Legends

Chapters

LEGENDS
“I did something dumb! You ready for our extraction?”
“Don’t ancient master races ever build anything small?”
“And to the dust we shall return.”
“Spartans never die.”
WARLOCK
LEGENDARY

LEGENDS

By PseudoFiction

In the pale moonlight all Ishmir could make out where the tree trunks a few meters in front of his face. And somehow, with everything exploding around him that was kind of a comfort.

The woods of Onyx were sparse with whole stretches where the undergrowth did not grow. Now for Ishmir that was a double edged sword, because on the one hand it meant he could move fast. On the other, it meant his pursuers could keep up easily.

Stun rounds thudded out of the drill instructor’s assault rifle and smashed into a tree to Ishmir’s right. The boy caught a branch on his left and hooked in the opposite direction of splintered bark. He wasn’t sure how or why his pursuer could miss at this range. Perhaps it was the poor light, or then perhaps it was the bulky armor making the shooter impervious to all forms of attack.

“No fair, no fair, no fair, no fair!” Ishmir screamed as he dove behind a cluster of roots. Bark and wood were blasted off his cover mere millimeters beside his head forcing the boy to cower.

It really was no fair, considering the drill instructors were all armored up and carrying assault rifles with stun ammunition. All Ishmir had were his soggy PT fatigues. His fatigues and a prayer.

“Ben!” Ishmir hissed between the ‘braaap’ of gunfire echoing through the woods. This burst was more muted, likely another one of the DI’s had spotted other trainee Spartan-3’s scurrying about the woods.

As the night went on this was becoming less of a training exercise and more of a slaughter.

“Ben! Where the hell are you?”

Ishmir scrambled to break cover but collided with something hard and heavy. The collision threw the gangly ten-year-old back a few paces and Ishmir found himself face to face with the drill instructor who had been hounding him for the better part of fifteen minutes.

The drill instructor – or more commonly known as DI by those they trained – was hulked out in muscular armored plates black as night. Ishmir recognized the armor configuration as that typically worn by marines who inserted into active warzones conveniently packaged in their own coffins.

Aside from the ODST armor he didn’t recognize the assault rifle aside from it being a bog standard MA5B, the bread and butter of the UNSC armed forces. But that was because he usually observed the weapon from behind while shouldering it on the range. To have the barrel squarely trained on his face was a new angle of view for Ishmir.

He immediately put his hands up, for whatever good that was going to do. The DI had the boy dead-to-rights. There was no walking out of this without a limp. He was going to be shot up, yelled at and left in the forest while the DI went to work hunting down and gunning down the other Spartan trainees.

Unless of course Ishmir’s original plan succeeded. Which it did.

A light figure dwarfed by the hulking drill instructor fell from the forest canopy and landed right on the man’s shoulders. In one hand the jumper had a rock the size of his fist and he didn’t hesitate to use it.

The stone cracked against the DI’s helmet twice, hard enough to crack the visor and dent the armor. He dropped his assault rifle and went to grab his attacker, but it was all too little too late.

Marko tore the DI’s helmet off and whacked him one last time for good measure. The drill instructor crumpled like his limbs had turned to jelly, leaving just the two kids standing over him.

“Boo-yah, bitch!” Marko whooped, dropping the rock he’d brained the DI with in the moss. His smile shone in the moonlight as he looked up to see Ishmir approach. “Who the fuck is Ben?”

“You know that porky guy in team Scimitar? The one who’s always whining?” Ishmir asked.

“Oh, yeah. That guy. I’m surprised he hasn’t washed out yet.”

“Well I figured the DI would be more inclined to walk into your ambush if he thought it was just Ben out here with me. If I had called out to you he would have been more cautious and he might have spotted you in the trees.” Ishmir grinned and pointed up to the thick branch Marko had been hanging from for the past hour as Ishmir baited their prey into the trap.

Ishmir noted Marko was wearing a very impressed expression. “That is really fuckin’ smart.”

“I have my moments.”

The trainee Spartans fell on the unconscious drill instructor and stripped him down to his skivvies. Stripping the dazed man down to his fatigues would have been sufficient if the situation called for more conservative measures, but the duo had some time to spare so they initiated humiliation tactics. After all the DI’s had been humiliating the Gamma Company recruits for the past two hours non-stop. A little payback was definitely in order.

Chucking the trainer’s fatigues off into the night, Ishmir flexed his arm and tested his mobility. The young duo had divided the DI’s weaponry and armor among themselves. Ishmir carried the pistol loaded with stun rounds on his hip and had burdened himself with the armor that fitted over his left shoulder down to his knuckles and more impact plating from the hip down his thigh, shin and ankle. If he assumed a bladed stance while facing any other hostiles out in the dark forest he’d minimize chances of taking a crippling hit. All that and he’d be extremely mobile.

Marko hefted the DI’s torso and groin-armor, as well as the helmet and assault rifle. He was the tank. So while he would light up hostiles will suppressing fire while presenting a target, Ishmir would slip around the side as quickly as possible and move in for the kill… so to speak, since they only had stun ammo.

“Now what?” Marko asked as he cycled a round into the assault rifle’s chamber and looked to his buddy who always had a plan of some kind formulated.

Ishmir gave his fellow Spartan-3 trainee a wicked smile. “Now the fun begins.”

