Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 68: Decisive Battle

“Are you sure you’re a real doctor?” I asked the changeling poking at me. In theory she was giving me stitches. I’d just never seen it involve spitting onto an open wound.

“Are you sure you’re a real patient?” she snapped back. “I could be using this slime to help a pony who’s more appreciative of my efforts! You won’t even get undressed!”

“We need the armor to stay on,” Destiny said. She was levitating a welding torch, and I really had to hope she was using it on my equipment and not me. I ached enough all over that it was hard to tell. “There’s no telling when she’ll have to fight again.”

“I worked in medicine for longer than you’ve been alive, and I’d never let a patient walk away in the condition she’s in!” the changeling barked. “Give me one good reason not to sedate her so deeply she doesn’t wake up until next week!”

“Wow, I thought changelings ate love,” I said. “What happened to bedside manner?”

“You know what families really love?” The changeling huffed, her wings buzzing in annoyance. “Having the ponies they care about stay alive!”

“Point taken,” I mumbled.

“The only point I want you to take is better care of yourself,” the drone huffed. “Or something like that. I’ve been patching up ponies for hours and you’re being more difficult than any of the others.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Take two of these and scream if anything gets worse,” she said, digging in a bag and leaving two individually-packaged pills in front of me. “They’re an antibiotic. I can’t tell if you’ve got internal injuries but if you do, you’ll need surgery, and this might keep you from going septic until I can get around to cutting you open. I’ll need to find a chainsaw to do it.”

“Try to get a better welding torch while you’re getting power tools,” Destiny mumbled. “Stupid thing… the one I had back home got much hotter.”

“Trust me, it’s already really, really hot!” I assured her.

“I think I cleared all the broken junk off the weapon rack,” Destiny said. “I’ll need to run some tests to make sure. Don’t swap any weapons until I make sure you won’t explode trying it.”

“And don’t explode near my other patients,” the doctor added, packing her bag and storming out. “I’ve got a palace full of them! The last thing they need is collateral damage!”

I waited for her to leave and stood up, grabbing the pills and swallowing them dry. My insides had settled down into a grey wash of nausea and unhappy feelings, but that was fine for now.

“Let’s find Star Swirl,” I said. Destiny bobbed, putting the torch down and following me out into the hallway. There were ponies everywhere. With the whole city stuffed into one building, they’d ended up in every available room and space large enough for somepony to lay down, and the guards were struggling just trying to keep order with panicked ponies and worried families trying to find lost foals and missing spouses.

“At least supplies won’t be an issue with SIVA,” Destiny noted. “In theory, Raven can recycle everything in case the siege goes long.”

“It won’t,” I said.

“Do you have some kind of plan for dealing with the undead outside?” Destiny asked. “Because I hope it’s better than your plan for taking out Chrysalis!”

“No, I mean--” I sighed. “Come on, I’m supposed to be the stupid one, not you. Chrysalis is obviously here, somewhere, and with ponies spread out everywhere, she has access to everything!”

The hallway in front of the throne room was the only space in the palace that was being kept clear by the guards, so at least somepony had considered that Chrysalis might try walking up to Flurry Heart and just stabbing her in the back. Raven poked her head out of the door before I could even be announced and waved me in.

“I’ve been tracking your location,” she explained. “I apologize that I haven’t had time to repair your armor. I’m occupied making beds and medical supplies.”

“It’s fine,” I said, waving a hoof as we walked into the room. Flurry Heart sat on her throne, looking at a row of displays with an unreadable expression.

“I apologize,” Flurry Heart said, without looking at me. “The mission to capture Chrysalis failed rather spectacularly.”

“What happened to the team that was supposed to be supporting me?” I asked.

“They were maintaining radio silence and never broke it,” the Queen said. “They have also failed to return. They are likely already dead.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little sick.

“Chrysalis must have seen them moving into position, or at least that is what I choose to believe. The alternative is that they were compromised from within. I do not wish to believe that any of my subjects would betray their own, and so I will ascribe this to enemy action.”

“None of the non-lethal gear we brought worked either,” I said. “The grenades stunned her a little, but she just tore out of the net. I didn’t have a chance to test the tear gas, but I don’t think it would have made a difference.”

“And now she is locked in here with us, or we’re locked in with her,” Flurry Heart said. “The changelings under my command are certain that she is nearby, but she can mask her presence beyond their ability to pinpoint her. It is likely she could be entirely invisible to their senses, and chooses to sew terror.”

