The Takeover

Shortly after the crash

Nova

I flew as fast as I could, dodging through the trees and searching the ground for any sign of my friend. The tears building in my eyes only made it harder to keep from running into a tree or branches. How could I have let this happen? I had no time to lose, he could be dying or already...No! That was not going to happen if I have a say in the situation.

Zap!

I came to a complete halt in the air. Something just flew by my face and hit the tree next to me. I looked off to the right, where it had come from, but I didn't see anything. I then turned around and saw where it had hit the tree. It was just a small scorch mark, with a little bit of steam coming off the damp bark. What was that?

I looked around again to no avail. I decided to move along at a slower pace, still looking for the last of my friends. Celestia it hurt to think about that. It hurt so much. I could feel the swell of tears I was holding back. I wasn't afraid to cry but I had more important things to do than breakdown. Especially in the middle of the Everfree Forest.

I kept searching with undying persistence, my determination for finding Khan at its peak.

I saw a little flash of light from the corner of my eye and I stopped just in time for another zap sound to hit a tree behind me. The smell of burnt wood immediately hit my nostrils as I turned to the source of the light. It was a...colt? It was a unicorn colt. What was he doing this far out into the Everfree alone? He only looked to be about 13-14 years old.

"Whoa!" I exclaimed. I was hovering towards him slowly, so as not to startle him. "You don't have to be afraid. I'm not going to hurt you. Where is-" His horn lit up again and the spell he had cast at me hit me square in the chest. The place where it hit immediately made me jolt, like it had sent a short shock of electricity through me. I tried to flap my wings but instead of me going back into a hover, I fell and landed hard on my back, my head hitting the root of a nearby tree causing a sharp pain in the back of my head and my vision to blur and pulse with my rapidly rising heartbeat.

"What the hell was that for? I'm going to hurt you!" I said as I sat up, rubbing the back of my head. My vision began to refocus as he made a few steps towards me. As I started to pick myself up to a sitting position, the colt's hoof slammed into my face sending me straight back down, hitting my head on the same root, for a second time. My vision had turned red for a split second as I stared at the tree ceiling. I leaned my head up, despite its protest to just lay there.

` I saw the colt standing above me, his head down looking at...well, down there. My head was still throbbing but I tried to move, the new found fear starting to course through me and take hold and I moved as much as my aching head would let me, but I wasn't getting very far, very fast. Something struck me as odd though when I noticed my attacker wasn't trying to follow me but his head came up and he locked eyes with me and I noticed for the first time, his eyes were not normal. The pupils contained what looked like hundreds of little black hexagons and it was creeping me out. I kept sliding backwards, the soft forest floor giving me a decently solid grip to use to push myself away from him.

Now, he was following. For every push backward, he made a step forward. I kept going backward, trying to get away, but my escape path was cut short as I felt the damp bark of a tree behind me. With no where else to run, I attempted to stand up. He was getting closer to me, about 2 steps away at his pace. I got up to all fours and spread my wings and took to the sky.

Or at least I tried to. I looked back towards my wings and gave them a few flaps but I was still grounded.

I couldn't fly.

I turned back around and was face to face with my attacker which startled me, but then his hoof connecting with my snout, and I fell backwards and landed against the tree. My vision once again going blurry. My attacker now stood above me, his eyes beaming down into mine. He looked down again...down there. This time though, his horn began to glow a dark but transparent black. His horn was aimed straight at me and that's when I realized that he wasn't looking down there, he was aiming his horn at me. His horn was steadily growing brighter and I had nowhere to go. I didn't know what he was going to do, but I knew from the spell he had hit me with earlier, it wasn't going to be good.

I looked just stared at him in uncertainty. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't feel my wings and I had lost all of the fight I had left in me. I thought surely that he was going to kill me, but his expression was unreadable. It was as if nopony was there at all.

Shink!

My eyes went wide as I saw three blades pierce through the colts' forehead and for the first time, his expression changed. It was a look of shock that was now plastered on his face. I also noticed his pupils, as they rolled back into his head, were no longer hexagonal. Blood started to spill out into a little stream down the colts' face. The blades retracted back into his head from wince they came. I started shaking at the sight as a fresh wave of fear came over me. The colt fell lifelessly to the ground blood already starting to pool around him.

Who was standing behind him however, I was not expecting. It was a griffin.

The griffin had a completely serious but calm expression, a set of steel armor covering his entire body. The chest plate had an emblem that I did not recognize, painted on the front over his heart. He had no helm and had a scar going through his right eye. The gauntlets that he had equipped had blades that were basically an extension of his claws.

