in the flash hider.

It took more rounds than Kraber would’ve expected to bring down the varknaaier. 7.62mm rounds hammered against his armor, and yet the man still moved. Kraber saw what he could only describe as a crater in the man’s rib section.

What the fok is that armor made of? he thought over a fraction of a second, before another round hit the crater.

When the bullet hit, it was like Kraber had punched through a water tank - blood exploded outwards, splashing against the pavement. The man fell to the ground, clutching his side, still completely silent.

Kraber didn’t blink, and hosed him down with the MG2021’s belt until he stopped moving.

“See, that wasn’t a fellow human,” Kraber said, almost conversationally. “That was a fokkin’ perdnaaier. That was a mal fok who’d ponify newborns in the ward. Remember that, suddenly things stop mattering as much.”

“RETREAT!” Kraber heard someone screaming, “PER! Retreat! They’re killing us out there!”

He stared down the street,

“MENSCHABWEHRFRAKTION!” Lovikov yelled. “ADVANCE!”

As the PER rushed for the factory, the HLF followed, blazing away with their weaponry. Whenever Kraber saw any PER, he fired off his LMG. PER fell like puppets with cut strings, and Kraber laughed hysterically as it happened.

“THIS IS FOR YOU Emil, JOU PIELKOPS!” Kraber roared, the LMG spitting hot lead into anything in Kraber’s field of vision. “FOR MY WIFE KATE! FOR PETER AND ANKA! FOR COUSIN RICHARD! FOR EVERYONE ELSE IN OUR LIVES YOU TOOK AND FOKKED UP THE GAT!”

As if to punctuate that sentence, he aimed for a newfoal and fired, shattering its left legs in a spray of gore. The bullet punched through it, and it fell to the ground, gasping, still trying to push itself along on its remaining legs even as there were great chunks of muscle missing.

“I WILL LICK JOUR FOKKIN’ SPINES CLEAN FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE!” Kraber bellowed. “GONNA KILL YOU ALL!”

The epiphany, when it came, was surprisingly gentle. It neither struck him like a blow or beat him around the heat. It was more like a wave that gently washed over him, before running back out through a metaphoric hole in his gullet.

And with it went all of his rage and fire, leaving him naked and empty, alone with himself in the dark nadir of the soul.

Who had he saved recently, if he was honest with himself? Prisoners, maybe, but… had he been heroic? Had he left someone thinking “I am genuinely grateful for this man’s existence?” Had he felt satisfied for saving someone?

Not… recently. He’d killed ponies.

But… somehow that didn’t feel like enough, he thought, even as he watched the HLF all around him mow the newfoals down.

The forest town, and the troopers roared.

It was the height of summer, he was wearing full body armor, and yet Viktor suddenly felt cold...

---

What remained of the HLF had finally made it to the PER-taken factory, thank to Lovikov, Benning, and Kraber’s efforts. They had paid in blood and treasure to spells and ponification, but they had arrived.

Now for the part Kraber had been most looking forward to.

“Kwaai,” he said, unholstering his shotgun. He slapped Lovikov on the back with his left hand, a smile on his face. “Let’s get ready to bliksem them.”

“Da,” Lovikov said, a borrowed Saiga autoshotgun in both hands.

“GET TO THE PORTALS, NOW!” someone was yelling over a series of intercoms. Kraber’s best guess was that it was Shieldwall.

“They have portals?!” asked Sully, his Kalashnikov shaking in both hands. “Shit! We could be looking at a full-scale-”

“No,” Lovikov interrupted. “That doesn’t make sense. This is a fairly standard grab-and-run PER attack. The portals are more likely an escape route. We cut them off, destroy the portals, and burn the petuchaks. Blanchett, pass me a molly?”

The scarred woman smiled. “It would be my pleasure.”

Lovikov walked up to a door, tossed a molotov cocktail through, and opened fire with his shotgun. It ripped through the room on full-auto, and Kraber heard screams of agony. All around them, PER were burning, and had Kraber not been wearing a gas mask, he would have savoured the wonderfully sweet aroma of cooking flesh. All the horsefuckers, the goddamn race-traitors and betrayers, the merry-go-round toys were burning to death.

Not exactly an ironically fitting punishment, but not an undeserved one either.

More screams, the squeals of ponies and humans burning alive. Good.

“What’s in here, anyway?” asked Dan the Gunner, peering inside.

In it, they could see something that looked like an archway built of junk and wood, standing freely in the middle of the room despite its structural implausibility. Lovikov’s autoshotgun was trained on the thing.

