PAO: Pony Art Online

"No, not him," Scootaloo said, swiping away yet another application from a guild member to become a commander. After a decisive victory at the thirty-second floor boss, the Cutie Mark Crusaders was growing into the biggest, and the strongest, guild in Pony Art Online.

Applebloom dozed on the opposite side of the Guildmasters' room. It was a cozy room at the top of the Ponyville Inn, where the three girls first signed the guild charter to form the CMC. Since then its been their prime spot to hang out and relax. But no such leisure was made available to the three once their guild began to grow.

"What about Twist?" Applebloom finally muttered as she woke from her nap. "She keeps sending her application to us every time we clear another floor."

"What's her level?" Sweetie Belle asked.

"Thirty-eight," Applebloom answered. Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo traded glances, suppressing the urge to laugh at Twist's expense.

Scootaloo shook her head. "Too low, like always."

Applebloom raised her eyebrow at that. "Damn, you're more savage than usual today."

Scootaloo looked at Applebloom, showing as much exhaustion as possible. "We have to sort through a dozen applicants for a new commander, and three times as many requests to join the guild. I'm tired."

Sweetie Belle stretched out on her bed, simultaneously reading through her own list of messages. "On top of that, tomorrow's Hearth Warming Eve." For anyone else, her tone would have been a complaint like any other, but Applebloom and Scootaloo knew what Sweetie Belle meant, even if she didn't mean to say it. They had Applejack and Rainbow Dash, but Sweetie Belle didn't have Rarity.

Frustrated, Sweetie Belle swiped her hoof across the guild menu, exiting out of the display. "We should celebrate! We haven't had more than a single drink after clearing the last floor. We should get out and do something!"

"Maybe find that massage place on floor fourteen," Scootaloo added. "There's a couple that works there, and I think the husband was a masseuse in real life while his wife was a working chiropractor."

Applebloom shrugged. "It's not like you have any actual muscles that need to be massaged."

"That's what most players think," Scootaloo replied, "but even Rainbow Dash goes there sometimes to loosen up after a fight. Players say the couple knows some secrets to how the Digisphere renders your avatar's body, somehow tricking the game's system to add a buff that makes you feel super relaxed."

Sweetie Belle nodded. "It does sound awfully nice to do something, anything, other than read anymore requests from guild members."

Scootaloo marked a waypoint on her map of the fourteenth floor. "The teleporter's two blocks away, we could pop over to floor fourteen and see if it's as good as they say."

Sweetie Belle beamed, she didn't need to be told twice. "Let's go!" she said, grabbing Applebloom by the foreleg and dragging her out.

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Floor thirty-two, nicknamed "The Dream Realm," had one of the most surreal landscapes Phoenix could imagine. If she could, she would have spent all of Hearth's Warming Eve on a walk around the map, taking in the everlasting night sky and its beautiful stars and constellations, accurate to the last nebula, courtesy of Twilight. Without any light pollution added into the game, the sky was better than any sight in the real world.

But there was work to be done.

No one notices you. You're just another player in the crowd.

The thought gave little comfort as Phoenix squeezed through the crowd celebrating in the town square. At the center of the crowd, a massive fir tree towered over everything else in the village, decorated with magical, everlasting flames, enchanted crystals, and even a solid diamond pony at the top of the tree. Phoenix could only imagine what players were doing at the floor's central city.

Phoenix would have loved to stay, enjoy the holidays like a normal person would, but her plans were on a ticking time table as it was, and she couldn't afford distractions.

Northwest of The Dream Realm's starting town was a thick forest containing the strongest NPC's in the dimension. But that didn't dissuade Phoenix. In her memory, that was where Twilight suggested to place a Hearth's Warming Eve event, a colossal boss that drew strength based on the players in the dimension.

The idea was to scale the boss up based on all the players, so that everyone would have to join in work together to defeat it. It was a great idea for a holiday celebration, but Phoenix didn't dare think of bringing anyone else in on it. The location was supposed to be secret, as part of a massive hunt for the event. But given their situation, not a lot of players wanted to risk their life looking for an over powered boss.

Phoenix grinned as she cleaved through the monsters in the forest. Unlike any other floor, The Dream Realm had nearly an infinite number of different monsters.

Through the Digisphere, PAO could take fragments of memories, dreams, or plain imagination, and splice the images together to create a never ending variety of creatures. The game may have turned out to become a death trap, but she couldn't deny the amount of effort and detail put into each floor.