“That would be like her,” Star Swirl said, stepping into the room. “There you are. Good work! You’re not dead.”

“Thanks?” I shrugged. “Tell me you’re as brilliant as Destiny thinks you are and you’ve come up with something really clever that’s going to save our butts.”

“All of the medics are on the watch for her,” Star Swirl said. “I don’t know if any of the fancy boxes and toys they have these days can find her, but she doesn’t know that either. The only problem is what to do if they actually do find her.”

“I am the only one who can face her directly,” Flurry Heart said.

“And she’s keeping you from doing that by putting a whole city in the way,” Star Swirl reminded her. “What are you going to do, start throwing spells around in the medical bay? Cast death curses across the cafeteria and hope no foals get in the way?”

“She will do worse,” Flurry Heart said darkly. “If I have to sacrifice a few to save the rest, I will. A leader must be prepared to make that choice without hesitation.”

“Death to the false queen!”

The door on the other wall was kicked open, and a pony in full armor stormed in, firing wildly. Plasma bolts sizzled across the room, hitting consoles and sending one of the analysts working in the throne room to the ground. The security detail closed in, trying to get between him and Flurry Heart.

I triggered the junk jet, and a steel web exploded into the air, wrapping around the armed pony and dropping them in a tightly-bound heap. One of the security ponies walked up them and kicked the gun away, then pulled their helmet off, revealing a crystal pony I actually recognized.

“Gypsum?” I asked. They looked up, their eyes glowing green from within.

“It’s not a changeling,” the guard said after a moment. “There’s something wrong with her.” He waved a hoof in front of her face, and she didn’t seem to notice.

“She’s being mentally dominated,” Star Swirl said. “One of Chrysalis’ little tricks.”

“Great, cool,” I groaned. “So we can’t even trust--”

The screaming cut me off. Ponies in danger and pain with nowhere to go. Trapped like rats. How many mind-controlled victims would it take to cause a riot?

Flurry Heart stood up. She hadn’t even flinched at Gypsum taking a shot at her. This brought her right up to her hooves. “Order the guards to detain anypony acting strangely!” she shouted. “Lethal force is permitted to save lives!”

“Destiny,” I said. She nodded and settled over my head. “We’ll see what we can do. I’ve still got a bunch of concussion grenades and a few nets.”

“Ma’am! We’ve got a problem!” One of the analysts reported, the only one still looking at the dozen screens around the room while the others tended to their wounded. “The snipers that were supposed to be out on special assignment have taken hostages and they’ve barricaded themselves in the energy storage array!”

Star Swirl sucked air in between his teeth.

“Are they the sniper team that was supposed to help me?” I asked.

“Unfortunately,” Flurry Heart confirmed.

“Figures,” I mumbled. “What can they do?”

“In there?” Star Swirl said. “If they breach those capacitors, they’ll go off like megaspells! Multiple, overlapping detonations! Everypony here will be dead a dozen times over!”

“That’s our first stop,” I said. “Raven, can you give me a back door?”

She nodded. “There’s a service corridor behind the room. You can breach the back wall safely without endangering the capacitors yourself.”

“I’ll route engineers to come in after you to repair any damage,” Flurry Heart said. “Go.”

---

I watched the engineer place a block of explosive against the wall. It didn’t look like much. They backed up, held up a hoof, and waited for a moment before bringing it down, triggering the detonator. The wall blew open with crystal shrapnel and sparkling dust, and I rushed through, the new software updates automatically adjusting my vision and picking out the sniper team in bright red outlines.

Alarms were already blaring, harsh honking sounds like a giant angry goose powered by a rattling steam engine that was quickly going out of control.

“That’s bad,” Destiny said. I didn’t have time to worry about how bad it was. The blast had gotten everypony’s attention, and laser sights were tracking through the dust in the air, bouncing off countless glittering shards. I bolted through it, triggering the speed implant inside me and grabbing one of the snipers who was taking cover near the back of the room and bringing him with me, throwing him at a second pony and charging the one nearest the controls, slamming him back into a metal panel hard enough for him to bounce, catching him on the rebound to slam him into the ground.

The world flashed back into color and blazing warmth. The snipers were very well trained. Three more of them were positioned around the room, forming a kill-box around the door. Despite starting out in the wrong direction they were already refocusing on me, and the first bolt of plasma hit my flank, scorching the armor but not penetrating. I slapped the helmet release and tossed Destiny towards the control bank.

