The GLUE Commandos were valiantly shooting at the Equestrians—who had, as usual, completely used up all of their Newfoal meat shields—from behind their shields, despite the disappearance of their Squad Leader, Agent Tristan Irving. Spells and bullets were flying in the air.

Just when one would think that all this had finally become Hell on Earth, an unspeakable abomination broke through the ceiling and attacked all those involved in the battle that it was intruding upon.

The clash that followed was short. The only reason the Thing wasn't immediately victorious was because of the extensive usage, by both human and pony forces, of fire and electricity. But, although they all fought savagely, there were no survivors.

None that were human or equine, that is.

+++ +++ +++ (HA-HA) Twenty-Eight Months Later (HA-HA) +++ +++ +++

August/██/0003 AO (After Outbreak)

The world had been reduced to hopeless anarchy. There were no governments anymore, just whackjobs who commanded other whackjobs. Everyone, and everypony, now just did whatever they wanted to do, whenever they wanted to. The universal creed was basically, "Do whatever the fuck you will do as yourself, until those Things get you, and you do whatever the fuck Things do when they're not assimilating. And when those goddamned Things are assimilating too, bitch!"

Equestria was in ruins, Celestia had actually established several "camps" in an idiotic attempt too weed out the Things' imitations. All her actions truly accomplished was, in fact, the acceleration of the utter meltdown of social order. In both Equestria and what was still outside the Barrier as Earth.

But then again, the Barrier didn't mean shit to the Thing. All it took was a trickling minority of infected ponies and the Thing was able to spread itself both within and outside of the Barrier.

Yet rumor had it that actually wasn't Celestia's final acts of misanthropy and discrimination that truly broke all hope for Equestria and their PER goons. No, what really broke them had been when Fluttershy had been revealed to be one of the Thing's many Imitations of the creatures that it had assimilated.

Apparently the Thing ended up assimilating all of Ponyville after it was discovered.

Thanks to that single incident, the once utterly self-righteous fanatics of the Ponification for Earth's Rebirth movement were now reduced to little more that a bunch of raving, idiotic paranoid whackjobs who ran around, looking for Things in disguise.

But, with their methods being that they killed any human or pony they came across while screaming "You have two seconds to prove that you're human/a pony!" at the top of their lungs, they obviously never truly accomplished anything beyond a one-hundred percent absolute zero.

This was indeed the End of Humanity, but it wasn't the Neo-Equestria that Celestia had obviously been seeking, no, this was an Age of Contagion, an Age of Pestilence, this was a time of The Ultimate in Alien Terror, this was an era in which Man is the Warmest Place for the enemy to Hide, this was then Thing's takeover of Earth. It—W̵e͟͠͡ ̢͡h̸͢͝a̵͡v́̕͟è̢ ͏f̶̛͘i͜͡n̷̶̕á̢̨lĺ̕y̷̢ ̵͝w̵̵on.̀

Author's Note

And Fin!

I am now, at long last, finally done with this story.

What's next? Why next, I'll be returning to The Conversion Bureau: Voracious as well as working on that one story I've been teasing in my Authors Notes.