Damn, I'm doing it again. Sunset thought to herself.

It didn't take long for her to reach the heart of the forest, where a large clearing in the trees awaited the event boss. Sunset swiped her hoof to check the time in her options menu. She was early. Thirty minutes until midnight, and then it would be Hearth's Warming Day, and there would be one hell of a fight.

"It's a fight you can't do alone," a voice said from up behind her. Phoenix tensed up, reaching for her sword with her magic. But something told her that she was safe. She didn't understand it at first, but her instincts quickly gave her an answer.

"You didn't have to follow me Rainbow Dash," Phoenix replied, letting a stone of guilt drop into her gut, realizing she had almost drawn a sword on her friend.

"We didn't follow, we knew you'd be here," came another voice from the trees, on her left this time. Phoenix dropped her head lower, avoiding contact with the walking mass of pink.

"Why... why are you here?" Phoenx spoke but her words were stuck in her throat. "You all shouldn't have..."

Rainbow stopped her. "Just don't, Sunset. Don't say anything, it was hard enough finding you after you left our 'Friends' list, so just listen to us." She landed behind her, with Fluttershy quietly gliding down to her right.

"We're your friends Sunset," Fluttershy said, walking up. She took her hood off and looked her directly in her eyes. "And we're going to go through this together."

Phoenix shook her head and pushed Fluttershy away. "I'm not Sunset, not here anyways."

"Don't you dare place any blame on yourself sugarcube," Applejack said, taking her stance by Pinkie. "Regardless of what everyone thinks, we know who you are. You didn't want any of this, but getting yourself killed won't change any of it. You are still Sunset Shimmer, and no matter what you say, the truth is, we need you."

"If you found this place on your own, you can manage without me," Phoenix replied.

"What the hell is it with you?" Rainbow Dash shot back. "Why can't you just come back with us so we can be a party again?"

The though of telling them itched at her mind. They couldn't grasp at why she was ashamed. Would they leave her alone if she did? Would they be as disgusted with her as she was with herself?

Pinkie took her turn to say her piece. "Please, Sunset. We were together when it happened, you know whatever's trapping us in this world has nothing to do with you."

Phoenix opened her mouth to say something, but she paused.

"Out with it already," Rainbow insisted. "We've been searching for you ever since floor one, we deserve some kind of answer."

"Fine," Phoenix finally said. "You're all wrong, and that's my answer. This has everything to do with me. This world is my creation, and even if I'm not the jailer, I'm still the one who put down the prison bars that shut everyone in this place. If anyone's going to fix it, it should be me, so no one else has to die."

They all stared at her, like she was crazy. She was suggesting that she could finish the game on her own, after all. They all tried to think of something to say, but finally Applejack just walked up to Phoenix and looked her in the eyes, like she was staring into her soul.

Applejack punched Phoenix.

As an unarmed attack, the Digisphere barely registered anything more than the push of the strike. The pain was internal.

"Don't try to lie yourself out of this one, Sunset, or Phoenix, if that's what you really go by now," Applejack said, yanking her up off the grass. "When you're sincere, it shows like nothing else I've ever seen. You said you change for the better when we became friends in Canterlot High. That was sincere. You figured out how the Sirens could damage even our friendship. That was sincere. You told Twilight she could find a new life with new friends in Canterlot. That was sincere."

Sunset was taken back, nearly staggering over from the words. She didn't think those details, which seemed to happen a lifetime ago, was still so fresh in Applejack's mind.

Applejack didn't seem to notice the weight of her what she said. "So don't give me this 'lone wolf' shit, acting like you have to fix everything on your own. We're ready to help you Sunset, so, just let us help you."

She couldn't keep it in then, not while she was surrounded by the only ones who cared about her in PAO. Sunset collapsed to her knees, burying her head in her hooves.

"I'm sorry, Applejack, but I can't let you help me. I couldn't stand it if you did," she said. She looked up to her friends' faces, taking in their curious looks one by one. She had to tell them, it wasn't a choice anymore.

So she explained it to them. "I've never stopped thinking about all of you ever since the first day. Every moment I looked around and saw a happy party, I remembered all of us together on the hill, right by Starter Town. But when I fell asleep, or got lost in thought, I couldn't help but admire everything around me. And then, I realized that deep down, I'm happy to be here."

Sunset paused to take it in. Her voiced shook and her body trembled. It sounded worse aloud; she sounded so selfish. If she hated herself, how could she expect her friends to accept her?Her friends all took a step back. It wasn't what any of them expected to hear.