“That’s a damn portal!” said blond woman named Remillard. She’d been PHL, once upon a time - and left for the HLF. She’d never explained why. Either way, despite this - or maybe because of it - she’d risen through the Menschabwehrfraktion’s ranks, easily becoming a favored soldier of Lovikov’s.

“Tell us something we don’t know, Abby,” Lovikov sighed.

“Well, for starters… it’s short-range. Not imperial-made, looks like PER work,” Remillard said. “And it looks inactive. So, on the plus side, we’re not at risk of an invasion. On the other hand, there’s a PER base somewhere that we know nothing about.”

“Could we go through?” Dayoung asked, FAL held towards the portal, almost lazily.

“Nyet,” Lovikov said. “We don’t have the IFF, and even if we did… we don’t want to end up like Johnson.”

“Who’s-” Megan started, before Kraber waved her off.

“Don’t ask,” he said. “You’re happier not knowing.”

Kraber watched Remillard look the room over. Sometimes, he hated the woman. Wanted to hold her by the shoulders, and demand to know how she could’ve ever sunk so low as to work with ponies.

But for now, she was helping, and Kraber could let it slide.

“Huh,” Remillard said, looking at a table. “What’s this?”

Following Remillard’s gaze, he saw a glowing yellow crystal a little bigger than a railroad spike - something that’d likely be worth a lot of money before the War. Maybe more, nowadays, if the HLF found a buyer.

“Looks magic,” Blanchett said, as Remillard reached into her backpack for a set of tongs and a plastic container of some kind.

Kraber snorted. ‘Obviously.’

“Whatever it is,” Remillard said, placing the crystal in the container, “It looks important. Reminds me of that crystal stuff we see Imperials and PER using now and then.”

Kraber thought back to that. It did look familiar. And he had seen Imperials and PER using strange, crystalline equipment now and then

“I could maybe use some of my contacts in Portland to get to Romero, ask him for inf-”

“We are not,” Lovikov said, “Going. To talk. To that. Bastard.”

“Who’s Romero?” Megan asked, confused.

“Aweh,” Kraber said, “Jou know we’re one side of the HLF, people like Yarrow-”

“Yarrow,” Megan said, “Yarrow… the Englishman with the, ah, the energy weapons? All the Norse stuff?”

Kraber bristled at being interrupted, but he choked it down. Megan was a kid, after all.

“You know about that,” said Dan the Gunner, “But not Romero?”

“To be fair,” Kraber said, moving between Dan and Megan, “Romero likes to keep a low profile.”

“But seriously,” Megan asked. “Who’s Romero?”

“He’s on Yarrow’s side of the Split,” Kraber continued. “Their R&D. We get people like Remillard, they have Romero. Word is, not only does he supply newtech, but-”

And then Kraber heard it.

“HELP!”

Everybody snapped to alert, weapons out and scanning the area.

“Who said that?!”

“HELP!” the voice yelled again. “They’ve got us in the basement!”

Lovikov pointed towards the corridor. “I saw a set of stairs heading into the basement,” he said. There was certainly at least one easily-guarded hole that was perfect for holding prisoners…

As he moved, Viktor holstered his lovely new MG and unlimbered his shotgun. It consisted of two Mossberg pump-actions that had been welded together. Answering a nod from Lovikov with a small salute, he approached first. Just as insurance, he’d already changed the filter on his gas mask.

“Please!” the voice called out as he descended the stairs.

“You heard the guns!” another chimed in. “They’re here to save us!”

This speaker sounded younger. Like a child. Oh, if the PER had taken child prisoners, he was gonna slaughter whoever was left.

“Shut up!” someone else yelled, and there was the sound of a hoof against flesh.

Kraber kept his silence as he rounded the back of a pockmarked, crumbling wall of cinderblocks, an open room lit by a guttering lightbulb ahead. There was a single door at one end of the room. A single unicorn newfoal was standing guard, and immediately spun towards Kraber, casting clumsy spells. They were easily dodged, but the newfoal’s focus on the South African gave Benning the perfect opening to slip in behind the beast and snap its neck between two gloved hands.

“Nicely done,” approved Lovikov. “Guard down, without expending any ammo.”

Viktor however had already moved to take cover at the door, and was cautiously shining a torch down it with one hand while cradling the double-Mossberg in the other.

“Sound off!” he called. “If you’re prisoners, identify yourselves!”

“Yes! They’re holding us captive!”

“Silence!” screamed an incoherent voice, and Kraber winced.

“How many are guards are in there with you?” he demanded, ignoring the guard’s protestations.