Four years later…

“Hey!”

The word just hung there for an instant as Marko gave his motion sensor a second glance.

“I got something,” the excitement in his hushed voice unmistakable.

“You sure?” Ishmir had just about enough of false alarms brought on by an antsy sociopathic teenager looking to sink his knife into something.

“Pretty sure.”

Ishmir sighed and angled his visor downward a little. This wasn’t good. They were barely a mile into the Everfree Forest. The Covenant patrols were getting bolder, venturing deeper into their territory. They were getting too close to the Castle of the Two Sisters.

Hell, they were already on top of the SCALPEL.

Just a dozen meters from where the invisible Spartan-3 crouched in the thick foliage was the clearing dotted with standing stones among which he’d landed their prototype SCALPEL spaceplane three days ago. Since landing in Equestria – their second visit actually – it had been over forty-eight hours of non-stop operating. There had been the initial Covenant invasion to contend. Then there were the evacuations, keeping the alien hunter-killer teams and airborne strafers off the ponies as they sought out the cover of the crystal mines underneath Canterlot and the Castle of the Two Sisters hidden in the thick Everfree Forest.

And now it was down to holding the line, preventing the scouting parties scouring the forest and routing out the out-gunned inhabitants of Equestria.

The only thing in their favor was the fact no Covenant re-enforcements had shown up. It was still just a single cruiser hanging high above Canterlot, and Ishmir thanked every deity he had knowledge of that the glassing hadn’t started yet. The Covenant were interested in Equestria for some reason, and that was buying the headhunters time.

Here we go again, Ishmir thought to himself, watching the foliage ahead move from side to side as the aliens came traipsing through the night. The two Spartan-3s were very familiar with the subtle aspects of fighting a bigger enemy. They were but two headhunters after all, the guys in white coats having decided long ago ‘2’ was a magic number. And their enemy numbered in the hundreds, perhaps even thousands.

Patience and skill was the key. Flintlock team had been whacking Covenant scouts all across Everfree Forest, had them searching in circles for most of the two days as the headhunters ran around them like children sticking their tongues out and shouting “neener-neener, can’t catch me!”

Unfortunately the Covenant were getting wise and their teams were pushing deeper into the woods.

The foliage burst apart as they came stumbling through. He identified two grunts at the front of the formation, followed by a jackal marksman carrying a pulse carbine and finally a towering brute in light blue armor trailed up the rear, spike rifle hanging casually in one claw. Ishmir counted them out casually, prioritizing in order of threat level and proximity to his position.

“I got eyes on,” Ishmir whispered on the comms. “Four Covvie scout team, little bastards in front, big one in the back. Danger close.”

“Copy that. I’m getting eyes on… nnnnnow.” Marko chuckled. “Hello, Charlie Foxtrot. How are we doing today? What’s the plan?”

“See what they do. Hopefully they turn around and go home.”

“Do you fucking hear yourself sometimes?”

“Yeah…”

The grunts staggered past within arm’s reach of where Ishmir sat. The heavy tanks of pressurized atmosphere they carried slowed the squat little aliens down. They weren’t a species built for traversing rough terrain… or any terrain that wasn’t their homeworld really.

The jackal that passed was more suited to the tight forested quarters. It had a slim figure and a long gait allowing for easy stepping over rocks and roots.

The brute in the rear was almost like the grunts, the enormous ape had a bulky frame and had to turn sideways just to fit between some of the trees.

It stopped right in front of Ishmir, raising a hand and barking its fellows. Following the commands of their squad leader, the aliens stopped as the brute drew a breath, sniffing the air curiously. Ishmir moved ever so slightly, his fist gently curling over the stock of his trusty pistol. He had enough ammunition for a short scrap, and the silencer of his M6C/SOCOM would dampen the noise enough so Covenant re-enforcements wouldn’t come running.

He just hoped Marko would reach for his own silenced weapon instead of lugging a grenade into the fray just for funsies.

The brute’s head turned sharply, but not towards Ishmir or the trees in which he knew Marko was hiding. It looked over to peer through the thinning foliage into the clearing beyond where a SCALPEL sat parked under a simple camouflage net.

“They’ve spotted our ride. Let’s take ‘em,” Marko hissed going for his knife, but catching the movement Ishmir flashed a red acknowledgement light to his HUD.

“No spilling blood. We need to clean this up after we’re done.”

“Oh, drag the fun out of everything why don’t you?” Marko sighed. “Fine. On your go.”

Ishmir moved slowly and smoothly, the wavering surfaces of his SPI armor adjusting. He killed the active camo, each geometric surface of the eldritch suit going from transparent to the painted red he’d worn for much of his Spartan life. His visor glinted gold as the Spartan-3 materialized from the forest and leapt forward with inhuman speed.

“Bust ‘em.”

Ishmir landed on the brute’s back the same time Marko dropped from above. One arm wrapped around the brutes neck and with a pull Flintlock-One turned the alien’s head around with a crack until it rested at an unnatural angle. The creature was dead before it even felt the weight of the headhunter on its back and collapsed.

Marko was death from above for the two grunts in the front at the same time. His hands locked around their breathing apparatus and he squeezed, buckling and breaking the gear from their faces. Pipes hissed and straps snapped before the two aliens dropped sideways and flopped about, gasping and choking on Equestria’s oxygen rich atmosphere.