Regardless, Sunset felt that she had to continue. "Imagine, the world around us is a death trap for thousands of innocents, my friends are locked in a virtual reality risking their lives just to escape, and I wake up every morning smiling to myself because I get to be a pony! Players, real people, have been dying with every floor, yet somehow, I'm happy!" She paused, taking in another shaky breath. "The past few months have been driving me insane, yet even just now, on my way here, I had the gall to feel proud of the world I had made."

It was Sunset's turn to be surprised. One by one, they embraced her, hugging her close as if the world was at an end.

"I don't get it," Sunset croaked out, "I just said I've been happy...even at you expense, and you still-"

"Understand. We still understand, sugar cube," Applejacked finished for her. "It don't matter if you made this world or not, everyone's had their moments to joy here."

"Yeah Sunset, you should have seen the party we threw over at Ponyville," Pinkie Pie beamed, throwing her hooves in the air for exaggeration. "I bet we had at least ten thousand players celebrating Hearth's Warming Eve, and not a single one of them confused it with Christmas!"

Sunset chuckled at Pinkie's upbeat attitude. "It was Equestria's equivalent of our holidays, so we put the events in."

Our. Sunset's heart skipped a beat. For years she was conflicted over the human world and Equestria, wondering which she really belonged in after she graduated from Canterlot High. Has she really been human for so long, that she felt a part of its world?

"Events like this one?" Rainbow Dash asked. "We had a hunch you'd be here, but we're still not clear on what exactly is supposed to happen."

Sunset waved her hoof in the air, treating it as if it were nothing. "Just a giant boss. Twilight coded it to scale up based on the floor's player population, but I came prepared with a few special scrolls." She grinned, pulling them out from her inventory. "I might have cheated them in on day one when you weren't looking, before my admin controls got screwed over."

"You what?" Rainbow Dash gawked. Sunset just grinned cheekily. "I can't believe you did that. And here I thought you were an honest player."

"The boss is overpowered, so I need to just as strong," Sunset explained. "And besides, I was caught up in the excitement at the time." Rainbow Dash shook her head mockingly, disapproving of the unearned scrolls.

"Sounds cool! What do they do?" Pinkie Pie asked.

"Different things," Sunset said as she shuffled through them. There was a red scroll, two yellow, and a gold. "This one causes you to reduce your enemy's health by thirty percent, these two triple your health, endurance, and attack speed. This gold one's the key scroll though. It'll level you up to the level of the boss for ten minutes."

Everone's eyes widened. "That's so overpowered," Rainbow said, staring at the golden scroll with amazement. "Why're you using it now?"

"Because if Twilight made this boss the way I think she did," Sunset answered, "it might give me a lead on how to get out of this game quicker, or at least find out how death in-game got linked to a malfunction in the Digisphere, and how I could fix it. We're pretty low compared to what the boss is going to be, and subduing it, not killing it, is going to be the important part. I need to focus on working out the magic anomaly in its data."

Jaws dropped all around. As her friend, they all knew the impact Sunset could make on clearing the game, but they never thought it would be on this scale, or that she'd be able to break into the system from her in-game character.

"Wait, so the boss scales up if there's a bigger population on this floor?" Pinkie Pie asked.

Sunset stood up, preparing for the event to start. "Don't worry, the population in this dimension isn't what I expected. The players here now won't make it a challenge."

"What if I told everyone in Ponyville that the Hearth's Warming after party would be at this floor's central city?" Pinkie added. Sunset looked at her, completely stunned by what she heard. Ten thousand players would certainly scale up the boss to a troubling level. Sunset quickly reconsidered rushing into it with brute force.

However, it was too late. A bell sounded from the sky, signalling midnight for every dimension of Equestrad. Above the forest clearing, Sunset saw the most horrifying figure she could possibly imagine, and she cursed Twilight under her breath.

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It was bigger than anything encountered in the game before. The monster towered over the forest, its eyes just peaking over the tree tops. With its massive wingspan, a single flap flung Sunset and her friends back into the thick forest trees. It did little damage for an attack, but it didn't matter. Everyone was dazed, not from the gust, but from the sight before them.

It was Celestia. A massive, bastardized form of Princess Celestia.

"What the hell is that?" Applejack shouted, raising her shield to deflect an incoming blow. As a Tank player, she always drew the first strikes without much effort.