"Are you from that plane that just went down?" The griffin asked me in a rough voice and a commanding tone.

"Ye...yes." I replied shakily still recovering from the attack and now able to focus.

"I am Sergeant Coldfire." He said as he pressed a button on his wrist guard and saw as his blades retracted in to small bulk on the top of his paw, from where he reached out a paw in offering to help me up. "When I saw your plane go down I raced ahead of the rest of my squad. They should be catching up at any moment."

"I'm Nova-" I heard a rustle in the bushes behind him and I stopped talking. He turned around slowly. Then a pegasus jumped out of the brush. He had the same dark steel colored armor with the same insignia over his heart but his armor seemed a lot lighter than Sergeant Coldfire's.

"Catch up?" The pegasus asked sarcastically. The pegasus had a forest green coat and a black and lime green mane with lime green eyes to match. And like Coldfire, he wore no helm.

Another pegasus landed hard on the left side of Coldfire and quickly looked up and said, "You make it seem like you're faster than us." This one had bright blue eyes and a yellow coat, with a green and red mane. Once again, the same armor as the other pegasus but he wore a band around his head that had his mane running under and over it.

Coldfire turned back around to me and rolled his eyes. It was obvious that outside of being teammates, they were close friends. He then turned around and said, "Alright, stay tight, we're moving out. We are going to find the other civilian and we will be rapping up this trip."

"Yes sir," the two pegasi replied in unison.

He then turned to me and said, "You ready?"

I nodded. I was ready for anything if it meant I was finding Khan and getting the hell out of this Celestia forsaken place. He had to be around here somewhere.

Coldfire turned around and commanded, "Heads low, eyes open. Move out on me." He walked slowly and tactically, in a well practiced stance, the opposite direction from which I had come. We moved up at a slow and steady pace, I was in the middle, Coldfire was in front of me, and one of the pegasus ponies to the left and right of me, their hoofsteps in sync. I tried to flap my wings enough to get into a low hover, but they were still not working and I couldn't feel them moving. Almost as if they weren't there.

"So," the pony to my right killed the silence, slightly looking back at me for a second before snapping his head back around to keep watching forward. "Never did get your name."

"I never got yours," I said back in a matter-of-fact tone.

The pegasus to the right of me let a small chuckle.

"Fair enough," he said back, looking to the right at his teammate. "My name's Nyxal and the giggling buffoon over there is Rivera."

"My name is Nova." I said turning to my right and giving a small smile. He had a look of shock on his face, like he couldn't believe his friend just said that.

Zap!

"Get down!" I heard Rivera yell.

Coldfire also shouted to me, "Nova, behind that tree, go!"

I ran, with trails of light following close behind. The tree I was behind was getting peppered with spells. I leaned against the tree and slid down into a sitting position and put my head against the bark. My breathing had become heavy again, noticing the pure adrenaline running through my body now. I let my head roll to the side, attempting to stem my rapid breathing. I closed my eyes and took in a breath. The constant zapping sound along with the shouts of Coldfire and his team told me that there was quite a few of those...things. Whatever they were.

I opened my eyes. I looked over the trees and the brush. As I let my head roll to the right and I saw, what seemed to be a dark gray hoof, hanging out from behind a tree about six yards away.

"Khan?" I asked out loud, to no one in particular, my outburst catching the attention of Sergeant Coldfire as I ran behind them to where Khan was lying.

"Nova, stop!" Coldfire called out to me, but I wasn't having any of it.

The scene only got more nasty the closer I got to him. His coat was burnt on the back of his back legs and over his hips. His head was on top of a root and under it a small pool of blood had formed atop some leaves. His face had a trail of blood going down the side of it and his left wing a little out of place, maybe out of socket.

"Holy shit, Khan." I whispered to myself. I started to give him a gentle shake in an attempt to wake him from his unconscious state but that wasn't enough. I checked to see if he was still breathing and he was. "Khan, wake up!" I shouted, shaking him a little more forcefully than before. "Wake up!"

Zap!

A gasp escaped me as a spell hit the tree above Khan and I. I looked behind me where I saw three emotionless faces with horns alight from about twenty-five feet away, slowly advancing through the brush.

I started shaking him again, harder. "Khan! I saw his eyes flutter for a second before slowly opening and him blinking several times and his eyes getting a little wider with each blink. "They'll be here any moment! We've got to go!"

"What's going on?" He asked groggily. He sat up a little bit and winced, running a hoof down his head and mane and he looked at his hoof that was now covered in blood. He looked up at me and said, "All of this is real?"