He darted forward next, catching the jackal before it could react. Wrapping his arms around its neck like Ishmir had done to the brute, Marko turned the marksman’s head right the way around and let the dead body fall from his grip.

Laughing as his smile matched that etched on his domed visor, Marko held up his hand for a high-five with his closest friend. “Fuckers didn’t know what hit ‘em. Top shelf!”

Ishmir didn’t react though. He wasn’t even watching. The other Spartan was looking into the forest the way the Covenant patrol had come.

Eventually a grunt missing the breathing apparatus that should have been stuck to its face bobbed up over Ishmir’s shoulder.

Shaking with every syllable, the grunt’s head and arms wobbled comically as it spoke in a voice suspiciously like Marko’s. “What’s the matter, Ishy? Why are you being such a gwumpy wumpus?”

Ishmir responded by grabbing the dead grunt and tearing it from Marko’s grip. And all he could say for himself was “What?” as he shrugged innocently.

“You have issues,” Ishmir told him, making the other Spartan snigger.

“You’re figuring that out only now?” Adopting a more serious posture to Ishmir’s concerns, he added, “Are you worried about the patrols getting close to the SCALPEL?” Marko took a knee and kept watch while Ishmir took hold of the bodies and dragged them into the thicker foliage.

“There’s that, but the patrols are getting close to the Castle of the Two Sisters too.” He grunted, rolling over the brute before dragging the heavy creature out of sight. “The illusion Celestia put on the castle only hides it from aerial view. If they stumble over it on foot we’re going to have problems.”

“Nothing a proper application of force can’t solve.”

“True,” Ishmir agreed. “But if we get stuck defending our FOB we’ll never be able to engage the offensive.”

“Speaking of which, you think the princesses came up with a plan yet? It’s been a few days.”

“We need solid intel before we assault the Covenant. Unfortunately we’re low tech here. We’re relying on pegasus scouts and runners. This stuff is going to take time. Patience is a virtue.”

“You know who you’re talking to, right?”

“Point taken. But we can’t fuck this up. We’re two Spartans versus a cruiser.”

“We were two Spartans versus an Uneven Elephant once. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Ishmir smiled. “Famous. Last. Words.”

From the sky it was just another stretch of unbroken canopy, invisible to the passing banshees and phantoms. But from the ground, at the eye level of Flintlock and the ponies it was a massive clearing in which a castle stood.

It wasn’t exactly a whole castle, much of the structure seemed to have collapsed and only two towers were left standing on opposite ends. But the front door still worked, the walls stood and the fact it stood on an island surrounded by a wide deep gorge with only one access bridge made it highly defensible.

Also the fact the castle’s remnants were overgrown and looked unlived in would hopefully turn away even the most curious Covenant scout should they happen through and bypass the aerial camouflage enchantment.

Marko and Ishmir crossed the bridge and followed the path right up to the front steps, making sure to announce themselves for the concealed Royal Guard sentries hidden in the bushes.

“Ooh-rah, headhunters,” one of the stallions called.

The other held up a hoof and bumped it against Marko’s armored fist.

Climbing the steps, the headhunters moved into the great hall. The inside of the castle wasn’t much better than the outside. The tapestries were decayed, pillars and door arches moldy and crumbling. The glass in the windows and the ceiling was broken, covered by tarps. Torches were to remain unlit in the interest of stealth and nearly every square inch was occupied by ponies and their belongings.

All of Ponyville had been evacuated to the Castle of the Two Sisters with Princesses Celestia, Luna and Twilight Sparkle, whereas all of Canterlot had gone underground into the crystal mines with Princess Cadance and Prince Shining Armor. Contact between the two refugee camps had been spotty at best, but apparently the ponies in the crystal mines were in a similarly bedraggled state.

Carts and tents formed very rough lines across the space. The ponies who owned them were frazzled, tired with bags under their eyes and generally hopeless looking.

But when they saw the headhunters move through, something sparked in them.

They surged forward, their expressions suddenly brightened and began bombarding the headhunter with questions.

“Are the aliens gone yet?” “Are they close to finding us?” “How many did you send away today?” “Did you find any other ponies?”

The questions turned from curiosity in their contact reports into questions about missing loved ones. And soon not even Marko could deny them answers.

“No, uh… I haven’t seen your daughter,” Marko mumbled trying to move on, but the mare pestering held on to his leg.

“Please, just take another look at the photo one more time. You must have seen her!” the pegasus sobbed.

“My wife was coming home from Canterlot when the fighting started.” A stallion carrying his son on his back levitated a family photo in front of Ishmir. “Have you seen her? She must have made it to Ponyville by now!”

“I’m sure she made it into the crystal mines, sir,” Ishmir offered, but before he could put the stallion at ease he had another picture of a foal, mare or stallion shoved in his visor with pleas to find the missing and possibly dead.

Soon moving without hurting somepony became impossible. But thankfully a voice hollered across the great hall, making the pony mob pause.

“Everypony settle down!”

The crowd parted, but the headhunters could already see over the multicolored sea of heads to spot two ponies striding from the archway between the two thrones at the top of the room.

Twilight Sparkle’s friends Rarity and Applejack were well known in Ponyville. Then again, everypony knew each other in Ponyville. But Twilight’s friends were national heroes and held a special place in all their hearts.