Even in the ever lasting night of The Dream Realm, Sunset could tell that nothing was right with the figure of Celestia. The coat was darkened to a filthy grey, with specks of dirt and moss littered over her fur. Even worse were the eyes; as if they were surgically removed from an iguana and squeezed into its eye sockets, the boss' eyes bulged out of its head, and stared unblinkingly at the players around it. The cracked, bloodshot stare of the eyes erupted its gaze into the everyone's heart like a blistering molten volcano.

Before she could vomit, Sunset turned away abruptly, opening her menu screen to fiddle with its options. Rainbow Dash noticed as she drew her weapons to attack.

"Sunset, now would be a perfect time to use those scrolls," she said, glancing nervously as the monster carved chunks out of Applejack's stamina with each strike of its horn.

Sunset tossed them to Rainbow Dash. "I never expected to kill it, I just need a few minutes with it!"

There was no time to ask. Rainbow Dash opened the scrolls, activating their effects. They misted into sparkles, surrounding Rainbow Dash to apply their special effects. It was nothing she had ever felt before.

With her sword in wing, Rainbow surged forward at the boss, striking it at the base of the hoof. The shock wave cracked through the forest like a thunder clap, ringing in the everyone's ears. But despite the astounding effect, the blow did no visible damage. Despite the level boost, Rainbow Dash could not compare to what a raid could do.

"Rainbow," Applejack called out, "would be nice if you'd hit harder than a filly dozing off on a summer evening right about now."

"The weak spots are the eyes and the wing joints," Sunset advised. She didn't have to look away from her admin menu to tell how the fight was going. But if she wanted to help, she needed to finish her own task first.

Rainbow Dash nodded, aiming her strike at the join of the boss' wing. As enormous as it was, Rainbow's heightened power rocketed her into the air with a single leap. In that moment, it didn't matter that her wings were occupied with a weapon. She flew through the air with more than enough power to land a crippling blow.

On the ground, Sunset worked away at her admin screen. Still broken since the day PAO became a prison, nearly all the commands were interfered with, save for one crucial ability. Like an access port for technology, Sunset could access the streams of magic with her admin commands, provided there was enough magic in the stream. The Dream Realm was the perfect place to start, but only the boss could trigger a massive fluctuation of magic that Sunset could work with.

Behind her, the fight raged on. Still on ninety-five percent health, it was clear that not even Rainbow Dash could sway the fight in their favor. Even with such high speed and evasion, she knew she was lucky to have had only glancing blows from the boss.

Applejack was less fortunate, her health nearly at zero. The others had to safely steer the boss away, which meant Rainbow Dash was the one to do it.

But like everything else in The Dream Realm, the boss knew Rainbow like nothing else could. The gem in her Digisphere read her mind like a map, following her imagination strait to her nightmares. Before she could react, the boss vomited an avalanche of roses and daisies onto Rainbow. The flowers were a simple distraction at first, but the real shock set in as each flower popped open one eye, then another, and stared longingly at RD.

Startled, Rainbow broke her focus on the boss. She regained it in a split second, but she was too slow to avoid the crushing hoof as it dragged across the forest floor, cleaving through the virtual dirt. In that single strike her health dropped to sixty percent. Without the scrolls' buffs, it was painfully obvious how badly the fight would play out.

Fluttershy sent her pet to heal Rainbow Dash instinctively. The bear, enchanted with magic from floor twenty-eight, unleashed a barrage of healing auras that could pull a player to full health in seconds. But with her scrolls active, the difference in power was staggering. Rainbow Dash barely recovered to sixty-five percent health before the monster hurled a blast of magic from its horn.

Sunset didn't like it, but she needed the fight to go on. "I'm almost done getting the data, just keep it fighting a little longer!"

There wasn't much choice. Rainbow Dash leaped up onto a tree branch, bouncing off of it and striking the wing of the boss, interrupting its attack. Applejack followed up, stunning it with a heavy shield bash. It didn't make sense, but PAO was still a game like any other, and Applejack stun still incapacitated the boss for several seconds, despite its overwhelming mass.

Everyone took the opportunity to attack, slashing up at the legs of the wings of the boss. But a combined attack did little more than buy them time. At ninety percent health, the boss looked more enraged than weakened.

"Back off!" Applejack shouted as she taunted the boss. She knew her shield would hold for a few blows, and could only hope to buy enough time for Rainbow Dash to regain enough stamina. Metal ringed as her shield deflected hit after hit, flashing as magic sizzled off its edge. Quickly, however, she had to retreat into the cover of the trees.

