*Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-CRACK*

"I still don't understand how these elevators work at all." Mused Hunter as he stepped out of a platform which led him to a room infested with maggots of the size of dogs. He was currently dealing with the most common kind of creatures plaguing these Night Terrors, bugs and arachnides were the usual representations of fears among the young and, oddly enough, recently married people.

Not bothering in wasting much time, he dealt with the maggots with a practiced motion of deep slashes and sidesteps. Once done, he gave his surroundings a bit more of attention while he looked for the source of the nightmare. There were two paths ahead of him, one led to another room shrouded in darkness and the other was cut off by an bottomless pit as if the world suddenly ended on the spot.

"Huh, it didn't took as long as I thought..." He shrugged and folded his cleaver. His footsteps felt louder with the almost unnatural silence in the air, they stopped when he forced himself to stop walking as he spotted several multicolored orbs floating in groups of four. Hunter reached to turn on the lantern attached to his hip, its soft light gave him some valuable feet of visibility in his search of the beasts dwelling in the dark. Unfortunately, it made him stick out of his surroundings like a sore thumb, evidenced by the sudden screech of the bugs alerting one another of his presence.

Just behind one of the sets of eyes a line of neon green lit up horizontally, showing the body of the creature. The whole body was covered in a hard, black chitin. It had the head of a spider, with only four relatively big eyes and a pair of pincers that hid fangs dripping with poison. Unlike other arachnids, this one had a thorax in which eight spindly, long legs supported its weight. On top of the thorax and the abdomen were four wings, buzzing in short intervals as if it was preparing to lounge at Hunter. Running along the length of the creature was a glowing line to the end of the abdomen, where a stinger giving out a strong stench of what could be assumed as a pheromone, possibly to mark and objective.

Hunter waited silently for it to start the attack, there was no point in talking to something that can't think. A flash of green sped by his right and he spun to swing his cleaver, only for it to bounce off the chitin and send the bug off course at the other side of the room-turned-arena. He furrowed his brow at the outcome, then another buzzing sound catches his attention and started running in a random direction while he folded his cleaver and pulled out a black broadsword with an overly large handle. A hiss was heard a few feet behind him and he turned on his heel, pulling at the handle of his weapon in a flurry of sparks and swinging it in a wide arc, and a loud *crack* of the rupture of black, hard natural armor was soon followed by a soft *squelch* of pulverized, soft, transparent flesh.

He set the point of his church pick on the ground and pushed the body of the bug with the sole of his boot, efectively releasing his tool from the deadweight it gathered. Noticing the lack of individual endurance of his prey, he ran without hesitation to the chittering kaleidoscope of eyes looking back at him from within the darkness.

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Countless eyes watched him, capturing every move with a morbid fascination as he fought oblivious to his spectator. Four arms gripped the mirage before their owner in a forceful manner, yet the pictures were undisturbed as they played out. A groan of mostruous pitch rose from somewhere among the entrails of the watcher as they kept watching.

A voice from source unseen, feminine in nature, stole the attention of the spectator with a single word.

"Attack."

And attack it did.

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Twitching carcasses of oversized bugs covered the floor as he rested on his knees, fighting to breathe in the aftermath of what he felt were two hours of constant killing and dodging. A smile stretched in his face as the all too familiar lantern rose from the ground with his messengers greeting him already.

A chill went down his spine.

The messengers hid, scared for their lives.

He felt the all too familiar sense of knowledge beyond understanding being crammed in his brain.

An Amygdala made itself known as the veil of mortal ignorance was lifted, a faint trail of dark smoke escaped from the holes in its head.

"Please, don't tell me they're here..." He whispered with fear lacing his words as he trembled, dreading for what its mere presence entailed to the world.

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"I feel the blood of my brethren in his veins." Said the voice, inhaling deeply and letting out a satisfied sigh. "Test him if he is truly worthy of our power."

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The Amygdala slammed two arms on the ground and it launched itself into the air, Hunter ran away from the landing zone where it landed a few seconds later. A large swipe and another slam from the front arms were met with similar results as the human kept himself alive with practiced motions.

He made his weapon turn back to its shorter form and switched it for his cleaver, opting to use fast, short ranged swipes instead of throwing slow, crowd-controlling attacks against an enemy slower than him. He went to strike at the arms supporting the nightmarish being while it raised another arm with the intent of crushing him, but the thick skin absorbed most of the damage and he was sent sailing as he was backhanded.