So when Applejack told them to back off, the crowds backed off. The orange coated earth-pony trotted over with a heavy gait, whereas her brilliant white unicorn friend had a daintier stride.

“Everypony, Ah’ know y’all are itchin’ ta’ find ‘yer missing loved ones, but mobbin’ these fellers every time they walk through isn’t helping,” Applejack drawled. “As it is they got their hooves full keepin’ them alien varmints from findin’ us.”

“I don’t have hooves,” Marko mumbled.

“Details,” Ishmir mumbled back.

“Everypony, I have a marvelous idea,” Rarity piped up. “Why don’t we create a board to stick the pictures of everypony who is missing next to the door? That way before Double Tap and Hack-and-Slash go out they’ll have a look at the board and they’ll know the faces to keep an eye out for.”

“Joke’s on her, most of these ponies look the same to me,” Marko whispered before Ishmir shushed him.

The crowd seemed to like that idea and immediately followed Rarity as she led them towards where they would build their ‘missing’ board. As she passed, Ishmir made sure to nod curtly.

“Thanks.”

She winked with a smile. “Any time, Mister Double Tap.”

“Ah’ wonder when she’ll admit that’s not ‘yer real name,” Applejack chuckled, following her friend.

“Not while she’s still dreaming about your pony form,” Marko chuckled, nudging his fellow.

Ishmir shook his head and walked away. “I wish I were old enough to drink profusely.”

Leaving the way Rarity and Applejack had entered, Marko and Ishmir made their way to the west side of the castle. On their way were several more wide halls and chambers housing other ponies. Most of the castle was occupied, with mostly families provided with more private living spaces. But it was still cramped and there weren’t enough beds, couches, cushions or pillows to go around. Some ponies tore up some of the carpets or pulled down banners to act as blankets.

A short flight of spiraling stairs finally brought the Spartans up to the war room. There, three mares and a pegasus stallion in Royal Guard armor stood around the map in the center of the room. Most prominent of the figures was Princess Luna.

Despite not having the same build that commanded immediate attention like her older sister, Princess Luna had picked up a feature from last she was in Canterlot. At the hands of a brute chieftain she now had a spiderweb of scars running across the side of her face. Angry red lines broke up her dark fur, marring what was by all intents and purposes a perfectly pretty alicorn face.

The mauler burns could have been healed with magic of course, and it was still possible to fade the scars away, but Luna had refused. She held on to them, for the time being anyway, as a reminder of how she had been too slow to react on her first near-fatal meeting with the brute chieftain. Her hesitance had nearly cost the life of her sister and she kept the scars to make sure she did not hesitate again.

All of it was trivial of course. Everyone, Princess Celestia included knew it wasn’t Luna’s fault she’d been shot in the face by a brute. It could have happened to anyone.

Celestia’s injuries had healed entirely after nearly twenty-four hours of magical healing. Her scars were invisible as well, returning her clean alabaster sheen to its full glory. Though there was a noticeable tiredness in her eyes, like she hadn’t slept a wink since the Covenant descended.

Even Marko and Ishmir had managed powernaps between engagements. And to their combined surprise, even Twilight Sparkle had been sleeping like a baby whenever she could find the time.

Princess Twilight Sparkle had re-outfitted the gear the Spartans had originally made her to carry ammo. She had streamlined the whole thing, removed some of the excess pockets and pouches so she only carried what she needed herself. She had even sprayed some Royal Guard armor a lavender color to match her coat and inserted it into the rig to provide a little ballistic protection. She had also sprayed her helmet the dark purple to match her mane, but kept the headgear clipped to her homemade armor.

Holstered on her side, right under her wing was her pistol, the very same M6C/SOCOM she had used to kill her first brute. Which was part of the reason Ishmir suspected the alicorn’s makeover. Originally he’d put together the saddle bags for her to carry the Spartans’ ammo and weapons. That way she wouldn’t have to fight.

But now she seemed to be dropping hints that she was ready for combat.

“Ishmir. Marko,” Celestia greeted as she spotted them. “Thank you for coming.”

“Hey, shit-for-brains,” Marko greeted Twilight.

She smiled and greeted him back. “What’s up, ‘ya blank-firing turd-gobbler?”

Marko’s damaging influence had hit the point of no return.

The study in the west tower – the only room with intact windows – had been converted into a war room. The princesses had torn out all the furniture and drapes and placed a round table projecting an interactive map of Equestria in the very center.

The map was especially interesting, as it would change depending on what the scouts Celestia had sent to spy on the Covenant reported back with. Hovering over Canterlot was the miniature representation of the Covenant cruiser. Ponyville lay in ruins with stacks of smoke rising from the burnt out orchards skirting the town.

There were even miniature Covenant figures placed on the board. They seemed mostly concentrated on the Canterlot skydocks and in Ponyville where some sort of command center had been erected.

Covenant troops hadn’t spread as far beyond the two areas. There were other cities in Equestria, those closest to the theatre were being bolstered by Royal Guard and evacuated to the farther corners of Equestria. But it seemed the Covenant weren’t interested in pursuing them.

And the headhunters finally found out why when they looked at the map for the first time that day. A scout must have come in with new intel because there was a big new player on the board.