“See what you can do to shut things down!” I yelled, not letting her answer before I took off, launching a concussion grenade at two of the snipers and charging the last one still up where he was shooting down from service catwalks. He got a shot off at me, the bolt barely missing my head. Without the speed implant, it was like flying through molasses, exhaustion and crashing blood sugar making me feel leaden.

I practically landed on the sniper, firing a net into him at point-blank range and sending him sprawling for ten paces, cartwheeling with the force of the launch, the net wrapping around him tightly and leaving him as a dizzy bundle.

I stumbled to the edge of the catwalk, but the engineers were already rushing in, hitting the sniper I’d just thrown with a wrench and knocking him back out. I limped over to the two that I’d hit with a concussion grenade. All I’d really done was knock them away from their long guns. They got up, drawing long crystal knives that looked like serrated shards of glass.

“Just put them down,” I said. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but if we have to fight--”

They turned the knives on themselves, stabbing them into their own chests in perfect silence.

“Oh buck!” I swore, running over to them. I grabbed the knife and-- was I supposed to pull it free or leave it? Leave it, right? So they don’t bleed out right away? I hesitated, but it didn’t matter. They were already beyond saving. I groaned and trotted back towards the controls. Everything was red, blinking and red, or just so far off the scale it had stopped working.

“This place is bucked!” one of the engineers yelled. “We’ve got pressure rising everywhere in the system! Half the thermomagic couplers are already gone! If this doesn’t blow, it’s still going to kill everypony here with the radiation!”

“Here!” Destiny pulled a book of diagrams out, slapping them on the console and flipping through them. “Where is it…”

“There has to be a way to stop this,” I said.

“There is,” a confident voice said. Flurry Heart stepped into the room, looking around at the massive bombs about to go off in our faces. “I will attempt to contain the blast.”

“That will never work,” Destiny said. “This is your magic! Just the amount alone is… the instant impulse from the blast is going to overwhelm any shield.”

“I learned quite a bit from my father,” Flurry Heart said. “He was a master of shield spells.”

“If you want to help, I need you to hold these junctions together,” Destiny said, using her magic to draw arrows on the map. “They’re what’s going to blow. I need to manually trigger the vents in the Giraffey Tubes, and I’m the only one who can do it because of the radiation backwash. Then-- Chamomile, you need to go after Chrysalis!”

“Huh?” I blinked. “But… what about all this?”

“We’ve got this,” Destiny assured me. “But if she sabotages something else we won’t have time to fix it! The software updates in the armor will cover for me, just go and punch the monster!”

---

I held a mind-controlled pony in a headlock and tried to figure out what to do. This was a nightmare, almost literally. Ponies were counting on me and I had to find a powerful, shapeshifting monster that could be anywhere, doing anything.

I punched the struggling pony I was holding and let them drop in an unconscious heap. A concussion would probably solve the mind control thing.

“Attention, evacuation procedure is about to commence,” announced Raven over the intercom. “Mares and foals first. Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the secure embarkation room. Guards will direct you there. This message will repeat. Attention, evacuation procedure…”

I suddenly knew her plan, like she’d laid it all out for me. I bolted, charging through the stuffed corridors and eventually taking to the air, flying over the crowd in the tight space, bouncing off corners without even time for apologies as I pinballed my way towards the mirror portal room.

Star Swirl was there, working some kind of spell on the tall mirror. A crowd of foals and mares had already gathered, held back by guards to give Star Swirl room to work. I landed next to him and he gave me a critical look.

“We’re sending the foals first,” he said. “I don’t care if you don’t belong here, I can feel the magic in the air and we don’t have time to argue about this.”

“Don’t open the portal,” I whispered.

“This place is going to go off like a bomb!” he snapped. “We have to save who we can!”

“Destiny is sure she can stop the sabotage,” I said quietly. “Can you please just trust me on this? If you open up that portal, you’ll be doing just what she wants!”

“If I don’t, they’ll all die,” Star Swirl said. “Every second we delay will cost the lives of ponies that could be going through that door!”

“Just- give me a minute! One minute!”

“That’s about how long it’s going to take me to set the destination,” Star Swirl said. “You have that minute and not one second more.”

I nodded, turning away from him. “She has to be here,” I mumbled, looking at the crowd in front of the mirror. Who was it? My eyes ran over the ponies. If I was Chrysalis, what would I do? What would I use to try and hide? What would be the perfect disguise?

Right at the front, poised to be one of the first ponies out of Limbo, was a mare holding an infant. The foal looked uncomfortable. Close to tears. I glanced at the mother, the mare not even looking at her little filly. She frowned when I met her gaze. It hit me like a thunderbolt.

