Chapter 15 — Murderer
Chapter 15: Murderer
“But now I realize that some ponies are just cruel, and deserve to be punished.”
Boxes.
“Why-why are we back here?” Cards asked me. Her eyes, one of them adorably black, were still red from crying, specks of her mother’s blood still here and there on her white body. This dim storage room at the back of the Sleepy Oaks sheriff’s office did not bring back good memories, unless you counted me beating up Blackout in the shower, which was awesome in hindsight. Seriously, though, something about that black eye looked good on her: it wasn’t really puffy, just discolored, like an abused puppy. A part of me wished I’d punched her in the eye when I’d first met her just so she’d have that look.
“Yeah, why?” Dust chimed in. “You leave me and her alone for, like, an hour or so in this creepy building, then you show up outta nowhere and lead us here. What gives?”
“That’s a strangely complete summary of our current predicament,” I commented.
“What?” Cards asked.
As I looked at her questioning face, a little thought made its way up through the back of my mind: I think I liked her now better than ever. An hour ago she had murdered her mother, and it’d taken this long to calm her down enough to walk and try to leave. Yet for all of that, she was now firmly aboard Team Jericho, which meant that she likely wouldn’t be playing the moral crusader come to ruin my murder party. Which was good. The last thing I needed was a white knight trying to tell me to stop having fun killing bad guys. This was why it was going to be a good day.
With the light on, this place was almost bearable, even with all the crates giving it a claustrophobic atmosphere. I ran a hoof over the dusty little table that, once a upon a time—or so Cards told me—the little mare had played card games on when she was supposed to be working. I dimly wondered if they had buried Glasses at all, or if this place had a morgue that he was rotting in. Yeah, we were just going to wander around town and find a pack of wild beavers feasting upon his corpse and laying their beaver eggs inside his skull.
“Cards, do you remember that magically sealed crate in this room?” I asked.
She blinked. “Yeah; we never got the code to it. The lock was some specific thought, I think.” The mare looked over to the crate she’d just described sitting next to the table. “What about it?”
I nodded my head over to it. “Only works for unicorns, racist designers. Stick yours in the lock, think the phrase ‘three doors down’. It’s the password thing.”
“But how did you...?” Dust probed.
“I found a piece of paper in Duke Elkington’s throne room/office thing when he brought me there,” I said. “Apparently, ‘three doors down’ was some kind of failsafe built into all of these kinds of chests. I guess they felt the need for a skeleton key. Go on, Cards, open it up.” Because I won’t; Dust said at least one unicorn got their horn blown off by one of these, and that’s not happening to me, no siree.
Cards hesitated, took a breath, then looked to Dust. The pegasus shrugged and nodded, and Cards slowly ambled over to the chest. “Three doors down, right?” she asked, and I nodded. She blew a puff of air out of her mouth. “Okay. Here goes.” And in she went.
To my dull surprise, a weird magic sound came from the box, and its top opened on its own. Cards jerked her head back and stared. There’s bound to be some sexy loot in there! Nudging Cards out of the way, I peeked into the large box and gave it a puzzled frown.
“What is it?” Dust asked.
I pulled it out. “It’s a suit of cloth armor; as in, the kind police would wear during a riot.”
“Riot armor?” Cards muttered. “This isn’t armor: there’s no steel or iron.”
“Steel or iron does not necessarily armor make,” I replied. “You can easily have a suit of armor without any steel or iron that is, on its own, fifty times stronger than steel, and can deflect almost harmlessly sharp and pointy things without effort.”
“That’s crazy,” she said.
“If it was crazy, why are you alive?” I asked, and she blinked. “Remember how back in the doctor’s house, that stallion tries to stab you, only for you to survive with only slight, slight, slight bruises?” She nodded. With a toothy grin, I pulled out my knife and raise it high, pointing the blade downwards. She snapped her eyes shut as I brought the knife down, straight into my own chest.
Nothing happened, just a slight jabbing pain in my breast, like being poked rather hard by the baton of a stallion trying to imply what he was going to do to you now that you were in jail. That is, he was going to bake you a very nice batch of cookies, and that they would be so good as they went down into your stomach, and you were going to be become the best of friends, and then he was going to savagely violate your every orifice because betrayal was the only way he could get it up, but it was okay because he used magic to change his sex in order to make it not rape. Because that was how Equestria saw it. No, I was never getting over that, no matter how preachy I sounded!
I continued smiling as I waited for the little mare to hesitantly open an eye. When she did, I harmlessly stabbed my chest quick enough to make sure she’d see it. “And that’s why you’re alive, Cards.”
Cards blinked. “Whoa. That’s... amazing. I sort of thought it was some sort of magic that kept me alive. This kind of thing has to be, like, the bleeding edge of technology and stuff.”
“No,” I scoffed. “It’s antiquated as hell where I’m from. We haven’t used steel armor for over a century. To me, people who wear that kind of armor are just silly, and you should totally trip them so that they can never get back up and subsequently die; I, wearing teutsche armor, will be dancing around them singing merry tunes of how lightweight my gear is; and then I go to his house and deliver a solemn message to his wife and young son about how their father died before breaking out into a vaguely homoerotic dance routine about how pathetic he—and where was I going with this? There was a metaphor in there, I’m sure.” I rubbed my eyes, then massaged a hoof across the riot armor.
“What are you doing?” Lightning Dust probed.
“Testing it,” I said. “Whatever this is, it’s clearly utter Scheiße, compared to what I’m used to.”
“Shai-suh?” Dust replied.
I rolled my eyes. How many times had I already used that word in front of her? “Yes, Scheiße—means ‘shit’. Shit. Scheiße. See?” She nodded slowly. “But this armor isn’t what I thought it was: rather than a super weave, this is just some well-padded cloth with some light steel plates under it.” I sighed. “Further proof of the superior ingenuity of my countrymen.” Looking at Cards, I put the armor next to her, sizing it up to her. “Holy Hell, I think it’ll fit you. Cards, put it on; it has to be better than going around naked.”
“But I,” Cards tried.
“Don’t argue with me, girl!” I snapped. “Do as I say and you’ll thank me later, I promise.” Under my hard look, Cards buckled and nodded. She took the armor and hesitantly looked it over, likely trying to figure out how to put something resembling clothes on. I didn’t watch her for two reasons: one was that I still had a sense of modesty, and the other was because there was a far more interesting sight in the room than a mare getting dressed.
There was a box in a corner of the room that I had missed last time I was here, a little box labeled simply “Archaeology”. For a brief second, I thought it was misspelt, it being Archäologie back where I was from. I walked up to the box and fiddled with its lid, which came off almost effortlessly, save for the small clouds of dust it sent up. Inside, there was, to my delight, a Voixson.