He tumbled into as stop before reaching a wall of the room, his head was swimming and his ribs were aching from the rough ride. He righted himself and jabbed a blood vial to his thigh, leaving his injuries behind, when he suddenly realized something.

'I'm running out of vials!' He thought, 'Ok, let's make no more mistakes.' Approaching his opponent, he ducked under a vicious hand flying out to grab him and he retaliated with a few hits of his own. The Amygdala began slamming its hands underneath its frame, trying to crush the bothersome hunter. Tired of the constant bites of the cleaver, the behemoth took a few steps backwards and pushed Hunter aside. Confused by the sudden retreat, the human did a few steps back of his own to assess the situation.

From within the gaps in the exoeskeleton covering the head of the Amygdala, countless yellow eyes erupted and started glowing with arcane energy. Hunter had little time to react as a sudden barrage of lasers rained down on him, following him while he ran to a safer distance. If it wasn't enough, the ground touched by the lasers began exploding a few seconds after, cutting off several escape routes.

The Old One stopped the attack to regain its bearings, giving Hunter an opening to keep cutting away at the tough flesh. But before he could reach his opponent, the Amygdala started coughing and a torrent of bile flew in short, yet voluminous, bursts that pooled on the ground before the nightmarish being. Holding back a gag at the stench of the fowl substance, Hunter avoided stepping on the puddles of acidic goo without missing a beat.

When he finally made it to the hunched head of the Amygdala, he reached into a pocket in his coat and pulled out a piece of thunder paper and slided it over his weapon. A wild crackle of electricity danced on the surface of his cleaver and clinged on the edge of its teeth while it tried to jump to the nearest living being. He reared back to hack at the bulbous head of his opponent, but before he could make contact with it, the Amygdala jumped away and Hunter hit nothing but air.

"Of course..." He deadpanned, ignoring his own 'no speaking' rule.

After his rather failed attack he turned to the direction his opponent jumped to, only to find nothing. A scrapping sound came from above him and a few small pieces of rubble fell on his head. He blinked and looked up. The Amygdala was hanging from the rocky ceiling like a roach, if it had a face, it would be smiling smugly.

"...That seems fair." Then he thought, 'Honestly, these kind of things no longer surprise me'.

The behemoth let gravity take hold of it with its clawed hands set to squash the human. He had no time to escape, so he faced the inminent danger head on and swung the cleaver upwards, transforming it into its longer form. He buckled under the massive weight of the Amygdala, but he held his ground and kept his weapon as a macabre support beam for the impaled Old One. It shrieked in pain and rage and swatted Hunter from underneath it. The electrified cleaver was dragged along with him tearing skin and muscle tissue, leaving behind a large splatter of ichor.

Infuriated, the Old One flailed and raged by slamming its arms and legs blindly, quickly advancing in Hunter's direction. It got to the point where it grabbed at one of its own arms and pulled with all its might. The loud, sickening *crack* of bones shattering and a disgusting, wet *squelch* of muscles stretching to their breaking point were the only sounds beside the constant enraged shrieking of the Amygdala. The cacophony ended when the arm was severed from the body as the owner wielded it like a rudimentary club, leaving a bleeding stump at the middle of the forearm with chreds of sking and muscle clinging stubbornly to the rest of the handless arm.

Hunter didn't have much time to process what he had just witnessed because when the Amygdala finished with its gruesome rage fit, it went full speed to pulverize him with the severed arm. He avoided it succesfully and retaliated in kind with his, still electrified, cleaver aiming at the head. He ducked and avoided touching the constant torrent of blood coming from the stump and the amputated limb, he didn't know if it had any ill effects on him, at least not yet. Reaching the torso of the Amygdala, he slashed at the exposed ribcage, left in this state by the failed leaping attack, trying to make as much damage as possible and he commited a mistake.

He got greedy.

An oversized claw grabbed him and started squeezing him, threatening to break his ribs, as he struggled to break free the Old One held him at eye-level (or as eye-level as you can get without any kind of facial features) and began charging a beam of arcane energy point-blank. Somewhere along the way, he let go of his weapon. He commited a second mistake.

Knowing he had no way to survive a hit of this magnitude, he struggled even more and slipped his hand free and into his bag. He searched frantically for something, anything that could get him out of this mess. His gloved fingers brushed against something small and metallic, a part of a mechanism of some sort, followed by a hollow metal cilynder. His eyes widened in realization and alarm, just what he needed, but he was running out of time. He desperately searched for the wooden stock and took hold of it, he fumbled with it in panic as he drew it, aimed and fired. The effect was inmediate.

