3questria

Chapter 2: Capital Punishment

Washington, D.C.

Day 1 of the Invasion

Agent Gallagher had been in the Persian Gulf. He’d served in Afghanistan. Very little could stop him.

But a thousand-pound hunk of wrecked car had pinned him to the street as sounds of chaos and confusion rang outside. Shaking off his unconsciousness, he tried desperately to claw his way out of the wreckage.

He heard automatic weapons fire. They were under attack. Muffled screams and boots on the ground. Something big was going down.

Then, all of a sudden, the car was gone, blasted off by some unknown force, and Gallagher didn’t waste a second. He was on his feet within moments with his Sig Sauer drawn, trying to contact someone, anyone, via the radio.

And then he saw the flying horses.

Millions of them, maybe billions, emerged from the dark energy hole that hovered above the rubble of the Washington Monument. From afar, they looked like a large swarm of locusts. But as they neared, Gallagher could make out a horn, a pair of wings, and a set of hate-filled eyes in every horse that neared him.

Then the world exploded.

BOOM!

The Secret Service agent tumbled backward as a tongue of fire leapt from an overturned Jeep in front of him. Recovering quickly, he took aim and fired. Each shot met its mark, felling one flying beast after another, scattering their bodies across the street. Taking a moment to reload his weapon, Gallagher observed the things he had just shot.

They were horses, or aliens. A combination of the two. Gallagher barely had time to observe the bodies before three more aliens attacked him, shooting at them from their horns and from guns on their backs.

The horses had guns.

“This is G-2! Does anyone copy?! Over!”

Nothing but static. Gallagher dropped the radio and fired until his clip ran dry. And even then, more of the alien ponies came after him. He wasn’t the only one shooting. As he ran for his life down Penn Avenue, he heard distinct Beretta and MP5K fire. The agent ran and ran until the ponies decided to target someone else. Only then did he stop running, stopping in the middle of the street in front of the White House lawn to catch his breath.

He didn’t see the minivan careening toward him.

WHAM!

Metal met flesh, and Gallagher flew down the street and skidded along the asphalt, burning through the fabric of his suit. The pain was unbearable, but he didn’t appear to be badly injured. The minivan never stopped as it sped across sidewalks and grass trying to evade the hellfire from the sky.

He got up gingerly, double checking that his bones hadn’t been broken, and then made his way to the Mall, where most of the gunfire was coming from.

It was a grisly sight. Civilians, police, and Secret Service alike were all getting mowed down by the gun-wielding winged unicorns. But then Gallagher saw that at the base of where the Washington Monument once stood, wingless unicorns were charging out of the white light that had engulfed the monument. Gallagher dipped and ducked to avoid the beams of deadly light that the ponies let loose, finally taking cover behind a piece of the monument, alongside a police officer, a woman, and a sanitation worker.

“Sir!” the woman yelled over the gunfire. “Sir, what’s going on?!”

“Ma’am, all of you, stay down and don’t leave this spot until it’s safe! You, officer! Where is the rest of the President’s security detail located?”

The officer reloaded his gun. “I couldn’t tell you, man. They all scattered when the shooting started. What are those things?”

“I couldn’t tell you, man,” Gallagher replied, unknowingly mocking the officer. “You keep these people safe, alright? I’m with the Secret Service and I need to find the President. But you keep these people safe!”

“Uh…yeah. Okay!”

Unimpressed with the officer’s lack of confidence, Gallagher broke cover and ran for the Capitol. As he ran he passed Servicemen, police, and fleeing civilians, all screaming their heads off. The sky overhead was black with ponies, and he could see and smell smoke everywhere.

At that moment, a blue unicorn took aim and fired.

BOOM!

The magic bolt went between Gallagher’s legs and hit the ground a mere inch in front of him, and the fireball engulfed him. He never had a chance to cry out, to see his murderer. He simply vanished in a vortex of flame.

Canterlot Castle

YOC 4017

Approx. 1950 hours

Celestia could not believe what she was seeing. Even from her balcony overlooking Canterlot, the glow of the portal storm from Bleakmire was almost unbearable to look upon. Twilight Sparkle gasped at her side.

They had been right all along.

“Blade,” Celestia growled. “How could we have been so foolish to let him free of our grasp so easily?”

   “Princess…”

“Twilight,” she said, turning to her pupil. “You realize what this means, don’t you? Blade has made for another world! But which one?”

“There is only one other world I can think of, sister,” said a new voice from behind them. Princess Luna trotted up alongside them, shielding her eyes from the bright light of the faraway portal.

“Luna! You don’t mean…?”

“Earth. The land of the humans.”

Twilight’s face twisted in confusion. “What’s a human?”