What was he talking about? "Yes, this is real and we've gotta get back to Sergeant Coldfire!" I helped him up and let him lean against me, his wing around my back for additional support. He was stumbling hard. Then he stopped for a second.

"What are you doing?! We've got to go!" I yelled at him. Then he tackled me to the ground and I heard that familiar sounding spell as it hit the tree about five feet behind us.

"You're not beating the shit out of me again!" He said trying to get back up and stumbling to the side. I stood up and brushed myself off and quickly steadied him, again leaning against me.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked concernedly while half walking, half dragging, him back to where Coldfire and the rest were.

He replied with a slight gurgle, "If we live through this," he stopped and had a coughing fit. He spit a glob of white and red goop to the ground and through blood covered teeth said, "I'll tell you."

I half-walked, half-pulled him back to where Coldfire and the others had taken cover from the onslaught of magic behind a fallen tree. As soon as we got behind the tree, Khan knelt down, and then fell over completely with a groan. I nearly fell over trying to catch him. "Khan?" I asked frantically and got no response. Then it all hit me at once; the fear and the losses. I had just lost everybody I loved and cared about, all in one day. Except for one and that one was going unconscious on the ground, life probably slipping away. My eyes were tearing up really badly and I could feel a lone tear fall down my face. I sat down next to his head and lifted his head up and set it in my lap. "I can't lose you, too." That statement being voiced made it impossible to hold back the tears and I cried. I cried for the first since my mom died. The sound of spell on wood and the constant shouts didn't matter anymore. I wept into his mane, the tears mixing with blood and that mixing with the forest floor.

I heard Rivera say behind me, "Sarge, this isn't looking too good. We've got to get these civilians out of here. We are outnumbered at the very least eight to one and if they overrun us we are all going to die or become one of them."

I looked up, face wet from tears to see what they would decide. "Nyxal, report back to HQ and tell them we are on our way back with two civilians. Tell them to bring a squad and meet us halfway and have a paramedic on standby."

Nyxal quickly saluted and said, "Yes, sir!" before taking to the sky at full speed heading to the northeast and disappearing through the tree cover.

"Rivera, carry the injured civilian to the rendezvous point. I'll cover our retreat."

"I'm on it," he quickly replied and was walking towards me. I tried to wipe the tears from my face the best I could.

Rivera started to pick up Khan when Coldfire took his attention off the approaching attackers and put it on me. "You make it obvious that this pony is very important to you-"

"He's all that I have left!" I said, choking back a sob.

He looked over at Khan and continued, "The best thing you can do for him, as of right now, is keep it together. We can get you both back to our home base and get him medical treatment." He looked back at me. "Think of it like this; if you die because you couldn't hold it together and those things got to you, what would he have left? Better yet, what if you turned into one and he came across you later on down the road?"

His words struck deep and he was right.

"So let's get out of here." Coldfire said. "Stay in front of me." I got up with new found encouragement and did as he asked. "Rivera, move out."

Rivera and I walked side by side with Coldfire covering our six. Khan was laying across Rivera's back, completely unconscious.

I heard a rustle of leaves to the right of me and I paused for just a second, before Coldfire said, "Keep going and don't stop."

He jumped through the leaves towards the noise. I started looking forward again, keeping my eyes open. Out of my peripherals, I saw a small flash of light and what sounded like somepony smashing an apple. He walked back through the bushes and took up his position behind us again, his metallic claws now fully extended and covered in blood. His claw extensions had to be at least five inches long.

I looked over at Rivera wondering what he had as a weapon, because I didn't see him using one earlier. That's when I noticed his armored wings. The front and the back of them were sharpened and I saw a sheath of some sort built into the underside of his armor under his left foreleg. That blade must have been pretty long because the handle was directly under his chest, so all he had to do was reach down to the left to bite onto it and pull it out. We came up on a pathway and we followed it to the southeast. We walked for what seemed like at least twenty more minutes and nightfall was upon us. Coldfire had a flash light mounted on the underside of his armor, Rivera did too. They used a button on the panel on their forelegs to turn them on, just how Coldfire had used a button on the panel to retract his claws.

We continued undisturbed, however, nothing tried to attack us. It did make me wonder how much further we had to go. Khan was still asleep on Rivera's back.

We came to a fork in the path we had been following. The pathway to the left wasn't clear however. Four of the unicorns lined up in row as if they had been waiting for us. Then four more came out on the right pathway.

Coldfire shouted, "We're surrounded!" I turned around and saw that at least ten more of them had blocked off the path behind us.

"What's the plan, Sarge?" Rivera asked, obviously trying to stay calm.

"Still working on it!" He said, turning in circles over and over again looking for a possible way out. "We can't fly away with an incapacitated civilian and the other under an AA spell."