I forced out a high-pitched gasp. “Aww, it’s going to be akin to one of those pretentious notes that a bad Spielmeister puts into his game campaigns, isn’t it?” Smiling to myself, I pulled it out and set it upon the table. “Dust, look what I found!” I enthused at her. “It’s going to be filled be solipsistic nonsense and sexism because the Spielmeister clearly has some weird hatred of mares, since all the mares in his campaign who are interested in you are either out to murder you or die in extremely gruesome ways. Seriously. I had one campaign where my teammate’s girlfriend got stabbed with a penis through the eye and died from repeated penis-brain penetration.”
She blinked. “What?”
“Yes,” I said to her with a sagely nod.
Play button pressed and the Voixson crackled to life. “A message to the director of the Archaeological Institute of Equestria,” said a voice with what to me was a refined Southern accent. “Winterfulth the seventh, year of—” the record skipped. The hell was ‘Winterfulth’? “Director, you’ve known me for as long as we’ve been a part of the AIE, and in all that time as an ambighter of the Institute, have I ever lied to you?” He sighed. “I send this message not in person but from this newfangled Voixson for one simple reason: I am dead. It betides me that what we have found here in the swamp will kill both me and the ponies digging this site up. It was not the ancient ruin of suggested expansion from the nigh-forgotten Crystal Empire in the days beyond yore which we were told it would be, no. Instead, it is a crypt, a tomb, a sepulcher to a monster. Already, two ponies have gone mad from seeing the corpse of the unholy abomination that lies here. Within this unholy sepulcher are things which boggle the mind, ancient, terrible things that we were not meant to know, I would dare say.
“I record this message with the knowledge that we will all here surely die, we will slowly go mad, and that... thing... we awoke will consume our flesh. I record this message as a warning: do not, whatever you do, send ponies to look for us, for they will end up like us. The extreme remoteness of this location in the swamp is my only solace: nopony has disturbed this place for millennia before us, and so should it for all time remain.”
“Sounds like the plot of a bad horror novel,” I noted absently.
“The abomination hunts us for sport, for game, for fun now,” the Voixson continued. “It shouts in guttural tongues. Every time it slays one of us, it screams Ave Lucifer! Ah-way,” he said slowly, “loo-kee-fair. I... I had the chance once to ask it what it meant before it began to kill and torture and maim...it it said it meant: ‘Hail the bringer of light,’ and ‘Hail the luciferous one’. But now I am here, cold and almost alone... and I am afraid.”
“Director...” He sighed. “Brother, I love you. Take good care of Mom for me, okay? She’s getting on in years. I send you this message carried by the one pony not to be trapped here in this sepulcher with us, Glistening Feathers: I have told her to deliver this message to the nearest town in order to have them send it to you, and then to get as far away from this place as the heavens allow her wings to fly.”
Far off in the distance, a voice cried out as in in ecstatic glee: “Reddite ergo quae sunt Caesaris Caesari et quae sunt Luciferi Lucifero.”
“Goodbye, Brother.” It scratched, jumped, skipped, and died.
I just stared at it. How had this thing ended up here? Clearly, though, the abomination was that monster that was bothering Elkington. “Weird,” I commented absentmindedly. “Demons aren’t supposed to talk at all. Only their worshippers speak. I’m starting to doubt this is a demon at all. Probably some whacky teenager in a bad mask.”
“That’s from, like, a little over two years ago,” Cards said, “right before everything in town started getting horrible. I recall we got this thing from a half-dead-looking pegasus mare who flew right on back into the swamp; we put in this box here we had reserved for things they hauled out from their dig, but since we never got any written instructions, guess we sorta just left it here.”
“You know, the last thing I would ever want to be is an archaeologist,” I said. “Half of the time you’re unleashing ancient, unknowable evils from the depths of the world. In fact, I once read an article in the paper about a famous archaeologist getting sick and tired of unearthing unspeakable ancients evils.”
“Y’know,” Cards hesitantly offered, “I can sort of agree to those p’worth.”
The hell does ‘p’worth’ mean? I looked over and gasped. “Cards, look at you—you’re so adorable!” At least, I thought so: that black eye, pitiful armor, and generally miserable look, I just wanted to put her in a box and poke her with a stick for decades and decades. I put a hoof on her face and went, “Touch.”
She flinched away from me. “Bad touch!”
“Wait,” I said slowly. “If adorable means to be able to adore, and adoration comes from to adore, and you Equestrians seem to give adoration to your Princess, does that mean that Celestia is adorable?” I put a hoof to my chin. “Suddenly, things have gotten weird.”
Suddenly, my mental image of Princess Celestia shifted into essentially becoming Cards with a fancy hat. The mental Luna, the literally devilish mare covered with mutilations like the one on my chest, remained as she was. It reminded me of this one board game I had played wherein I switched my government from a Republik to a monarchy for gameplay reasons, and so I went out and found the guy with the fanciest hat and made him king.
Cards rubbed her face where I’d touched her. “I was trying to say that a bunch of archaeologists went missing in the Acolapissa swamp around the time bad things started going down here.”
“You think they’re connected, both of you?” Dust asked.
“Well, yes,” I replied. “And we’re going to find that thing that killed them and kill it ourselves.”
Her feathers ruffled as a shiver visibly ran up her. “Brgh,” she suddenly grunted. “Anypony else just feel the temperatures drop by twenty degrees?”
I was about to ask if she was mad, then I realized that the Equestrian system of temperature measurement was radically different than the one I was used to. Stupid crazy differences in things. If ever there were a reason to invade Equestria, it would not be to destroy its magic in order to save it, but to force them to use more logical ways of measuring things. Seriously, what the hell was a ‘foot’ and how did it measure things? I looked to Cards, who had a similar look on her face to the one Dust had. “Anypony else not feel it?” I intoned.
Cards bit her lip. “We’re going to kill that monster?” She hesitated, her face quivering like a crystal on the verge of exploding from some absurdly high note. “Suddenly, I...”
“Don’t want to?” I offered. “That thing affected your mother: it made you murder the mare that gave birth to you. I will go to this monster and slay it.” She bit her lip harder. Semi-consciously I moved my hoof over to a pocket of my duster, where a little paper crane was nestled securely. “The angel’s trap had a ghastly perfection.”
“The angel’s trap?” Dust inquired.
“Yes, one specifically tailored for me.” I glanced to the ceiling before looking at the pegasus. “If someone told you you’d go to Hell and burn for all eternity after death if you pictured your mother naked—I’d once been told this when I was a little colt—you’d eventually do it. Why? Because you did not want to go to hell, did not want to see Mommy naked.”
The pegasus blinked. “Excuse me?”