I stormed up to her and slapped the foal out of her grasp, knocking it to the ground. The ponies in the room gasped, some of them screaming in anger or confusion. But not the mare. She stood there silently, stoically. The expression washed off her face the moment the foal left her grip.

“Using the same trick twice?” I looked down at the infant. It glared up at me and hissed, showing snake fangs.

“How did you know?” the infant growled, the voice deep and hateful. “I could have been anypony!” The ponies that had been glaring at me and close to starting a riot froze and stared at her before backing away from the hissing monster.

“You don’t want any survivors,” I said. “You had to be one of the first ponies ready to go through. Then you could destroy the portal from the other side and trap everypony here, and nopony in Equestria would even know you existed.”

The filly exploded in green fire, splitting open and expanding, blackened limbs tearing themselves free from their cramped disguise. Chrysalis tossed her ragged mane back and sneered down at me.

“The only thing you’ve accomplished is getting an opportunity to die more slowly and painfully than if you’d just let the explosion take you,” Chrysalis said. “You’re still reeling from the beating I gave you a few hours ago. I’m surprised you decided on a second helping!”

“This time I’m ready for you,” I said.

“You’re--” she laughed. “You’re ready for me? You think you’ve seen all my tricks and you’re prepared to face me? What gives you the idea that--”

My knife hit her in the neck, sending a gush of black and green spraying ten meters through the air, like she was full of high-pressure lines of ichor and rotting grease. I motioned with my hoof, and it flew back through the air to me, clicking into place neatly.

“I was trying to take you alive last time,” I said. “I don’t have the luxury now.”

Her neck flashed, healing over in a wash of green fire. She bared her fangs, her amusement instantly transformed into anger. The guards in the room lurched into motion, finally, turning and peppering her with blue plasma shots. She winced at the impacts, the plasma scorching the top layers of her carapace. Chrysalis lowered her head and charged me, crooked horn first.

I braced myself and caught the spear with my knife, bracing my right hoof with my left, but her strength lifted me right off the ground and towards the wall. A ring of fire and darkness appeared, and she charged right into it with me holding onto her horn. I braced for impact, but there was none, and we flew through the wall like it wasn’t there, the ring snapping shut behind her and cutting off the stray shots from the guards.

I let go and tumbled to the side in the service corridor, surrounded by the castle’s lifelines, all of it grown by SIVA and more like veins and arteries than HVAC work and plumbing, plastic pipes throbbing as they pumped and curving ducts seeming to gently breathe.

Chrysalis glared down at me. I held up my blade. It was a tight space. For a moment I thought it might actually work to my advantage. I knew I could hurt her, and if I could make her bleed, I could probably do a lot more.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Chrysalis teased, breaking into a fangy smile. “You’re going to try solving this with brute strength.”

“That was one idea,” I admitted. “But I just got an even better one.”

I punched my hoof into the wall and focused. I could feel the SIVA moving through it, flowing where it was needed. The crystal palace was like a living thing, and we spoke the same language.

The pipes next to Chrysalis bubbled, the surfaces deforming before they erupted, the air instantly turning arctic-cold in a spray of the palest sky blue, liquid oxygen freezing her in place. Frost covered her black carapace before she disappeared into fog. I saw a flash of green light around her horn, and it went off like a bomb, sending me tumbling back down away from the flames.

Chrysalis screamed, thrashing in the blaze of heat and cold. I couldn’t make out much through the blaze, just the dark shadow of her body in the flames.

“I’ll kill you! You and every last one of the ponies in this castle!” Chrysalis shouted. She took a step toward me, and then her body shifted. Green flames replaced the bright oxygen-burning fire, and the corridor shook, her size doubling and then doubling again. Her cries of anger became the roars of a terrible beast, one too small for the space we were in. She moved, and the walls weren’t enough to stop her.

A massive claw slammed down through where I’d been a moment ago, and the only reason it hadn’t squashed me was the hoof that had grabbed mine and pulled me back.

I looked behind me to see Raven. She stepped out of the wall, and it rippled behind her like water. She motioned with her head and I followed behind her, running away from the growing horror ripping through the castle behind us.

“I approved your emergency access request,” she said. “I’m erecting emergency bulkheads and shoring up the castle structure, but it won’t last.”

“Can you get me outside?” I asked. “Maybe I can lead her away!”