It was stampeding around the area designated Ghastly Gorge. The whole terrain had changed around it, the narrow winding gorge known for tight turns had turned into a crater. And flailing about in the middle of it was a siege tower. It had a bulbous top with open bays around the mid-section giving way to the sleek armor forming a shell down to the tapered point at the bottom. The whole thing had the shape of a three-limbed squid, the three enormous arms seemingly holding the impossible moving structure up flailing to turn rock and earth to dust as it excavated deeper into the earth.

The tower was designated by the UNSC as a Type-55 Ultra-Heavy Siege Tower. Or “Kraken” for short.

The headhunters had only ever seen one in action once, and that had been from a very long distance away. The only way to put it down had been to call in orbital support and put a MAC round through the thing. Obviously not an option in Equestria.

Marko knelt by the map and looked the Kraken head on. “Now that’s a kraken development.”

Ishmir groaned. “Oh, God. Not again.” Luna gave him an inquisitive tip of her head and Ishmir explained; “The last time we saw a Kraken it was nothing but puns out of his mouth for a week.”

“Hey, it’s better than all these horse puns kraken my brain.”

As the two older princesses stared like they didn’t get it, Twilight cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah, this will get fucking annoying quick.”

“I find focusing on the task at hand helps block him out,” Ishmir explained with a chuckle.

Pointing at the Kraken, Luna asked, “You have seen one of these before, yes? How do we defeat it?”

Ishmir shrugged resting his hands on belt and looking at the miniature siege tower pensively. “Through superior firepower we don’t have access to right now. We’re going to have to wing it.” Pausing, he glanced at the pegasus, then at the winged princesses. “Uh… no pun intended.”

“What are the structure’s offensive and defensive capabilities?” Celestia asked the Royal Guard whose expression hadn’t changed the entire conversation.

“From what we saw, your highness, the limbs can deal excessive damage to ground based troops and fortifications,” the pegasus guard reported. “There are also several ranged emplacements dotted around the main deck.”

“Shades,” Ishmir corrected. “Rapid fire plasma turrets.”

“Indeed. Any pegasus approaching from air would be shredded.”

“Well good thing we don’t plan flying in on the back of a pegasus,” Ishmir offered before looking at Celestia. “Princess, we’ll blow the dust off the SCALPEL. Marko and I can fly in and take out the turrets. Marko takes the guns, I’ll stay in the SCALPEL and try to thin any air support they have. Once the sky is ours you can roll in an assault.”

“I’m going with you of course,” Twilight Sparkle piped up.

That took everyone in the room by surprise. Though Luna and Celestia said nothing, Ishmir was plenty verbal about the suggestion.

“It would be better if you sat this one out, Warlock,” he argued gently. “I’ll be flying the SCALPEL, and Marko will be conducting a dynamic firefight. There’s not much for you to do.”

“I can watch Marko’s back. He’ll need an additional shooter,” Twilight countered, then looked to the olive green headhunter. “I can shoot and project a shield at the same time as well. I’ll be fine.”

Marko shrugged. “She ain’t wrong. I’ll be juggling a lot of moving parts down there. I could use an extra hand… or hoof. Whatever.”

Ishmir was still shaking his head and Celestia interjected. Lowering her head to her former student, the princess asked, “Are you sure, Twilight Sparkle? I am in agreement with Spartan Ishmir. This will be an extremely dangerous task.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t go?”

“I’m saying I trust you to make an educated decision for yourself, as you always do,” Celestia corrected. “I merely want to stress that this will be a dangerous undertaking.”

Twilight grinned and gave a firm nod. “I understand fully, princess.”

Lifting her gaze, Celestia said, “The reason we are in this mess in the first place is because I did not heed the advice of Princess Twilight Sparkle. It is a mistake I will not make again. If she says she can contribute to the success of this mission then I will support her. But ultimately this is your operation, Spartans. I will leave it up to you.”

Ishmir said nothing, merely angling his visor slightly towards Marko. Of course his buddy was buzzing.

“Fuck yeah,” Marko whooped. “C’mon, Warlock. Let’s go conduct your very first firefight.”

Ishmir sighed as Twilight bounced over to retake her place in Flintlock team. “Fine, but you’ll need something other than that pistol,” he said.

“I’ll hook her up with something,” Marko assured.

Twilight smiled broadly, levitating her helmet onto her head. “This is going to work out great. We’ll have the air defenses down in no time. Then we can fuck the Covenant up with a combined push.”

“Sounds good. We’d better get kraken.”

Twilight Sparkle froze, then groaned and rubbed the bridge of her nose with a hoof. “Me and my big mouth.”

“I did something dumb! You ready for our extraction?”

While Ishmir busied himself pulling the camouflage off the SCALPEL and running detailed visual checks, Marko was taping together improvised demolition charges. They had brought quite an arsenal with them from Reach and their supplies of explosives and ammo hadn’t run dry yet.

That just left Twilight Sparkle to prepare her own gear. She had requisitioned a set of armored booties for on her hooves and had added a sleek ballistic collar to her tac-vest just in case. Now while they were preparing for their initial assault on the Covenant Kraken, she laid out a mat and disassembled her pistol. All the pieces were lined up and organized with obsessive tidiness and Twilight took each piece one by one, cleaned it if it needed cleaning and oiled it if it needed oiling.