I shook my head. “Look, what I’m trying to say is: I want to, and for every ounce of ‘does not want’ in my mind, that want grows threefold.” I blinked. “Kill the demon, not see my mother naked, that is. I’ve made it a pointed goal never to know what my mother looked like so as to never imagine her, her actual self, naked.”
Cards gave me a weird look whose meaning I couldn’t rightly interpret. Probably nothing good. I made a mental note of it for future reference. It wasn’t a particularly fascinated mark, more like a bookmark a stallion might leave in the page of a magazine containing some particularly weird pornography that he doesn’t want to but can’t help get intrigued by. The kind that would be found years later by his son as he’s cleaning up his dead father’s personal stuff, and would forever sully the boy’s memory of Daddy, even though his old stallion only looked at it the one time.
Dust, on the other hand, mirrored the same perplexed look I had many years ago when I met The Hat, a flying sentient hat who loudly proclaimed, “Behold The Hat, for I have come to feast upon the naked heads of the living and their puny souls!” It was the face like that I’d worn when I replied with: “How did hat happen?”
I sighed, rubbing my forehead. “Okay, yeah, I need to unwind a bit. But that Voixson just raises too many questions. In fact, most of the answers in my head are just ones I’ve made up because they seemed like reasonable conclusions; I pride myself on basic deductive reasoning, you see.” I took in a breath. “In any case, they’re mysteries we’ll have to solve later. Cards, Lightning Dust, come on—I found something while I was out.”
As I went to leave the room via the doorway leading into the alley, I missed and ran into the doorway, bruising my shoulder. “Ah, stupid doors, still one of my many one weaknesses! I hate doors! Doors will be the death of me!”
|— ☩ —|
“What’s it going to be, then?” I asked it. Everything seemed wrong about this. The bird just stood there in the middle of the street, silent as a three-legged octopus. The thing was, birds shouldn’t be silent, especially not such a pretty and colorful bird. Although the fact that it was so colorful made it a welcome change from the standard crows and ravens and other dark birds that evil forces had such a fetish over, so there was that.
The bird just looked at us, then blissfully hopped a pace forwards.
I pursed my lips to the side as I hefted the small rock. With a flick, the rock sailed through the air and crushed the bird. “Hooray for Earth,” I deadpanned.
Lightning Dust tapped me on the shoulder from behind. “Um, GB? What was that all about? You just killed a wild parakeet.”
Looking behind me, I saw Cards pawing at the ground, and Dust just looked bemused to me. “It was evil, obviously. Birds are not silent, nor do they just... leer creepily at you like that.” I put a hoof to my chin. “Although I think turtles do. Or... Well, when I was a colt, I had a pet tortoise, but from the moment it first saw me, it hid in its shell until it starved to death.” I tapped the hoof to my forehead. “Yet for the life of me, I can’t remember why or how I got that tortoise. Was I holding onto it for a friend? Trying to make a soup because I hated my friend?”
With a shake of my head, I pointed out to the edge of the the town, where civilization gave way to murky brown lakewater that itself devolved into a thick swamp on the lake’s far side. I peeked over my head to see if I could see the baron’s plantation manor, but I couldn’t. For a moment, I considered asking Cards or Dust if Equestria had racist habits towards mules, since I recall the mule baron being remarked upon as a half-breed freak, but didn’t. Something told me that Cards wasn’t in the mood for me to stand upon a soapbox and act morally superior to her when I was in the the very same town where I murdered her only friend because he was annoying me; in fact, I could even seen the Acolapissa Cabinet of Curiosities, the place I slew him, far, far off to the left. There was a vague pang of nostalgia for that, which couldn’t have been healthy. But as for Dust, she had her own question.
“What are you pointing at?” the reporter asked.
“See that sizable boathouse?” I said, and she nodded. “There’s a rather lovely, well-built, likely expensive rowboat sitting in yonder place. I scoured what passed for docks here, and found that one boat to be the only vessel not sunken to a murky grave. Something was destroying boats, but missed the one hiding in the little house somehow.”
“So it was safe in its little cwtch, then?” she intoned.
Cwtch? Rhymes with Putsch. “What’s a cwtch?”
“Uh,” she stammered, rubbing the back of her head. “It’s a bit of northern argot, sort of.” It’s pronounced argot: silent T, long O. “Means, er... a hiding place, or, like, a storage shed thing.” She darted her gaze sideward. “Could also mean to hide or cuddle up to.” Dust glanced at the cwtch and then make a curt gesture towards me. “Has nothing to do with cooch, mind you, the dance or the slang.”
I gave a look so blank a wall would be jealous. “Riiight. Moving back onto topic, there’s a boat there, and that’s pretty much how we’re going to get to this place Elkington told be this demon was located. The Duke gave me a map drawn by somebody—probably those dead archaeologists; I didn’t ask many questions because I didn’t want to have him go on some annoying expository rant again—which should be how to navigate the swamps channels into the heart of the swamp and where this demon is. Any questions?”
Cards shook her head but made a weird gesture, a half-slash, half-poke to the neck that my mind wanted to associate with being hanged. It seemed to fit her ‘damned if I do, damned if I don’t’ look. Dust, though, just shrugged with acceptance.
“Good. Now then,” I said. My left ear twitched, and I jerked my head. From a back alley came the lumbering form of a pony... no, not a pony, a mule. I recognized him quickly as the Baron of Sleepy Oaks, and knew that I didn’t know his name. If you were totally unimportant and likely going to die, what was the purpose in learning your name? “Um, are you sane?” I called out, and he stopped, looking straight at me with his one good eye.
“That government boy,” I heard him say, his voice echoing in the empty streets. A part of me wanted to yell out just to hear my own voice echo, but instead I just wanted as his haggard, dehydrated look turned into a wide grin. “He told me you’d be back. He told us what you were. He told us how to save this town, peasants and all.”
“Your words echo in the vast emptiness of my head,” I replied.
He let out a laugh that had too many parts insane to every part amused. “And he told us where you’d be.”
I swallowed, taking out the Kruzifix and showing it to him, not even sure he was close enough to see it. “I have something for him. I come to deliver this, the thing he wants; and it would be just plain stupid, really stupid, to try to kill us.”
He tilted his head back and screamed hard. “Show yourselves, good servants of Princess Celestia!” The baron then bent over and coughed droplets of blood.
A door slammed open from across the street. And then another door. And another. And soon the air was surging with the sounds of doors opening and the stomping of hooves. Ponies, their sole defining characteristic being the so-red-they-were-almost-purple eyes, seemed to crawl out of the very walls. They lurched out from alleys like shambling corpses. They crept out of houses like teenagers sneaking out. Soon they formed a wall blocking the way we had come, and around the edges of the street.