A tentacle smashed through the ceiling, knocking pipes aside and blasting me with steam from behind.

“You do seem to have her attention,” Raven agreed. She looked ahead, and a new doorway opened up like an iris, a stairway folding out in front of us as we ran, each step a panel folding out of the wall like a flower and retracting once we’d passed it. Above us, light bloomed and we made it out into the still, quiet air of Limbo.

We were maybe halfway up the castle, on a ledge that might have been there all along or might have grown a few moments ago to accommodate us. The city burned below us, smoke rising from streets filled with the shambling dead.

The castle wall a dozen paces down from us exploded out in a flurry of motion, a dozen tendrils pushing through smoke and debris and pulling a huge form out of the narrow confines of the structure. Chrysalis had turned herself into something horrible and almost formless, like a skeletal dragon mixed with an octopus.

“I don’t think concussion grenades are gonna work on that,” I mumbled.

“No,” Raven agreed. “Queen Flurry Heart could destroy her, but she is still holding the capacitors together with her magic. She can’t step in until they’ve been vented.”

An idea, a bad one, came to mind. “The weapon I used to kill the last dragon I fought won’t work on her. It only disassembles SIVA.”

She gave me a pensive look. “There is another option. Although I currently look like a pony--”

“You can turn into a dragon,” I breathed. It was a terrible plan. Chrysalis’ new, massive shape stumbled into the city. It was burning around the edges with green fire, like it was so unstable she was ready to explode or collapse at any moment, like she was made of charcoal and ashes.

“I don’t know if I can maintain control. I might need… help.” She looked at me.

“What do you need me to do?” I didn’t have time to argue. It was better than any of my ideas.

Raven put a hoof on my chest, and silver threads flowed out of her and into me painlessly. “I am giving you higher access. You have control. Maintain physical contact with me after I transform and just… think about what you want me to do.”

She closed her eyes, and silver poured out of the castle, wrapping around her like a liquid egg. Chrysalis turned to look at us, the bony plates making up her horrific face opening like a flower to reveal a dozen eyes that all focused on me.

“There you are,” she said, the voice more felt than heard, echoing in my head. She moved like a landslide, too fast for something that large, a huge claw coming down towards me to swat me like an insect.

The egg cracked. A spear of silvery metal tore out of it, intercepting the claw. Metallic muscle and bone and pistons and gears wrapped around it in a blizzard of moving steel, growing from nothing in less than a second.

A wing exploded from the other side of the egg, and my instincts screamed for me to run away. I could hear the SIVA screaming in a tide of binary and code, louder than it ever had before. I gingerly touched the egg, and it lurched into motion, a wave pushing under my hooves and lifting me up on shoulders that hadn’t been there a moment ago, straddling a spine that was still cracking and forming with the vertebrae twisting into place.

Chrysalis took a step back, crushing a house under her weight, as Raven’s body filled out, metal flash-forging into armored plates and draconic features. She stood, and straps secured me in place on top of her when I even started to think about slipping.

“What?” Chrysalis hissed into my mind, confused.

“I guess we’re doing this! I have control” I yelled. Raven roared, a sound like pistons releasing pressure and steam venting. “Knock her out!”

Raven surged into motion, scales peeling back to reveal air intakes and rocket exhausts, beating her wings and rising into the air on plumes of fire before crashing down on Chrysalis, countless tons of living metal hitting burning chitin. Raven reared up, ready to stomp down on her again, and the tentacles around Chrysalis’ head snapped forwards, grabbing us and pulling the SIVA dragon aside.

I felt her start to tip and tried to correct, firing the rockets in short bursts and almost pitching over in the other direction before I got the hang of it and steadied the huge beast. It was a strange feeling, almost as if I was seeing through two pairs of eyes at once, synchronizing with Raven’s rhythms and thoughts.

“We have to take her out fast,” I said, hoping Raven was really listening. “She’s practically ancient, let’s show her something newer than wrestling!”

I closed my eyes, the double vision easing when I was just looking through Raven’s eyes. It didn’t feel like I was huge. It felt like everything else was tiny, like I was a too-big foal in daycare all over again, knocking over block towers and getting into fights with other fillies. The mane of tentacles writhed around the thick armor of Chrysalis’ head. She had an advantage at close range, so I had to think smarter.

Scales popped up on new hinges, and boxy frames poked out of Raven’s substructure. With a thought, dozens of rockets flew into the air, curving around and converging on Chrysalis from all sides like a whole circus of Wonderbolts weaving around each other at an air show. Plasma warheads detonated with blue and green fire on her hide, blasting hunks of meter-thick chitin into the air.