Since killing her first brute and insisting on holding on to the weapon with which she had done it, Marko in turn insisted she at least learn how to use and maintain the M6C/SOCOM “Automag”.

For example, she learned it was an offspring of the M6C magnum, modified for covert operations with built in tactical optics and a silencer. She learned even though the standard M6C ammunition would work, the Automag reached its optimal killing potential when chambering 12.7x40mm M228 Semi-Armor-Piercing High-Penetration rounds. Twelve per magazine to be exact.

She even learned the weight in her telekinetic grip when it was loaded and unloaded, the tiny variations in the weight even told her how many rounds were left in the magazine.

As Marko said, once Twilight mastered it the M6C/SOCOM wasn’t just a gun anymore. It had become a part of her.

As quickly as she took it apart with the purple glow of her magic, Twilight Sparkle re-assembled the pistol, slotted one of the mags in place and chambered a round before clicking it into the holster under her wing.

She still needed a primary weapon though, something with a little more punch. So she levitated what Marko had assigned her out of one of their duffel bags.

Ishmir descended from the SCALPEL cockpit and dusted off his gauntlets, approaching to see how she was doing. “Did Marko give you a primary weapon yet?” he asked.

Excitedly Twilight turned with a smile, levitating the rifle in front of her. The poor pony looked ridiculous hefting an SRS99 sniper rifle that was longer than she was. Marko certainly had a sense of humor.

“Right.” Taking the weapon from the confused princess, Ishmir knelt by the duffel bag and replaced it with something a little more her size. “Try this instead.”

The MA5C was the UNSC armed forces bread and butter. It was as much a part of the corps as boots, jeeps and tasteless coffee. It was a weapon of modest size, fired a hefty caliber that could punch holes through a brute and was accurate enough up to two-hundred meters. Practical over fashionable, the assault rifle suited Twilight Sparkle down to the ground.

At least until she saw what Marko’s customary shotgun could do to Covenant. Ishmir was sure she was likely to ask for an M90 next.

Twilight took to the MA5C like a duck to water. She had the magazine in place and the system cycled with barely any instruction. As for taking it apart and cleaning it, like with her pistol Twilight turned out to be a quick study. Ishmir only had to correct a few mistakes she made putting it back together again, but after that she was field stripping, racking, tapping and sighting targets like a Spartan.

Smiling at the rifle cradled across her chest, Twilight looked like she wanted to say something for a long time. Eventually she looked up and spat it out. “Thanks Ishmir.”

“For what?” the headhunter asked rising to his feet.

“For everything. For coming back to Equestria. For helping, even though you really don’t have to.”

“Thank me when we kick the Covenant off your planet.”

Twilight nodded. “I will. But just in case something happens to me before then…”

“Hey,” Ishmir knelt again and put his visor close to Twilight’s face. “Nothing is going to happen to you. You got Marko watching your back on the ground and I’ll be keeping my eye on you from the air.”

“I know. Just…” she slowly leaned over and put a small kiss on the side of Ishmir’s helmet. “I want you to know I’m grateful. No matter what happens. No matter how this goes.”

He couldn’t really blame the girl for wanting to make sure everything was in order before going into combat. Ishmir had to admit there had been a few times he’d been in a fight and was pretty sure he wouldn’t be going home.

“You girls finished gossiping?” Marko’s coarse tone cut right through the conversation.

Looking up, Ishmir and Twilight saw their olive clad compatriot swagger up, one shotgun hefted over his shoulder and demolition packs attached to various hard-points on his armor. He was like a walking IED ready to rain a hellstorm of hate and discontent on anything that stood in his path.

“I dunno about you,” the walking explosive hazard said, “but I’m ready to get some killing done.”

The inertia dampeners made the neck-snapping acceleration into the air feel like nothing more than a light vibration of the SCALPEL airframe. Twilight Sparkle wouldn’t have known she was even moving weren’t it for the landscape zooming by the sealed canopy.

She was in the rear seat on Marko’s lap just like their last flight. Ishmir was in the pilot seat, expertly manipulating the nimble aircraft to his will. But even so, Twilight couldn’t help feel a little unsafe, considering their sheer speed and the tightness of their corners curling around tall trees and mountainsides.

Even though it stood many kilometers away, the smoking remains of Canterlot on the horizon glode smoothly by until Twilight Sparkle had to crane her head just to spot the capitol.

“It’s okay to be scared,” Marko said so suddenly, and for a moment Twilight Sparkle had no idea why he’d spoken.

Then she realized she’d been nervously tapping her hoof on his armored knee with irritating persistence.

The alicorn quickly shook her head. “I’m not scared,” she answered almost too quickly. Marko just shrugged though.

“I didn’t say you were. I’m just saying it’s okay.”

Twilight huffed. “You never get scared.”

“Actually I do. I always get scared in a fight.”

“You do?”

“Yup. Even Ishmir does.” Marko patted the back of Ishmir’s seat twice. “What did Lieutenant Ambrose and Chief Mendez say to us about fear, Ishy?”

The other headhunter didn’t take his eyes off what he was doing as he answered. “Don’t let your fear of what could happen make nothing happen.”

“The worst decision you can make in a firefight is no decision.” Marko let that sink in a moment, then added, “Stay close. Watch my back. And if it moves; fuck it up.”

Twilight nodded firmly. “Got it.”