There were stallions, mares, colts, fillies. Their eyes were all alike. Some were laughing. Some looked happy. Some looked depressed. Some looked eager. Some looked hesitant. But all of them were there, staring at me. Many of them, even the colts and fillies, held weapons—knives, hammers, carpentry tools, a saw, chunks of wood, and everything but the kitchen sink.
Swallowing, I inconspicuously rubbed my neck. Apparently, abusing healing potions had almost made the noose-borne bruises disappear. Almost. “Cards,” I asked, “how many ponies live in Sleepy Oaks?”
“About a hundred and thirty-two,” Cards answered, faster and more certain than I’d’ve expected. “Many of the building here are just for the mines and the factory.”
“Girls,” I said with a calm voice, putting a grip on my sword, “when I give the mark, I want you two to run to the cwtch and get out onto the lake and away from here.”
“GB, what are you doing?” Dust asked, the crowd of ponies and one mule staring silently at us, sizing us up like a clown sizes up a child to know just how to make sure it burns itself into the child’s nightmares for all time. Seriously, all they needed was clown makeup and this would be a perfect replica of the first time I went to the circus. Except these ponies were arguably much happier.
I looked around. “There are a lot of them, and many of them are closer to the boat than we are. If we run, they’ll overwhelm us before we can get the boat into the water. If we fight, we’re not all going to make it. So. You’re going to run. I’m going to fight. I’m the distraction.” I took the Kruzifix and its necklace off and put it around Dust’s neck. “Hold onto this. Elkington thinks it’s special for reasons I never bothered asking about.”
Cards gave me a look of horror. “You... you’re not going to hurt or kill them, are you?”
I tightened my grip on the sword as I looked at a colt with a nasty knife clutched in his jaws, looked at the murder in his eyes. He couldn’t have been older than eleven. “Ich ziele nicht mit der Hand. Wer mit der Hand zielet hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. Ich ziele mit dem Auge.” I took a breath. “I aim not with the hoof. He who aims with the hoof has forgotten the face of his father.” I held my eyes shut for an instant, picturing my father the last time I saw him, picturing all of that blood. He looked good, half-dead. “I aim with the eye.”
“Government Boy,” Cards said with an air of desperation.
“On the count of three,” I said, watching them all stare silently at me.
“GB,” Dust added, rocking slightly on her hooves.
“One.” The ponies all tensed as the Baron stepped forwards, everypony’s eyes flicking to him. “Two.”
The baron pointed at us, bits of spittle around the edges of his mouth. “Au nom du Princesse, la Maîtresse du Soleil,” the baron commanded, “kill them!”
“Three!” I yelled as I pulled out my sword, the throng of ponies surging forth like a wave of liquid flesh and fur. Sticks and chunks of wood flew through the air, smacking me all over. One with a nail driven through it even scratched the back of my neck. Gritting my teeth, I glanced to make sure Cards and Dust were running before doing the first thing that came to my mind.
It was more instinct than thought, an action bred into my very Gene. It was often better that way. Sometimes thinking got you killed. Sometimes instinct killed the other person first. Blade raised, I charged the middle of the street’s line. Two mares and a stallion went down, and I tore through the hole their absence made, swinging with both reckless abandon and frighteningly murderous accuracy. It was a good thing I didn’t like any of them. After all, none of them went to my birthday party; they all left me alone and naked in the bounce house.
“Murderer!” some cried. “Kill that government boy!” another shouted. “He did this to us!” “It’s the only way!” “Celestia have mercy!”
Lightning Dust had come back from an enervated madness like these ponies were in. It had taken a severe beating and a night’s rest; and even then, she hadn’t been subjected to it for what might have been years, just a quick burst. Though, really, that was just idle speculation. I hadn’t a true understanding of the Miasmatischen Trübung. And if Dust’s example was to be trusted, enervation didn’t exactly make you do anything you hadn’t exactly wanted to do, that didn’t play off very real fears in the back of your mind. These ponies could not be saved; it was impractical.
“Forget the mares, after him!” the Baron ordered. “He’s the one who destroyed our homes and ruined our lives!” That was all it took for my plan to succeed.
Somepony grabbed me, only to come to the painful realization that having your neck half-severed by a sword wasn’t exactly a very good long-term life plan. I led the screaming, barking mob down the street, towards a combination toystore/barbershop. No, I had no idea how that worked, nor did I care at that moment.
As it annoyingly turned out, these ponies were fast, and many of them were closer to my destination than I’d realized. Four ponies, one of whom I recognized vaguely from somewhere, went down hard from their brand new sword wounds. They fell back, crucified in the street. They didn’t falter or hesitate, and nor did the other townsfolk, no matter that every swing of the sword found a vital spot. A part of me stopped to wonder if they’d ever even seen a sword prepared especially to sever flesh, like mine, and if they’d even seen a sword used against a living being at all.
I galloped up to the building, the hail of projectiles slowing, but not stopping. The mob surged at me like a cringe-worthy pun: you could see it coming, but nothing—nothing—could stop it. And it wasn’t funny, either.
Bolting into the place, I shut the door behind me and locked it tight. It wouldn’t hold, but it gave me at least a second or two. Oh, and the barbershop and toystore weren’t one place, more like there was a clearly marked door at the back of the building which lead into the barbershop. Now it made sense.
I snared up a bottle of Colta-Cola from a nearby display. No matter what fresh-hell it tasted like, it quenched the thirst before it could get out of hand. As I let out a sigh, a display window to my right exploded shards of glass all over the toystore. Three stallions crowded through the window, snarling and growling at me as ponies outside bashed on the door. I threw the glass bottle at one of them as I ran up and cut them all to ribbons, and the two that followed them. They were not instantly fatal wounds, but they were still fatal. Their bodies fell on the jagged slabs of glass, choking the window.
The door heaved and burst from its hinges, smacking into the ground and kicking up a layer of dust. I could hear the Baron screaming. “In there! In there! The one who did this! Stop him, or he’ll kill us all—even Princess Celestia!”
Stallions, mares, and—at the back—children charged me. Bits of spittle and wood flew through the air. With precise and savage swings, the leading ponies fell like ninepins in a game of bowling, a game I still needed to play before I died. Blood spattered as the wounded ponies screamed what would doubtlessly be their final breaths, but the throngs of them changed onward across their fallen comrades, no doubt crushing them.
There were too many. I retreated into the barbershop, slamming shut the flimsy-looking door that separated the two buildings. With frantic incoherency, they screamed at me as they battered the door to the ground and came at me. But they’d bottlenecked themselves, and with only a trivial amount of swordwork, the tiny hall was jammed with corpses and blood. Still they pushed on, trying to get the bodies out of the way.