Applejack shouted to Sunset. "Reckon I don't have much left Sunset, you gotta do what you gotta do right now or we'll never make it."

Sunset worked as fast as she could, reading the data on her menu screen, analyzing the pattern of magic that fed data to the boss. It wasn't ideal to rush, but there was enough data to hijack the link of magic. Sunset turned to the boss, taking a good, horrified look at it, and uploaded her personal access code to the Digisphere's magic link.

Rainbow Dash raised her sword, prepared to defend against the next attack. But the boss only spasmed. It lost its connection to the system, becoming linked directly to the magic of Sunset's Digisphere.

"What'd you do to it?" Pinkie Pie asked, staring curiously at the mindless construct. It didn't seem at all like the reckless beast is was mere moments ago.

"I used the remaining admin controls I had to gain direct access to the magic the boss used to read and interpret player's minds," she answered. "The boss was designed to be difficult, with the power read thoughts and memories, and use them to customize its way of fighting. The flowers must have been a distorted memory or something."

Rainbow laughed nervously, looking at the staring flowers. "Yeah, probably just something weird." She quickly brushed aside a few flowers at her hooves. "So you're going to destroy it, right?"

Sunset thought for a moment and looked at her menu screen. She shook her head. "Not until I get more out of it."

Applejack raised her brow. "More? You just froze an overpowered boss with a touch of a button, what more can you do?"

Sunset pointed to a point in the data on her menu, an almost incomprehensible point if Sunset hadn't talked about magic to her friends before. "That's a repeating fluctuation of magic, like a line of code for computers, that we use as the base for most of the magical functions in the game. It wasn't designed for resets, but if I tinkered with it I could potentially force every player out of the game by resetting the link between the Digispheres."

Pinkie tilted her head and furrowed her brows. "So... this is literally just turning it on and off again, but safely?"

"Pretty much," Sunset replied, shrugging.

"I don't believe it," Applejack chuckled. "Sounds so easy, but that was one hell of a fight. How long will it take to gain control of the reset?"

Sunset stared at her menu. "I can't really tell. It wasn't designed to do the job of the computer half of the game, so I'll have to fiddle around with it. On top of that," she pointed to the disfigured Celestia, "I can only access the Digisphere's magic through that boss right now, so it has to be alive until I sort it out."

"That'll be a problem," Rainbow Dash said. "I suppose we could just guard it so it doesn't get killed or despawn."

Sunset pondered the thought, sitting around the boss endlessly while she tried to figure out a completely different way to leave the game. Her eyes beamed as she found a different answer.

"I have a better idea Rainbow," She said as she selected sections of magic data and shuffled it around. The others couldn't make any sense of what the data meant. It looked like a pool of neon lights on Sunset's screen, but she used it like a puzzle that a child had completed a thousand times over.

Without warning, the boss began to glow. There was an initial panic, but Sunset's confidence calmed her friends down. They looked at the creature as it glowed, quickly recognizing a difference between the despawning effect and this one. Along the surface there were specks like static on a television, swimming around like fish looking for a new home.

"It actually looks kind of nice," Fluttershy said, admiring the pattern. And she was right; the boss was a beast of staggering horrors, but it was still a masterpiece of PAO that they couldn't help but respect.

As the glow grew more intense, the boss shrank to a normal size for a pony. It bent and twisted, some parts of it melting into a formless mass of light. The process was slow, but Applejack saw Sunset's intentions as it took a new, definitive form.

"You're making that monster into a sword? Is that possible?" Applejack rushed over to Sunset's side, looking at what she was doing in closer detail, but she still couldn't figure anything out.

Sunset simply nodded. "The magic's easier than computer coding most of the times, and it has a lot more different capabilities. The boss was supposed to drop a special weapon when it died, so I'm just using that weapon data as a kind of 'flashdrive' to store the rest of its magic. As long as that weapon is in an inventory, it'll be possible to use it to interface with the Digisphere's magic at any time."

"This is going to turn into that time you asked me to take a computer science course with you, isn't it," Rainbow Dash asked. She rubbed her forehead to clear her thoughts. "For the record, I passed that class without knowing a single thing at the end of it."

Sunset laughed. "I'll try to keep the 'egghead' to a minimum RD."