Chrysalis stormed through the clouds of shrapnel and debris, slamming into us and shoving us back, stopping the storm of munitions, the last few rockets going wild. Lime-green light flashed through her body, shining between her battleship-thick armor before erupting out of her mouth in a gout of poisonous fire, burning green and purple. White specks and flashes washed through my vision even with my eyes shut, and I could taste iron.

Raven raised her massive draconic wings as a shield to hold off the balefire, the silver panels quickly growing red and then white from the heat.

“Chamomile,” Flurry Heart’s voice crackled over the loudspeakers. “We are redirecting the energy output of the broken capacitors. Prepare to receive the energy transfer.”

“Doing what now?” I asked. I looked back at the palace. A team of changelings and crystal ponies was finishing the work of dragging thick crystal-optic cables and hooking them into an antenna shaped like a dish, with four steel arms holding a thick lens at the focal point.

Raven grunted, steam hissing out of her joints. Her back opened up like a butterfly, black panels sliding into place like a second set of wings.

“Transferring power now,” the Queen said. The antenna lit up, the lens glowing gold and tracers of energy crawling along the surface of the dish before launching out, hitting Raven in the back. The beam wavered and blinked in and out, the cables running to the dish visibly smoking even through the glare.

It barely mattered. I could feel the power surging through Raven. It was like a megaspell beating in my chest, begging to be invoked.

Chrysalis’ gout of flame sputtered and stopped, and Raven flicked her wings open, the molten edges dripping and splattering down over the city. Chrysalis was visibly shaken, taking a step back. Another wave of energy started to move through her, but Raven was faster. I pulled at that infinite source of energy inside, and when Raven roared, a beam of pure light erupted out, a blade of light that hit the ground under Chrysalis and swept up in an arc, slashing through her and stretching into the distance, slicing through everything in its path out to the horizon and beyond.

Chrysalis screeched and fell, two of her massive legs severed. She landed hard, and the energy she’d been building up exploded out of her side, blasting her ribs apart. The psychic pressure washed away. I felt like I’d surfaced after being at the bottom of a deep pool of sludge.

Raven shuddered, and my vision doubled again as we started to drift apart. The silver around my hooves, the safety straps holding me onto her, melted away and I was suddenly free. I’d never felt really small before, but when my perspective changed and I was just seeing things from pont-size again, I really realized how rough we’d been and how much we’d destroyed. Fires raged across the city. Radiation hissed against my skin in an annoying itch. Just in falling over, Chrysalis had destroyed several city blocks. Raven went down right after pulling away from me, the machine dragon falling apart into a heap of dead metal.

I caught myself in the air, barely avoiding riding her down. I circled and waited for it to still, then landed on the debris.

“Raven?!” I yelled. “Are you in there?”

“Here,” she said weakly, and the skull moved, scales popping off of the structure and landing with huge clangs. She crawled out of one empty eye socket, looking even rougher than I did. I flew over and touched down next to her to help her down.

“You okay?” I asked. She didn’t look exactly okay. I could see traces of scales just under her coat, especially around her spine. Her back hooves were still draconic talons, even if they were scaled to her normal size.

“I’m finding it difficult to return entirely to myself,” she admitted, her voice wavering. She leaned onto me for support. “I think I need to rest.”

“We both do,” I agreed. “Are you going to be okay if I leave you here?”

“If any undead haven’t been crushed by the debris, I’m sure they’ll find me less than appetizing,” she said. “Where are you going?”

I looked over at the fallen changeling queen. Even with her body lying still, I had a bad feeling. Maybe that was just radiation poisoning. Maybe it wasn’t.

“Finishing this fight,” I said.

Comments

[FridayPie]

Radio silence while enemy got ability to MC? That's tactical blunder.

[Thought Prism]

Jesus, this chapter was so damn cool.

[Reese]

"space large enough for somepony to lay down"
"space large enough for somepony to lie down"?

"and chooses to sew terror."
"and chooses to sow terror."?

"Chrysalis’ new, massive shape"
"Chrysalis’s new, massive shape"?

"around Chrysalis’ head"
"around Chrysalis’s head"?

"armor of Chrysalis’ head"
"armor of Chrysalis’s head"?

"Chrysalis’ gout of flame sputtered and stopped"
"Chrysalis’s gout of flame sputtered and stopped"?

"things from pont-size again, I really"
"things from pony-size again, I really"?