“Only the two! He-ARGH!”

The sound of a body being beaten gave the needed opportunity. While the guard was engaged with beating his prisoners, Kraber threw himself out of cover and sprinted down the tunnel. His eyes did not have time to adjust to the dark, but there was no need, not from the pocket of light cast by the horn of a male unicorn as he laid into his victim with a levitated crowbar. A female stood beside him, a phial of potion in her mouth. His focus entirely on the stallion, Kraber ignored the mare, whose head exploded courtesy of a well-placed round fired down from the tunnel mouth.

The ‘CRACK’ of the bullet was deafening in the closed space, but not as loud as the smash as Kraber brought his shotgun’s stock down on the stallion’s head. The animal ducked at the last second, rolling aside so that the swipe missed him. The glaze of his wide, almost swollen-to-bursting eyes told his entire story: newfoal.

“They deserved it!” he shrieked. “You’re all apes, monsters, and-”

“I don’t fokking have time for this, jou bliksem,” Kraber sighed, kicking it in the face. The horizontal adit was plunged into darkness as the light of newfoal’s horn was snuffed out, but the Afrikaner heard his opponent landing at his feet, and grabbed it by the tail.

With little pause, he dragged the unconscious beast out into the open air and pressed the snout of the double-shotgun into the soft vicinity of its sheathed genitals.

D-DHOOM!

He fired with both barrels. Everything below the pony’s ribcage simply vanished, leaving the approach cutting to the adit slick with blood and viscera. The hindlegs flew off in separate directions, slamming into the rock walls with wet, meaty thumps. Ignoring the explosion of blood, Kraber reloaded the gun and, turning, returned inside the mine...

...only to find a stunned Lovikov.

“Where’s the prisoners?” Viktor grunted, before the wannabe-zampolit pointed with his torch at a few silent figures cowering against the rough-hewn side of the tunnel.

Ponies.

The beam of light illuminated a stallion and a mare, along with three little foals. They were crying, miserable beyond all belief. ‘Mutilated’ was a mild word to describe what had been done to them. The walls of their hooves had been peeled away, leaving bloody nubs of soft tissue on which it would be impossible to walk. Each equine was covered in the scum of their own tears, shit, spit and blood, leaving them so filthy that Kraber couldn’t even tell what color they had been when they’d come out of the womb. Their cutie marks had been cut off, wings clipped back to the bone, and their horns chiselled away.

And worst of all was their silence. You could see the pain and grief in their eyes, but they could not vocalise it. They had been systemically traumatized beyond even screaming.

“P...pliss,” whispered the stallion. “I… am PHL. I am important to them.”

He repeated the words, almost as if it was a mantra. Time and again he spoke, invoking the name of the Ponies for Human Life as if it was an invocation, a warding spell of protection.

And Kraber? Kraber...

...did not kill them. No, instead he shot ‘Comrade Lovikov’ in the balls and bitchslapped Blanchett to the ground with the gun. Then he’d carried the stricken family to a getaway vehicle and driven them to safety.

...yes, that was it. He’d run away with them, and joined the PHL. Repentant, he had patched up refugees as a trauma surgeon, once more devoting himself to life and healing rather than death and destruction. He’d risen high. He’d crippled the HLF by bringing along plenty of other disaffected ‘reformists’, which essentially ripped out their conscience, but made them desperate enough to do downright stupid things. At the end, the HLF would just be a hate group, trusted by few and reduced to such terrible actions that they’d be guaranteed little (if any) sympathy. Oakes would be dead, Birch would be dead too, and maybe - just maybe - he’d helped people.

He’d been skilled, and gifted, and gained enough traction as the resident ‘House, MD’ to convince command to finance the medical radio drama he’d longed to create...a dream that he nurtured from the day when Miranda Severance (who worked at PHL biology now, didn’t she?) linked him to a version of episode 19 of Night Vale, with Kevin and Cecil’s reactions synched up to show the contrast between them. And maybe, just maybe, using the traction he’d gained from that after the barrier somehow fell

how was it going to fall?

he’d be able to finance a movie about his life, maybe directed by Ilya Naishuller, maybe by Neil Blomkamp. And he’d be played by Sharlto Copley, of course… and vice versa.

He’d taught himself to draw, to paint and write. He’d given himself over to reinvent himself, to be anything other than the bastard who shot prisoners-

No. That was a lie.

What Kraber had done, what he had really done, was laugh hysterically.

Yeah. Confronted with that brutalised family of newfoals, he had laughed, and mocked the father’s ‘words of power’ as he and Lovikov riddled them with bullets.