Scheiße! They were going to get through, and I couldn’t kill them through the wall of the dead and rapidly dying. I spun around, saw that somepony had boarded shut the door to the shop from the inside, and saw they hadn’t done the same with the large display window.
I grabbed some miscellaneous but heavy-looking object from by one of the barber’s chairs and launched it at the window, the glass shattering well because safety glass still wasn’t an Equestrian invention yet. Covering my eyes with my sleeve, I jumped out of the window. My duster made a whooshing noise so awesome that it suddenly made everything so totally worth it. For my brief moment in the air, I was laughing.
Then I hit the ground with a roll, using the momentum to stand back up. The sight hit me in the gut like being force-fed live kittens who were covered in spikes and had nothing but contempt for you. There were ponies here, too, many of them likely having run around the building to cut me off.
“There he is!” they hissed. “Quick, get him!” “Don’t let the interloper flee!” One mare just held her head and screamed bloody murder, flailing around as if being attacked by bees on tiny bee-like bee trampolines.
They mobbed me like a swarm of ants aroused by a fat kid covered in ice cream who’s just fallen down and can’t get up, dog-piling and tackling me. They kicked and punched and bit and clawed and stabbed and hit, none of them getting through the duster. Instinct was back. I pulled out my knife and dispatched the some half-dozen as easily as I could: fatal wounds all quick and professional.
Throwing their bleeding, screaming, soon-to-be-dead bodies off, I picked up the sword and gasped in pain as a searing slash gouged my flesh just above my hindhoof. Instinct was at work. The blade arced and swung before I could even think about it. And then I thought about it as I looked at the filly’s bright eyes.
She was alive enough to watch the impeccable steel dig into her little body. Her bright eyes darkened as the sword dug out a massive trench in her little body, no-doubt breaking her young, underdeveloped bones. A jet of blood spurted from her mouth as the sword tore through and out of her body, spraying blood into my face, the force of the the blow throwing her against the ground. Her dusty eyes stared up at from from the dirt, as if asking, “Why?”
I blinked, my world going black as I stared at her. Dead. Naked. Not even a mark on her flank. Dead. I... recognized her face. She was the filly of Doc Dome, the one who’d rushed out defend her father from me the first day I’d arrived, the one who couldn’t even pronounce the letter R yet. And I’d just murdered her without thought.
You broke the Code! a voice in my head hissed hatefully.
Three stallions and a mare hustled around the corner with large, betraying grins upon their hideous faces. They saw me, saw me seeing them, and saw the child at my hooves. “Child-killer!” “Murderer!” “Monster!”
More weapons tossed through the air struck me, a knife hitting my chest but bouncing off harmlessly. A child. A foal. A kid. A filly. A little girl. Likely didn’t even understand what was going on. Likely just tagging fearfully along with her parents... Likely didn’t even hesitate because of those two reasons.
Every muscle in my body felt like it was being cranked as I gritted my teeth so hard I was sure they’d break. The Code was shattered. Everything broke. This shouldn’t have happened! This should not have happened!
A mare was the first to near me. I swing not with my hoof. He who swings with his hoof has forgotten the face of his father. I swing with my mind. And it collapsed to the ground, bleeding and screaming.
Because there is no difference between people and objects.
The other three, the stallions, fell to the dirt like swatted flies. Things. Bloody things upon the ground. Two of them screamed. Two of them had their necks crushed underhoof. Quiet corpses. Then more came, many from the shop, many not. Children, mares, bucks, stallions. The trickle was at first a few, easy enough to kill. I held my sword back from the first child who tried to stab my hooves off, its mother already dead at them. But no matter what, it was it or I. And children had such weak bodies, such malleable minds. Their minds and perceptions were what made children awesome.
Pony after pony boiled out through the barbershop windows and from around the corners. This couldn’t last. I couldn’t stay here. I spun around and ran down the street. Ten paces. Twenty. Thirty. God only knew how many paces. Muscles ached. Blood ran. The heart in my chest seemed to explode with every beat. I tripped and rolled onto the dirty street. They were like laughwolves to the kill of the lion. Before I could even get up, they stabbed and bit, more and more of them piling onto me, children just as hard and murderously their parents.
There was no running. And to the refined tune of my honed steel, they fell in gorey droves. They fell in squats. They fell backwards. They tumbled limply over each other. Their bodies cast no shadows in the deathless light of the perfectly midday sun.
I realized I was screaming. I had been screaming all along, probably. My eyes felt just like clumped balls of sand ready to be shattered apart at the slightest provocation. My balls had drawn up against my stomach. My legs were straw. My ears were lead. My sword was just a gooey rod of fresh blood and chunks of foreign flesh and muscle, and I stood, screaming and hacking, all rational thoughts in my mind far away and absent, simply letting my body do its murderous tricks.
Was there a goddamn way to just hold up a hoof and tell them I’d spent a lifetime learning how to use this sword to mercilessly end lives in the name of the good and just? Was there a way in the nine Hells to tell them how effortlessly it tore their bodies to ribbons, and how my duster was almost impenetrable? To tell them that I was their death, plain and simple?
No, not with my mouth. But my mind and steel were only too glad to spin them the tales, to show them everything I’d learned over my lifetime, to instruct them on the ways one wields a tool whose sole purpose in life is murder.
Ich töte nicht mit dem Schwert. Wer mit dem Schwert tötet hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. Ich töte mit dem Herzen, a voice deep within me echoed curiously, testing me. Then, in Equestrian: I kill not with my sword. He who kills with his sword has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.
A stick ran through the air and smacked me on the forehead, drawing blood. The mob had thinned on this narrow street, but it could be thinned better. Ending the life of an old mare, I launched myself to the side and tumbled into an alleyway. They never stopped. Only four of them could squeeze into the alley with me. I let them have it, and their bodies thunked against the ground and walls like the world’s worst scarecrows, blood spattering the brick inlay of the walls.
The mob paused for a second, the ponies all looking at the multiplicity of corpses, and the stallion with the sword growling at them from within the alley. The face of the crowd shattered into the faces of individual ponies, faces that still possessed a basic instinct to survive. I spit out a mix of blood and saliva, not even knowing whose blood it was. One mare in the crowd was rolling around on the ground, begging for the voices to stop. A stallion was suffering from facial convulsions as it struggled to stand. One pony visibly shat itself. But it was otherwise as if the crowd had realized what they were doing, experiencing a moment of clarity, of fear, of shame. And maybe it would have lasted. Maybe they would just slowly back off and go home. Maybe nopony else needed to die
Then it was the Baron, running at me. “Baby-killer!” it roared. “Monster! Murderer! Slay him, peasants—I command it you! Kill the foal-slayer!” With the renewed zeal of righteous hatred, they obeyed. There were so much fewer of them now. I’d gone through them like Godfather Death’s scythe.