“A human is a creature with no hooves or tails. They walk on two legs and have arms and hands. They exist in a world parallel to ours, Twilight. But what could Blade want with the humans?”

“Power, perhaps?” Twilight answered. “The thought of conquering another species can drive anypony mad with the desire for power.”

“Onyx Blade seeks to gain new power,” Luna uttered. “That cannot be done.”

“Yes. With more power he may very well—”

BAM!

“DEATH TO THE PRINCESS!!”

“What on…?” But Celestia said nothing else as a bug-eyed unicorn charged headfirst toward her.

“Princess, watch out!”

“Sister!”

Celestia just barely managed to sidestep the crazed unicorn, but did not escape entirely unscathed. The unicorn’s horn sliced her flank, leaving behind a thin red line on her cutie mark. The unicorn slammed into the wall and tried to get up, but a dozen royal guards tackled him and held him down, and soon the room was a circus of chaotic ponies.

“Princess Celestia! Are you alright?!”

“I’m fine, Twilight dear. I am fine. But who is this pony? How did he get past the guards.”

“Forgive us, Your Majesty,” one of the guards said, bowing. “Guard morale has not been well since Shining Armor was incarcerated. I’m afraid this intruder broke through our weak point in the line.”

“Weak point in the line?”

“The guard shift, Princess. We are fewer and fewer every day.”

“But who is he?”

“A rebel!” the unicorn suddenly shouted as he was pulled to his hooves and cuffed. “A do-gooder for all of Equestria! I am the hoof that holds the rag that will clean up this mess of a land!”

“You will spend your days in the dungeon until trial,” Celestia said angrily. “Take him away.”

The unicorn never took his eyes off the princess as the guards hauled him away. Luna went to comfort her sister.

“Are you alright, Celestia?”

“I am fine, sister. He nicked me. Nothing more.”

“But you are bleeding!”

“I am fine!” Celestia snapped, and Luna withdrew. Twilight walked up to her princess.

“What happens now, Princess? I doubt you can just let what happened go. We need to figure out who this assassin is.”

“I know who he is.” Suddenly Celestia’s eyes widened, and she went back to the balcony, gazing at the bright portal storm.

“And I know what Onyx Blade wants. It all makes sense now. An eye for an eye, a hoof for a hoof.”

“What is it, Princess?”

“What does Blade want, sister?”

Celestia turned to them. Her eyes were grave.

“Chrysalis. He wants Chrysalis.”

Times Square, New York City

Day 1 of the Invasion

1400 hrs.

Alex Andrews picked his way through the rubble of the collapsed subway entrance and reached the smoky surface of Times Square, only to find that the square was aflame.

Fire leapt from every building, and he heard the distinct sound of gunfire and screams coming from all directions. As he coughed, a man burst through the glass window of a Burger King and hit the asphalt, sliding onto the street and leaving a bloody trail behind him. He didn’t move. Alex ducked out of sight.

Cars were burning. Buses were blown in half. People were running for their lives from…

From what?

WHABOOM!

An abandoned ambulance exploded thirty feet from the hot dog stand that Alex was hiding behind, and through the smoke he could make out a light haze that seemed to lead back to somewhere high above him. Tracing the haze, he finally saw what the people were running from.

Ponies. Millions of them. Some dark as night, others brighter than day. All of them looked pissed.

And they were all converging on the square.

A bolt of light zipped past Alex’s head, and he saw that a pony had just climbed out of the broken Burger King window, his eyes red with hate. It was clear that these were no regular ponies, and definitely not the kind Alex had seen in Western films. These things were like little cartoonish killing machines, intent on massacring the fleeing refugees in Times Square.

Alex ran for his life down the street, avoiding blasts and tongues of fire until finally he saw an open door and made a beeline for it. At last he was indoors, away from the fire, and he shut the door and barred it with a broken lamp.

He was in a lobby that looked as though it had just survived an earthquake. Debris was scattered everywhere, and in the midst of the rubble, Alex caught sight of a flickering TV on a desk. Ignoring the booming noises coming from outside, he made his way toward the television and slapped it, trying to get the fuzziness out of the picture. Moving scraps of metal and Sheetrock away from the set, Alex let loose a breath of success as the screen cleared up, showing a female reporter at her desk, her face grim.

“If you’re just joining us, it seems that the United States is under attack by an unknown enemy. Reports are coming in from all over the country of creatures destroying cities and killing civilians. Details are limited at this point, as we have lost contact with our head reporter in Manhattan. Wait, stand by…we seem to be having a probl—”

And then the screen went back to fuzz and snow. The transmission had been cut. Alex had his suspicions as to why.

The news channel he’d been watching was NBC. He changed the channel only to find more static, until he got to FOX News, where the screen showed Manhattan in flames. The story was the same. The country was under attack.

By ponies.