They’d killed the foals first.

One daughter, a pegasus, had tried to fly away with her tattered wings, and the crunch she made as she hit the ground had been hilarious.

None of them screamed. Even then, none of them had made so much as a sound. That had been a little disappointing. They might have had the good grace to make things as amusing as possible.

So Kraber had filled the silence by laughing. When it was time to execute the parents, he’d done it personally, admiring the pretty rorschach patterns the sprays of blood had made against the rock and dirt.

And he’d relished every second, gleefully slaughtering each of the invaders. Each of the spies. Each of the fuckers - or buckers, that’s how they said it, ja? - that had brutalised and persecuted mankind, abused human trust and exploited human kindness.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

The mare and the stallion he’d killed slowly, placing a bullet in each limb and then gradually working his way up through the abdomen to the neck. Blanchett had taken comparative notes, and expressed surprise when the stallion refused to die from blood-loss alone.

No, finishing that bastard off had required one last slug right in the socket that had housed his horn. The rage, the betrayal, and condemnation in his eyes as he stared up at Kraber had been striking, not just for its sheer intensity, but for how impotent it had been…

...as Kraber proved when he’d laughed one last time and pulled the trigger.

BANG!

He’d gone into the camp skop, skiet, and donner, he had completed his slaughter with a laugh, and a contemptuous kick.

Which was only natural, of course. They were ponies, they were the invaders, they’d destroyed the world and killed billions….

At least, that was what he told himself.

---

After The Battle

They were on their way back to the APC when Dayoung looked up to Kraber, Megan following close behind. The fleet of vehicles were pocked with bullets, and at least two had been smashed into unrecognizable hunks of metal by pony magic, but they were mostly alright.

Dayoung and Megan followed behind Kraber, Remillard, Lovikov, Benning, Sully, and Dan. They had a truckload of things they'd taken from the town as 'payment' - TVs, food, et cetera.

“Are jou okay?” Kraber asked, looking back to the two teenagers.

“You killed the ponies in the basement, didn’t you?” Dayoung asked, her voice unsteady.

Kraber nodded. “Ja. I did.”

He didn’t offer elaboration. Why should I? he thought.

“That’s what Michael Carter did, isn’t it?” Megan asked.

Kraber pondered that. “No. I didn’t go nearly that far.”

“How can you say that?” Megan asked. “They were-”

“For all we know, they could’ve been spies, or PER,” Dayoung said. “Why else would they be there? While everyone was arguing?”

Kraber clapped Dayoung on the back, a smile on his face. This stukkie, he thought. she gets it. “Far as I’m concerned,” he said, “I don’t give a fok. You remember what’s come to this world with ponies, the end of my home, this verdamnt war… then suddenly, killing a few starts feeling like a public fokkin’ service.”

“Da,” Lovikov said. “It’s what anyone in the HLF learns. Anyone in America, or Africa, or China can talk a big game about unity and friendship, right up until they lose their homes.”

Kraber watched Dayoung pause for a few seconds, shrug, and nod.

“I get it,” Megan said. “I think I do.”

They got into the truck and sped off towards Defiance.

As Kraber sat in the truck’s bed, Dayoung and Megan at the other end, a thought came to him. It wasn’t exactly something he could write in perfect grammar. If anything, it was something vaguely verbalized, along the lines of ‘That doesn’t make sense none of this does’ or possibly ‘does this feel right’.

Except both at the same time.

‘So what doesn’t make sense?’ he asked himself. ‘These people… well, they weren’t happy to see us. Even if it was in the middle of a war zone, they weren’t happy for us to save them.’

Ungrateful? No. Apprehensive. Worried. Unwelcoming.

What would make them so… so… Kraber thought, searching for the word. Unzufrieden mit us? They must’ve cared about ponies, yes, but… we’re only trying to help! It’s not like they could care about the fokkin’ gluesticks so much they would be afraid of us!

Except… we killed a family of… no, I killed ponies. I killed… a family of ponies?

I killed a family, Kraber thought, unable to unthink it. Killed. A. Family.

Still. I’ve done this countless times. What makes them so different?

“Hey,” said Dan the Gunner, looking down to Kraber from his position near the LMG, “What’s wrong? You gettin’ carsick?”

“It’s just….” Kraber said, shifting his hand from side to side in the almost universal hand motion for ‘ehhhhhhh...’. “I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right.”

“Well, I’m sure that some time off in Defiance will set you right,” Dan said. “Around your friends. Around people who believe in the HLF wholeheartedly, unlike those jagoffs.”