But the Baron wasn’t the closest body to me, no; the others were closer. And it was the others who died first as I screamed and charged into the mob. Then it was the Baron again, and closer to me than the other living ponies. I made sure to stab my sword through its stomach. The Baron’s last moments were filled with screams of agony as its own stomach acids poured from its wound. It was still alive, and I smiled as the baron screamed and gurgled in primal agony.
The ponies after the baron didn’t notice it’d fallen, and most didn’t even get the chance to realize they were dead, too. In the alleyway, in that bottleneck, they never even got the chance to strike me back. When they finally did start to notice that they were going to die, they tried to run.
They all died, too, like the animals—the things—they were. I ended up standing in the street, pulling my sword out of the last one, a petite mare who looked no older than Cards. The Baron was dragging itself out of the alley. I didn’t have to do a damn thing but watch as it tripped over a corpse and fell face-down into a pool of stomach acid and vomit. Screams. I ran up to the Baron and shoved its face into the acid until it drowned, and I held its sizzling face there until its body smashed in that way only a freshly drowned corpse will do. It must have been something the Baron ate.
No more ponies. No more Baron. No more children’s dirty looks.
I stopped screaming, I simply couldn’t scream with the intense need to pant for breath. My head hurt, and I could see large brown circles dancing in front of my eyes. As my breathing slowly came under control, the instinct controlling me faded, echoing in the back of my head a solitary, You’re welcome.
The dead mare by my hooves, it... she had tried to run, and she had died for it. With trembling lips, I looked up at the street. Dead. All dead. Blood like maple syrup slowly trickled into the little gutter lining the road. A mare nearby held in her arms a dead child, a hole straight through her eye and into her brain. I took a step back, my shallow heart’s pounding like how a woodpecker pecks the bark of a tree.
Shaking like an epileptic who’s eaten a gallon of sugar that he only now realizes was arsenic, I raised a hoof and looked at it. Blood. Mine, theirs—I didn’t know. All I knew was that they were dead. There was a difference between killing and murder. Murder was a sin. Killing a hard justice.
Emotions failed me. The ability to find amusement in everything died. Even my shadow had vanished under the eye of the whorish sun. I looked at the Baron and counted silently under my breath, “One.” Legs shaky, I shambled up the street, counting more and more. I walked into the barbershop and counted the dead they’d pushed out of the way. In the toystore where a stallion had gone down clutching a comically oversized stuffed dolphin, I counted. I counted. And counted. And counted until I reached the two mares and the stallion, the first two dead.
“One hundred and twenty-nine,” I whispered. “The entire population of Sleepy Oaks... minus Cards, her mother, and her father... Jeder Mann, jede Frau und jedes Kind.” A wave of nausea sent me sprawling onto the ground. “Every stallion, mare, and foal.” My shallow heart skipped beat after beat as I fought to breathe. This wasn’t right. This hadn’t happened. It was against the Code! Den Kodex! I couldn’t violate the Code!
It was a simple Code. Two absolutes, amended to constantly by little notes on how to best stay alive, but the absolutes stayed absolutes and could not change. They were easy to remember: Harm not Children. Commit not Rape. He helped me create the Code, the Kodex, helped me wield permanent, unusurpable control over myself! So long as I followed the Code, I was a good guy, I was at least in the general realm of the heroes of myth. But this? Today?
No.
The code had been violated. I was no longer Jericho, I was the Butcher of Songnam in all his mythical horror. There was nothing to fear but the stallion who stared back at me from the mirror.
I stood up, taking short gulps of air as I tried to steady myself. The Code was broken... but there was still the one who made me break the Code. And his name was the Devil’s Backbone, and I knew exactly where he lived. He had to die, and then, just maybe, the Code would be restored, fixed, glued back together, I would be the good guy again, and the ponies of Sleepy Oaks could be finally rest in peace.
But first, I had to find Cards and Dust. Looking up from where I stood, I didn’t see the boat I’d told them to find. My ears perked up. There was a good chance they didn’t know I’d broken the Code! Taking a deep, deep breath, I tried to force a smile to hide everything. It was a bit like a dog playing the piano with his horrifying dog penis which, unlike those of us ponies, got its erection through a literal penis bone. There was an inherent advantage to the spongy soft tissue that let us stallions get it up.
The smile on my face, I couldn’t tell if it was fake or genuine anymore. Good. Back to normal, then. So long as I didn’t think of the dusty eyes of the dead filly, I could keep the smile up. Of course, that was when I remember the savage slash the filly has gouged above my hindhoof, and then I realized just how much I was bleeding. Something had to be done about that, and I had to get all of this blood off me before I saw the mares again.
And if I couldn’t right this and fix the Kodex, I would simply kill myself to spare the world one more monster.
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Okay damn... That's cold... Even for Jericho that's cold...
Well shit...
i.imgur.com/3PgzsH3.jpg
Hot damn, this story is unpredictable!
I love this more than I could love a human child.
Bravo, Crushric, you crazy son of a gun. The Dark Tower was probably my favorite fantasy series ever.
That an interesting parallel you made, a Tuscher and a Gunslinger. I can see just a little bit of Stephen King seep into your own writing, especially the way you do your world building.
EDIT: Commented before I read the A/N
Well, at least nobody is left to be depressed mourning their lost loved ones...
...damn.
But on the other hand, I have some new things to add to the TV Tropes page!
Well, that was certainly intense. Jericho definitely went down a few stairs on my "Villian-Hero" staircase. I can't help but think that Dust and Cards will notice something off about him, at least, if the way his jokes sound forced now are an indicator.
Y'know, I always thought that "adorable" is a strange word, not just because there is no German word for it, but rather because I had the same thought process when I first heard it.
Congrats, I spat water all over my E-Book at the sheer randomness of the last sentence.
I fucking love this story. It speaks for itself with such grace that I have nothing to add.
Jericho always makes me think of Sheogorath, from the Elder Scrolls games. Even his mannerisms (save for the compasionite side) remind me of the fabled Prince of Madness.
"In fact, I'm so happy I think I'll rip out your intestines and skip rope with them!"
A new chapter of Jericho?
DROP. EVERYTHING.
And that chapter... Holy crap! I mean, I knew Jericho was really good at killing stuff, but an entire town? Including the children?
...Well, at least they won't have to mourn each other. Like I said last time, I forget just how fucked up your world is because I"m too busy laughing at it.
Plus, references. References everywhere. I knew the "...has forgotten the face of his father." lines sounded familiar, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it was a Dark Tower reference.
This is the best birthday present ever. Thank you, Crushric.
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, Puzzle Reader, all of my 
!
Kick Jericho up a notch of the dark-o-meter, gents—and it don't get better next chapter!