"AA spell?" I asked, concerned because it was obvious he was talking about me.

"Anti-Air spell. It's why you can't fly right now. Why you can't feel your wings even though you can still flap them." I tried to flap them again, achieving the same result that I did earlier.

I looked around us and we were unquestionably surrounded. Then, one of the unicorns that was blocking the path backwards, started approaching and his horn was starting to light up with that familiar black glow and all of his buddies did the same. The unicorn was now close enough for me to able to see the tiny hexagons that made up his pupils.

Then an arrow punched through the unicorns chest, the unicorn dropped instantly and the hexagons faded away from his eyes. This didn't stop the rest from coming though and I didn't have a clue where the arrow had come from but it wasn't shooting at me, so that's a plus. Another one hit one of the unicorns in the group behind us on the right trail and I heard a rapid beeping noise and small explosion. Blood splatted the area around the pony and it killed the two unicorns to either side of him. I saw a shadow come up behind the remaining unicorn and the sound of a knife being unsheathed, the unicorn's head popped off and hit the ground with a roll, the rest of the body falling over. With the beam of a light now being cast on the shadow, I saw it was another pegasus with the same armor as Rivera. His right wing had small splatter of blood on it

He motioned for us to follow and said, "Follow me! The others are just down this path" We ran down the right path and past the blood splatter that was what was left of one of the unicorns. I noticed this new pegasus had a crossbow slung over his back, making it obvious he was the one behind the two arrows. The sound of spells hitting the ground and trees around was becoming constant and we were only running as fast Rivera could go with Khan on his back. We turned a corner to stay on the path and I could see then end of the path that had five ponies guarding the entrance. When we came upon them, they parted so we could go through and we had entered a clearing. They had another four ponies with them and one of them had a white lab coat on the other two were standing behind him with what looked to be a stretcher. That must be the doctor. Nyxal was standing near them, guarding them I presumed. There were two more paths, one going to the west and the other going to the south.

Rivera quickly rushed over to the stretcher and the two ponies beside it had moved aside and the gurney was wrapped in two different colored auras, one was a dim green and the other was a vibrant blue. Fear suddenly took over me, I looked around to see whose magic it belonged to when I realized the two ponies that were behind the stretcher were unicorns. I was about to run over to them and the doctor reached out a hoof and stopped me and I looked up at him and saw he had a horn too. I fell backwards in an attempt to back away from him and I scrambled away to the other side of the small clearing. Coldfire flew over to me and quickly tried to calm me down, his body blocking my view of them.

"They are not the bad guys! Did you see their eyes? They weren't turned! They are with us!" Coldfire scolded me in hushed tone so that others wouldn't hear it. "You need to calm down before I make you." He stated threateningly. I didn't notice their eyes though and now that I thought with reason about it, if they were 'turned' then they would have tried to attack us.

I stood up, shaking the leaves out of my mane.

"Are you good?" He asked me. It was one of those questions though where I could tell if I said no, he was going to do something to me.

"I'm fine," I said with a straight face. "I'm sorry."

He moved away towards Nyxal and Rivera. I saw that Khan was now on the stretcher that the two unicorns were holding up with their magic at a table height so the doctor could look over him. Well, I had no reason to be afraid of unicorns anyway. Hell, my band was 3/5 unicorn and that's not including our manager. All of our crowds had unicorns mixed in with the rest of the earth ponies, the pegasi and griffins. These people were good people, or at least, they where helping me and my friend without question, good and bad being irrelevant.

I saw the doctor pull a needle from his lab coat and cleaned it off with a recently opened alcohol pad and wiped off Khan's neck with it and stuck it in. I hurried my pace to get over to him so I could see for myself what they were doing. "What are you putting in him?" I asked as I quickened even more to an almost run when Nyxal quickly cut me off about five feet from where they were at. "What are you doing?!"

I struggled against Nyxal but I couldn't surpass his strength. A sharp pain erupted in my neck and the pressure of it caused me to gasp in pain and just like that the pain was gone. I turned around to see Coldfire standing there, an empty syringe in his paws. My eye lids were getting heavy as I looked at him in shock. My legs were getting shaky and I just stood there and stared at Coldfire for at least fifteen seconds before I asked, "What did you do?"

"What I had to." He said in an emotionless and authoritative tone.

I fell over, my vision even with the ground. I saw him toss the syringe to the right of him as he turned and walked away from me. I was trying to fight the tired feeling I had, but it was a fight I was losing and one I had given up on. My eyes closed as I drifted off into a dreamless and drug-induced sleep.