The boss, subdued into a form of a sword, hummed on the ground in the center of the clearing. Already, the battle scarred terrain had regenerated into its pristine, stoic state. The sword's blade, a meter in length, glistened with its silver hue. The hilt, designed in the likeness of Celestia's wings, hummed softly, as if the boss inside was eager to escape.

"That's so awesome," Rainbow said, reaching out with her wing to pull it out. It vibrated strongly in her wing, but she managed to pull it from the dirt and to inspect it.

"It's heavy for a broadsword. Really heavy," she said, clutching the one-handed weapon with both wings. "Wow, the magic in it is vibrating a lot, like it's gone's insane on the inside."

"It suits you," Pinkie Pie commented, taking a screenshot of Rainbow holding up the weapon with her menu's camera. "It's fierce, threatening, announcing to everyone 'Come and fight, I dare you!'"

"Let's not go too far Pinkie," Rainbow replied, "Sunset needs it, she should have the sword." Rainbow handed the weapon to Sunset, but she shook her head and pushed it back.

"It's better if it stays with you for now. I need time to analyze what I got from it, and I want a good fighter to keep it safe." Sunset opened her menu and clicked open her friends list. It was empty. She entered her friends' name and they all had request messages materialize before them. Phoenix wants to be your friend!

"I guess it'll be best if we stay in touch," she said, "though you might want to keep it a secret. A lot of players out there still hate my guts."

They stared at their screens. Applejack was the first to ask. "How, in the blue hell, did you change your player name?" Everyone turned to Sunset with the same curious look. It had barely crossed their mind when they saw Sunset, but now it seemed to be the greatest mystery in the game.

Sunset blushed a little. She had hoped the name change would throw them off, but it seems her fascination with phoenixes had to be revealed. "There's an NPC on the first floor named Zecora, with a hut in the middle of the Everfree forest. You can buy a potion from her that lets you reset certain player skills and characteristics, including name. It was the first thing I did to hide away from everyone."

"And we thought Fluttershy was reclusive," Applejack snorted, patting Sunset on the back. "You're always one step ahead, which is exactly why we need you."

"Thanks," Sunset answered back, hugging Applejack, "but I should start looking into these weird magic frequencies, and if we're lucky, I might be able to extrapolate a source of the interference of the frequency of Digisphere's magic, starting with the reduction in the sine graph's-"

"Or," Rainbow interjected, "we could celebrate Hearth Warming Day! It's Christmas in real life after all, and I heard the taverns have a special seasonal cider!"

As if by instinct, Sunset slinked back. "I don't know, I haven't done well with crowds of players."

"Don't worry Sunset," Fluttershy reassured. "I know it might feel daunting, maybe a little scary, but most of the players couldn't possibly spot you out in a crowd."

Sunset sighed. If anyone understood a desire to hide from people, it was Fluttershy, and her reassurance was even more impactful than she knew. "Alright, I suppose I can't go sneaking around forever." The rest cheered, taking her by the hoof and nearly dragging Sunset back to the central city. Along the way, Sunset felt something she didn't know she missed. Her anxiousness washed away when she was with her friends, an she was relieved.

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"We've been searching this forest for hours," Sweetie Belle complained. "I'm almost starting to feel the massage wear off."

Applebloom grunted as she hacked through the thick bushes of the forest. "Our info brokers all confirmed something happened here when it became Hearth's Warming Day in the game. If we get there first we could kill the boss and get its unique item."

"At least wait for the others to catch up," Scootaloo added to Sweetie's whining. Applebloom stopped swiping her hoof to check her map. Behind the three of them there were fifteen dots scattered in the forest, slowly marching toward their location. Even with their selective recruitment, all the members of the CMC had trouble keeping up with their leaders.

"We can wait when we find the boss," Applebloom decided. "We can't give up now and lose our advantage."

Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle sighed, trudging behind Applebloom. They wandered through the forest, following the light of moon until they neared the clearing.

"That's it!" Applebloom shouted, checking the map to confirm that they were in the right spot. The clear was a clear patch in the middle of the forest. She had no doubt that the boss awaited. Ahead, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle looked around the clearing.

Applebloom moved to their side. "Do you see it? Where is it?"

The clearing was empty, devoid of all movement.

"I think we're late," Sweetie muttered.

Applebloom said nothing, but simply slumped onto the ground, leaning against a tree stump. Organizing their guild members to join them took hours. Marching through the forest with no clear direction took even longer. She was exhausted.

She let out one solitary, sustained groan that echoed through the silent forest. "Fuck me...."