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If Jericho were a real proper "hero", this story would be a lot more boring. Sociopathy is grand, ain't it?
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Then I think you'll like that next chapter. That sonuvabitch narrator has had it coming for a looong time. Nobody, not even the narrator, gets out of Jericho unharmed.
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Jericho does what it wants, yo.
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More tropes? All of my
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I fear for your children, good sir.
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I recently starting reading The Dark Tower and it has become a small obsession of mine, now. I just really like the world he presents, so in-sync with many of the things I want to do. The next chapter, which once was attached to this one, contains a very more bit of that influence: a character says twice "Long days and pleasant nights ahead", for example, a bit more death of the "face of the father" lines, and a reference to one of Roland's internal monologues/memories from The Drawing of the Three.
Though I am curious, what does "I can see just a little bit of Stephen King seep into your own writing, especially the way you do your world building" mean? We worldbuild alike?
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And even if you let Jericho speak for himself (a very bad idea), he'll probably say something as stupid as it is profound. Or a penis joke. Either or/
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Heheh... sorry for the E-reader. Note to readers: dinnae drink and read Jericho at the same time.
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The more you laugh, the darker and darker shit I can slip in! And as I said, this and the next chapter (once the same) took a heavy dosage of influence because I've been reading The Dark Tower. The other chapter is ready, is actually posted but unpublished to FimFic, and I'm just waiting for when it's "the right time".
And happy birthday! Long days and pleasant nights ahead to you.
3135307 I can't put my finger on it, exactly. It's more of a vibe I guess. Maybe it's just the way you reveal the Tuschland in random bits and peices as the plot moves along. Maybe it's just me. I haven't read The Dark Tower in a while, I kinda took a break from the series during Wolves of the Calla after I got districtacted by another of King's works The Talisman, which has deep tie-ins with The Dark Tower.
Somebody needs to tell Jericho about kohl before he decides to test his ideas for a full-contact sparring beauty parlour.
Maybe.
Now you have to worry about her kill stealing...
Silly Jericho! Everyone knows Equestrian beavers do not lay eggs!
Beavers first paralyse their prey with a venomous bite and then forcibly implant barbed beaver placentas in the host's lower GI tract. The beaver younglings then emerge and eat their still living host from the inside out over the course of a week. It sounds horrific, but do not worry! The mother beaver takes great pains to ensure that her younglings are comfortable and well fed. She will even inject enzymes into the host so it will be more palpable and easily digestible. Nothing but the very best care and nurturing!
Isn't nature fascinating?
Reminds me of the black ICE from Neuromancer.
In alphabetical order, while wearing a clown suit, no less!
Do not forget to fill the armour with centipedes and to take a slash on the knight's face while he is immobilised.
And the other half you are either fighting cloak-and-dagger intrigues of back-talking, back-biting, and back-stabbing colleagues vying for tenure
or kowtowing before the parsimonious Grant Committee Almighty. 
It is a terrible profession to be in. They will watch you closely, hounding your every move, sniffing for any sign of weakness. You must always be on guard, never getting a moment's sleep. One misstep, one wrong word, one failure and they will on you like a coal scuttle full of tiny anvils of evil. They will tear into you with gleeful abandon, leaving you broken, disgraced and utterly ruined before delivering the final coup de grâce.
The ancient, unknowable evils are not much better.
As a side note, has anyone ever thought of the poor unearthed revenants? Imaging how they feel!
Imagine you are settling down for a nice, quiet millennial sleep. Your followers have sealed your burial/bedroom with your worldly treasures and favourite accoutrements. You are now prepared to spend eternity schmoozing with your fellow demons on the Oblivion Plane of Eternal Spikes. The afterlife is looking good when suddenly the unthinkable happens! Barely 1000 years pass (you still have not finished unpacking into your new residence FFS!) and suddenly a herd of strange ponies ignore your polite "NOTICE: Please do not disturb" signs and break into your room, sledghammering their way through walls and doors. They gleefully fossick through your property like pastel magpies, nicking anything and everything that takes their fancy. They exhume your body while you are still groggy, strip you down, and then lock you in a glass cage, leaving you and your schnitzelgruben shamefully exposed for all to see!
And they have the temerity to call you evil!
See?! He is upset you have broken into his bedroom and nicked all his stuff. What's a demon revenant got to do to get his home repaired and his stolen property returned?
Smart move. That bird was probably in league with the waffles...
Evil and Darkness do not actually use ravens and crows for totems. That is a popularly perpetuated misconception. (Ravens and crows are actually standards for the forces of Emo Moodiness and Whinging). Real evil uses pink and fuchsia flamingos. The totemic effigies are everywhere! Their beady eyes staring, accusing, judging...
<Ron_Burgundy>Well, that escalated quickly!</Ron_Burgundy>
Not bloody likely. I believe the polite term is aggressive self-defence. This lot has been stirred into a frenzy and wants blood.
Have you seen the new World War Z yet? This reminds me of the snarling, swarming waves of zombies in that movie. Creepy and disturbing.
To be fair though they were stripped of reason by the force possessing them, and they attacked first.
Bit of a flaw there, especially if you are dealing with mind controlling enemies. Needs a Dire situation, last resort self-defence corollary. An enemy that evil and powerful will undoubtedly exploit that against you. A slashed jugular is equally fatal regardless if it is delivered from a trained warrior or a reluctant filly.
I think Jericho has got it all bass-ackwards here. Songnam was an unprovoked butchery, but this was pure self-defence and protecting Cards and Dust. The bloodthirsty mob was willing to die for their overlord and Jericho simply obliged them.
I wonder what our favourite Equesterian quaumvirate is thinking now that a sizable chunk of southern Equestria has been violently inhumed?
Crushric, you rapscallion, you.
Always great to see this update!. Like 'drop everything at one and fly you fool!' great, in fact! 
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Well, it's neat to know that Mr King and I seem to have the same in-built ideas on how to worldbuild.
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Soon, all your free time shall belong to me.
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Funny thing is... that's not too too far from what I always wanted to do to Jericho. All I'll say is, what I actually do to Jericho was enough to make my editors cringe and curl their toes in horror. Let us hope that it's the kind of pain this bastard Jericho deserved.
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Ah, these are always so fun—and not a little bit strange—to read.
Thankfully, much like the working poor, they're not people and so no one cares about what they think, since they can't even feel.
Well, he was actually screaming a corruption of a line from the Bible that actually relates to your comment. My Latin's a bit rusty, but I'm sure the cases are correct. It means: "Render therefore unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to Lucifer what is Lucifer's."
Yeah, good movie—terrible adaptation of the book, but a good movie.