Kraber turned towards Dan, curiously.

“I mean honestly. Not the hero’s welcome we expect. Least we’re coming back to people who appreciate us,” Dan sighed.

‘Somehow,’ Kraber thought, ‘I’m not completely sure that’s what I need.’

‘Where did that thought come from?’

---

December 2022
Dancing Day

“Wherever that thought came from,” Kraber tells you, “It didn’t leave. And I was thinking of that when I saw you in the trunk. The looks in their eyes. The realization that no matter what you were, I’d destroyed a family.”

He pauses. Aegis trots over to him, beer bottle in his jaws, and places it on the table next to his friend.

“Dankie, my bru,” Kraber says, ruffling the scraggly strands of mane that trail behind Aegis’ red bandanna.

“You’re welcome,” Aegis says. “Figured you’d need it after that story.”

“That’s horrible!” you yell, but then you remember what Kraber did in Montreal. The bond that he and Aegis share. Kraber has, you think, made up for what he’s done. Or at the very least, he’s on the way to doing it.

“It was,” Kraber says, the emotion blasted form his voice. “And I hope to God I can make up for it.”

“But I still have more question,” I say. “How did you get to Montreal? With us in the car trunk? And how did you and Aegis get to be such good friends if you were-”

“You’re sure you want to know?” Kraber asks.

I nod. “I”m sure.”

“Well,” Kraber says, “This is going to be a looooooong one.”

Author's Note:

...Wow.

You know, Kate calling Kraber and having him hear this didn't happen in the original story, but it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing here. And... good cripes, that was horrible. I think I need a drink, I'm too sober to deal with the fact that I wrote that. As for why Kraber didn't hear it until it was too late? Well, he doesn't like to use his phone while driving on account of nearly dying like that when he was in college.

Now some of you new readers (do I have new readers?) may be thinking: "THESE PEOPLE ARE DICKS!" I mean, I did kind of write them being ready to loot civilians, and looting. I mean, it wasn't

Good. That's the intended reaction to the HLF - and Kraber. Promise, though, Kraber gets better.

It'll take some time, though.

Comments

[Mr cold ghost]

Nice to see a new chapter! I loved the battle foals! I mean they are a much more believable threat I guess than just the Zerg rush of a horde of zombie newfoals. Thanks for the update!

[Doctor Fluffy]

8773620
Thank Jed and Royalpsycho for that - it wouldn't be the same without them ^~^

And it was a pleasure! There's more updates coming SOON (tm)

[McNess]

“Oh, you’ll be happier soon enough when we get you out of that ugly human body and make you into a pretty little filly! How can you be happy with that body, yuck! Human bodies are icky and big and ugly and...and mean! Humans are mean!”

I see what you did there. Also I just loved the addition of this scene overall.

He repeated the words, almost as if it was a mantra. Time and again he spoke, invoking the name of the Ponies for Human Life as if it was an invocation, a warding spell of protection.

And Kraber? Kraber...

...did not kill them. No, instead he shot ‘Comrade Lovikov’ in the balls and bitchslapped Blanchett to the ground with the gun. Then he’d carried the stricken family to a getaway vehicle and driven them to safety.

I love that you kept this from the original story. Of course there are other similarities like the scene where Kraber promptly prevents the injured guy from being ponified, but this was by far my favorite moment that you kept. (Also, Kraber bitchslapping Blanchett to the ground killed me, I would've been laughing till I choked if I wasn't reading this at work)

A lot of genitals getting blown off so far, I approve! (I think?)

[Doctor Fluffy]

8777306

I see what you did there. Also I just loved the addition of this scene overall.

I hate that quote with the burning intensity of a thousand suns, and I like getting to turn Chatoyance's own quotes against her. And thanks! It was kind of a spur of the moment thing adding that scene in, but I figured it made sense. Glad you like it!

A lot of genitals getting blown off so far, I approve! (I think?)

I blame Garth Ennis.

[Starcat5]

8777453
As a fan of Unicorn Jelly, I find all this backlash against Chatoyance to be more than a little annoying. Granted, her various blow ups over the years earned her that backlash from both sides of the TCB devide, but I still find it annoying all the same. *goes back to reading stories about Pretty Pastel Ponies defending Humanity from other Pretty Pastel Ponies*

[Jed R]

8804818
Honestly, backlash against Chatoyance is at best tangential to a lot of the current crop of Alt-TCB. Although frankly from what little I’ve seen of Chat’s work, it’s got serious character derailment issues that are rightfully mocked.