The focus behind the arcane blast was disrupted by the barrage of quicksilver shards. Without an outlet the energy powering the blast had to go somewhere, in this case, the caster of said blast.

A strong shockwave sent Hunter sailing through the suddenly stiff fingers of the Amygdala, breaking them in the process. He rolled to a halt a few meters from the detonation zone and shut his eyes tightly, gasping in pain. He struggled to breathe and waited for the ringing in his ears to stop before he dared to get up.

"New rule. Never doing that again." He groaned, then he propped his weight on his elbows to survey the damage. Just as he thought, the head, and most of the upper body, of the Amygdala was no more. The uppermost arms were consumed by the sudden surge in the arcane energy build-up, meanwhile the rest of them were thrown to random places of the arena. He suddenly felt grateful by his stroke of luck of being caught by one of them. The rest of the body was slumped on the floor like a ragdoll, the part of the torso that survived was charred black and smoking, the legs and tail were limp without any purpose of keeping balance to a non-existent body.

Something shifting caught his attention, he turned his head to look at that distracting something. It as the severd arm of the Amygdala. He recalled some hunters of other worlds preferring using oddities like this one, the reason of it eluded him. But now he had an inkling of why it fascinates some people, probably it was some sort of trophy meant to be wielded, maybe it was just the sense of superority over these beings, or maybe because people liked weird things.

'Good thing I like weird things then.' He walked to the amputated limb and stored it in his bag, then he repeated the process with his cleaver, knowing he had nothing else to fight tonight. But something nagged at the back of his mind, 'How did they get here?'

He went to the lantern where the messengers greeted him, he lit it and got out of the vanquished nightmare. Once in the Dreamscape, he sat down and turned to the little creatures at the base of the lamp, "Do you have any idea on who might be behind this?" The shooke their heads almost instantly. "Alright, then I'll need you to do something. The next time you see Princess Luna, please tell her we have troubles. Really big troubles."

He paused for a minute and looked around him, apparently a new day was about to begin and everyone was awakening. He had to go back to the real world soon and begin his shift at the outskirts of a beast-dwelling forest. And in top of it all, he had fill more blood vials before he ran out of healing items. Joy.

"You guys think I need a vacation?" The messengers merely shrugged, not knowing what 'vacations' were, "Yeah, me too."

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It was almost nighttime in Ponyville. The meeting was nearing to an end, having been filled with an assortment of lectures of all the knowledge on human physiology known by ponykind, which was not much to begin with but it still had the basics on biological needs such as dietiary, sleeping and social habits researched in the human world, courtesy of Sunset Shimmer. But considering the background of the dream-dwelling human, it left more than a few topics open to speculation.

"So, what are we going to tell Princess Luna?" Asked a very tired Twilight to an equally tired group of mares. "I mean, we only have the basics on what he's doing and some of his background but there's nothing else we can point out without speculating."

Rainbow Dash answered with a huff, "I guess we could just take him out before he hurts somepony. Something feels off about this guy, I don't think we should help him."

"I say we must give him the benefit of the doubt, if we don't know his behaviour then there's little else we can do." Said Rarity, gently petting Spike, who had fallen asleep somewhere during the meeting.

"I think we should leave him alone. I mean, what if he's doesn't want us to bother him?" Chimed Fluttershy, who was barely keeping herself in the conversation being too worried about her animal friends she left back in her cottage. "I-I don't want him to get mad at us..."

"Ah don't know what to do, to be honest. Even if we go to help him, Ah don't think we can just waltz to his door and solve his problem" Replied Applejack, scratching the back of her head.

Pinkie was absent, having to take care of the Cake twins earlier in the afternoon. Before she left, she left a note with a drawing of herself juggling bags of flour while riding a monocycle.

"Ok... Then I guess we have to wait to give Luna an answer. Until then we must keep this information in mind if we want to reach an agreement while I ask the Princess for more details on Hunter." She magicked a gavel and banged it a few times on the cutie map. "This meeting is officially adjourned, you're free to go." Her friends didn't waste any time in getting up and walking out the door.

She bid her friends goodbye and sat there for a moment before muttering to herself in a giddy tone as she watched them leave. "I always wanted to do that."

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"He survived. Just as expected." Said the voice. "Let him rest, I want his best in the next test."

A chorus of guttural groans and growls replied at the words of their godess.

Author's Note

Well... This took longer than I thought. But still, I think a short, action filled chapter is easier to write than the ones with a lot of dialogue. I feel like dialogues are my weak point.

Anyway, comments and opinions are appretiated.