Leaning over to one side she could peek around the back of Ishmir’s seat. She couldn’t see the Spartan very well, but she could see where they were going.

Ghastly Gorge wasn’t just a winding gorge of grey rock anymore. It was a canyon. Levelled out by the Covenant siege tower, the canyon featured steep sides almost a kilometer in diameter. The original gorge snaked out one end towards the north-west, and out the other end to the south as well. But at the heart of it now was a bowl of what looked to be water and pebbles the size of houses.

And there in the midst of it, grinding earth to dust and shifting the rubble aside to burrow itself deeper was the Kraken.

As per the namesake, the mechanical beast was quite like an enormous squid – and if any scholars would disagree they couldn’t deny it still looked like a tick stuck on the face of Equestria. Purple running lights pulsed across the craft as it rocked gently from side to side like a skyscraper veering with the wind.

It disappeared under them as the SCALPEL overshot. Ishmir immediately rolled them to one side and orbited high above the craft. Through the gaping bay doors it was possible to see the currying of aliens clambering for the fixed gun emplacements and weapon racks erected on the main deck.

“They’ve spotted us,” Ishmir noted with a casual glance downward.

Marko gave the thermal scopes a glance and confirmed hot-spots forming around some of the plasma cannons. They were heating up to repel the fighter. But the Covenant would have to be fast to keep up with Ishmir’s flying.

He tightened their roll and peeled out of orbit, nosing the SCALPEL straight at the Kraken. In response a trio of banshees shot up from the deck, but their formation was scattered. Ishmir pushed them straight through the midst while spooling the forward facing machine guns.

“Guns-guns-guns,” Ishmir causally reported as he squeezed the trigger and rolled the SCALPEL at the same time.

The guns roared and raked bullets across the hull of the Kraken. He tweaked the pedals and nosed his shots across the deck, perforating several Covenant infantry before he overshot the target. The fighter screamed past the wobbling siege tower with only meters to spare before Ishmir rolled them upright and pulled out of the dive.

They swooped low, just over the three thrashing limbs grinding up the earth underneath. As he ascended them back to deck-level with the Kraken he eased off the throttle. The thrusters vectored, widening until the VTOL engines took over. The thrusters by the sides of the cockpit angled downward and ignited with similar nacelles flexing to life near the tail end of the craft.

The transition from flight to vertical hover was the kind of smooth that would have DC-77 pelican pilots drooling with envy. Marko barely noticed until he realized the scenery wasn’t a blur. Ishmir had them lined up just outside the Kraken.

Plasma crisscrossed the nose of the craft as Ishmir opened up with the chain guns again. This time he hit more than on his first pass. He took care to aim, swiveling as he did, punching grunts out of the shade turrets and turning the scattering infantry to paint. While he did he edged them into the shadow of the Kraken’s towering canopy.

“How will we get down there?” Twilight asked as Ishmir brought them in, slow but steady.

“Feet first!” Marko shouted. “Ish?”

“Stand by!”

Ishmir hit a release lever over his head and the cockpit canopy parted down the middle, the rear half sliding backward with the front part covering him sliding forward. With the canopy out of the way, Marko immediately stood in his seat.

With Twilight Sparkle cradled in the crook of his arm, the headhunter swung his legs out of the cockpit and caught the edge with one hand, planting his boots on the side of the airframe. Twilight couldn’t help look down at the dizzying height of the ground very far below.

Then the Kraken’s main deck slid into place as Ishmir brought them in.

“Ready!?” Ishmir cried over his shoulder.

“Ready for hell!”

“Drop in three…”

The guns roared again, cutting a brute in half and forcing the aliens under it to scatter.

“Two…”

Ishmir swiveled to one side and tore through the exposed flank of a shade turret, killing the grunt inside.

“One…”

Strafing sideways, Ishmir banked for his exit, lowering as best he could to the deck.

“Drop-drop-drop!”

Marko’s gauntlet opened and he slipped from the SCALPEL. A moment later both he and Twilight fell free, soaring straight down to the deck. The world moved in slow motion as Ishmir banked on hard, growing the gap between them. Twilight slipped from Marko’s grip as he straightened out, folding his arms over his chest. The alicorn immediately spread her wings, drifting slightly out of his flight path and slowing her descent slightly.

When she hit the deck, her armored hooves sparked and she curled into a ball, rolling with the sideways momentum carried over from the SCALPEL. Ishmir had already nosed the fighter craft out of the Kraken and took off with a quick burn of the main engines.

Sliding to a halt on her side Twilight saw Marko had hit in a similar fashion. Only when he curled, he rolled over and landed on his feet with enough orientation to pull his shotgun off his back with a single clean draw and unload the first shell into a nearby jackal.

Her erratic heartbeat was numb. She was pretty sure she wasn’t even breathing anymore. There was no pain, no joy… just that razor-edged focus she descended into whenever she started a new book or study.

Scrambling to her hooves Twilight Sparkle whipped around and levitated her assault rifle forward, tweaking the trigger and holding on tight. She raked an accurate five round burst from the mid-riff up across the chest of a grunt forcing it to topple backwards over the open side of the Kraken. By the time the alien had vanished from sight she had turned and emptied the magazine into some other aliens that dove down a ramp leading below deck for cover.