The point that Jericho here is so torn over is that only villains and monsters actively kill children. According to the Code, Jericho must be at least a hero insofar as having ultimately heroic goals, and so long as he does not violate the sex organs of another person (not just mares, since it's possible to rape eunuchs, too) and he does not murder children, he knows he can stay just above the line of pure villainy. Because villains must all die; heroes can survive anything, can get away with almost anything, can be loved my millions. At the end of the day, Jericho needs to have a heart in order to stay alive and achieve his goals—because without a heart, without love, you are a monster. That is what Jericho simply believes. And, well, during a flashback next chapter, you will see what Jericho believes to be the only way to deal with monsters.
His morals might be rather blue-and-orange, but they are there. Somewhere. In the Kodex. More on that next chapter.
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By my definition, I was referring to forced intercourse. Castrating someone is A-okay, according to Jericho's really messed-up logic. I won't pretend it makes much sense to anypony but him.
i dont undersatnd why he would have a code to not kill children there stupid and annoying and i am one and im pretty sure im the only one who likes jericho more for this chapter but oh well
I've been watching Jericho since the beginning. I've watched him kill an innocent stallion then shrug it off as meaningless. I've watched his random tangential thoughts and his fractured payche. I've watched as he swore to 'fight the good fight'. I watched him walk the line between hero and villain, between protector and predator, then watched him cross that line not once but twice. Through all of this, there is just one thing that continues to confuse me, one thing that I don't understand..........
What the hell do Laissez-faire economists have to do with anything? Even for Jericho, that's pretty bizarre.
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Well, generally speaking, people who are allowed to kill kids are the bad guys and are incapable of being liked. Jericho knows this. Jericho does not want to be "utterly irredeemable", ergo the Code.
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Look back to chapter nine. In a word: Juggernog. In more words, an economy lacking much (if any) state control, which means that Juggernog does not have to publish a list of ingredients on the back. Jericho does extra damage versus Laissez-faire economists, even.
Huh. Reading through the comments here is quite interesting, especially with people saying Jericho is a villain now because of his actions in this chapter. For me, the opposite is true.
He's been a villain all along. The instant I recognized he was a sociopath, it became pretty clear, even before he started killing tons of ponies. Which is one of the reasons I like this story so much; you've done an excellent job of portraying someone with absolutely no conscience whatsoever, and he's kind of hilarious, too. Aside from killing tons of ponies, of course. He's quite the lovable villain.
This chapter, though, turned that on its head. Suddenly, he has moral boundaries which he has crossed, and that really shakes him. The fact that he crosses these boundaries, and has some kind of remorse about it, even to the point of questioning his own motives, makes him far more of a hero than a villain in my mind. If anything, this is a step up the hero/villain ladder.
He's still dag-nasty evil, though.
Also personal headcanon: The enervation really is affecting him. But for him, "going insane" means behaving halfway decently. Since he kills ponies normally with absolutely no remorse whatsoever, having any pangs of conscience whatsoever means he's going completely bonkers. So while everypony else would go insane because of enervation, he'd become more and more of a normal pony.
actually... Jericho didn't kill card's friend cuz he was annoying... Card's friend swung first and Jericho acted naturally... or was his natural reaction to swat away an annoyance... o.O
What spy I here? An incredible lack of comments, is what!
Therefore I, as the Grand Quasi One, hereby dedicate this chapter to the Warmongerer!
Blood for the blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne! Milk for the Khorneflakes!
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Bitch! Why are you the Grand Quasi One?! It should be I! Jojo!
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Because I, Siffer, was the first to be granted Holy Editing Rights by the One!
Oh no doubt! I understand that Jericho is considerably distraught at killing the filly, although I suspect that is less about killing her and more about actually breaking the code. (Why do I get the feeling that Jericho would have used some severed heads to deliver a "sword safety" puppet show to the filly had she survived?) He needs to have some moral standards to follow. Otherwise is is no different than the monsters he kills, just better trained and equipped.
I am just surprised this never came up and addressed with Mister Welch or in his time in the infantry during the Demon Crusades. They did, after all, deploy nerve gas to possessed civilian centres, and Jericho did butcher most of his platoon when they reanimated and turned their remains into a clubhouse...
It seems odd that nopony taught him that there are no innocent bystanders in battles against mind-controlling, possessing evil demons; there are only the possessed who are trying to consume you, and your team mates who are trying to protect you. Given the Teutchers' long history of fighting demonic forces, this seems like a glaring and grossly negligent oversight of the military high command.
Well you did say you liked stream of consciousness comments. Ask and you shall receive and all that... Your writing style and humour makes them really fun to write.
I just hope they are not too obnoxious or frivolous.
Yup. While my Latin is as rusty as my flaming wolverine juggling skills, I did recognise the quote (hurray for cognates!
).
I just could not shake the silly mental image of a reanimated Elder Thing running about the archaeological dig, shouting in Evil Latin(tm), and causing bedlam, all the while trying to recover his stolen property.
Well... I didn't see this one coming. Very interesting development Crushric. I really want to see why the Devil's Backbone is special and can speak. So much death recently but with Jericho's background I don't see it as too unusual, but that poor filly. Poor Jericho too, bloke is gonna lose what little mind he has left soon. I saw mention of the Crystal Empire's forgotten expansion, were they playing with demons, or did they just find Mr. Backbone and try to seal him away?
As a final question. What happened to you and Siffer? Ran out of stuff to say, more important things come up, did you die and come back to life as semi-conscience zombies, or something not listed above?
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I got sort of distracted.
Sorry mate.
Now, Ask no more of us, Foolish Mortal, for we are the Grand Quasi One!
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You apologies are worthless. Like literally I can't buy anything with 'em. Tried to buy a new GPU for my rig and NewEgg said they don't take apologies (or bits of string) as payment, though they oddly take cards made of plastic. But in the end it's all fine since my internet at home was le dead all last week.
Also I saw you were made the Grand Quasi One, by yourself. What do your duties entail?
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Being awesome and being Quasi
As the Grand Quasi One, I am second only to the One, and all within Jericho!Equestria must hail my Quasi Godlike Powers.
Every dark badass needs their Arbu.
Alice Cooper. Hell to the yes.
Maybe if Jericho finds Cards and Dust back, he'll ask them how they're gonna see him now? And if he manages to redeem himself and "fix" the Code, maybe he'll smugly declare that he ain't evil, he's just good-lookin'? He's definitely a Killer...
Anyway, another excellent chapter. Ever read Harmony Theory? There's a scene in there where resident psycho assassin Charisma murders a bunch of ponies in the Celestia-forsaken town of Precious Corners. Jericho's rampage through Sleepy Oaks reminded me of that a lot.
I find this chapter not unlike the main plot of H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow of Innsmouth.