Holding her rifle across her chest, Twilight’s finer tendrils of telekinesis dumped the empty magazine and brought a fully loaded one from one of the pouches on her tac-vest. At the same time she looked back and levitated a grenade from the back of Marko’s belt while he put rounds into another gaggle of fleeing aliens.

“Throwing a grenade!” she cried, priming the device and throwing it. Though ‘throw’ was perhaps overstating it.

The purple glow of her magic didn’t fade until the grenade was position right above the ramp, so technically she dropped it on top of the aliens below. The device detonated with a thump, muting the sound of her racking her assault rifle, and the force of the detonation, and the follow-up explosions of undetonated plasma grenades, threw several dead aliens into the air.

One jackal did a rag-doll cartwheel into the side of one of the shade turrets, panicking the grunt at the controls. Instead of turning the device and hosing the duo the alien jumped from the turret and into Twilight Sparkle’s sights.

She put it down with a trio of rounds to the side of the head.

“Shade down on this side!” Twilight reported putting down another grunt as it made a run for the empty turret.

At the same time Marko leaned backwards as a burst of plasma from another shade skimmed his shields. “Push on your side! Go!”

Her hooves only skidded a few millimeters before she found enough purchase to throw herself into an assaulting sprint. She only deviated when she spotted a flash of plasma coming her way, letting the bolts sizzle into the deck or weapon crates littered across the space. Her MA5C remained level as she ran and fired bursts on the move.

A jackal’s head snapped backwards and it rolled down a ramp. Another grunt followed as it went to check on its superior. Finally Twilight closed the gap between her and the shade turret and she leapt forward.

The turrets were situated on the edges of the deck, each standing on a little dais to give it a little more elevation. Oval shaped energy shields gave the device some cover, while the operator in the hot seat relied on the spherical hull of the device for the most protection.

Despite the exposed sides and the risk of getting showered by the other turrets, Twilight Sparkle either didn’t know or didn’t care as she landed in the pilot seat of the shade.

Her hooves immediately found the control yolk and she swiveled the long forward facing plasma guns to a squad of Covenant rapid responders ascending to the main deck. It seemed to be a squad of mostly brutes supported by some jackals with the circular shields. They would really mess with Flintlock’s momentum.

Until Twilight found the trigger.

Each belch of plasma caused the turret to slightly kick and buck in its anti-grav moorings. But her aim remained mechanical and true as she hosed the re-enforcements with plasma. Shields and armor systems exploded out of existence along with the agonized screams of the unsuspecting aliens. Several of the brutes dove away, their fur singed or burning. The jackals on the other hand disappeared in the opening salvo, turned to vapor or sticky piles of charred flesh.

“How’s Warlock doing down there?” Ishmir asked on coms just as the SCALPEL shot past their position. It was followed quickly by a trio of banshees struggling to keep up with the loops Ishmir was flying around them.

“You should see her, Ish!” Marko whooped as he stuck his first demo-pack to the back of the turret, Twilight Sparkle still pounding volley after volley into the Covenant. “She’s a fuckin’ machine!”

She leapt from the turret as Marko primed the explosives and readied her assault rifle again. There was a lull in the fight, but it was only brief. And by the time Twilight had exchanged a glance with Marko the plasma was flying again. Two of the brutes who had been forced into cover before they popped like corn on an open fire leveled their weapons and opened fire. One plasma rifle hummed and the other spike-rifle barked sending a mixture of solid and energy based projectiles shooting overhead.

Twilight Sparkle and Marko rushed forward without thinking twice. Marko’s personal shield flashed as several plasma bolts evaporated against the golden barrier. Twilight had erected a shield for herself as well, the spike projectiles flattening against it with each impact only having a slight ripple effect across the purple barrier.

Both of them leapt from the dais the shade was perched on and soared right at their targets. Twilight was shooting as she flared her wings and crashed hooves first into the first brute with the spiker. She wasn’t impact, but the downward force of her wings propelling her forward was enough to flatten the alien under her. Flat on its back the brute was then finished off with a half-a-dozen assault rifle bullets to the face at point-blank range.

Marko had sheer mass on his side with his collision with the other brute. He crushed it into the deck and swiftly cracked the stock of his shotgun into its face. Teeth splintered and the solid mandible bone snapped like a twig before Marko followed up with several more strikes to cave in the creature’s face and end it with an executing shot to the throat.

Glancing over his shoulder and calculating the distance between them and the shade, Marko muttered; “clear!” His suit sent a detonation signal to the primed explosives a moment later and the first shade disappeared into a cloud of fire and smoke. Debris pinged off the deck beside them as the duo rose for the next round.

One turret down. Marko and Warlock reloaded and got back to work.

Ishmir gunned it, maneuvering aggressively – jinking up and down, performing quarter rolls, dropping to the deck and pulling up at the last instant to avoid crashing headlong into a wall. They weren’t the type of aerial moves reserved for a casual cruise. With the three banshees persisting on his tail, and the other two ahead lined into his sights the aggressive corners and rolls were a necessity.

The targeting reticles lined up in his HUD went green as he closed on the tails of his prey and a tone rang through the cockpit. He immediately thumbed the missile controls and the aircraft responded with a satisfying ‘thunk-thunk!’

Two missiles dropped from the SCALPEL’s belly, each propulsion unit igniting a second later to push the projectiles one after the other faster than the fighter travelled. The white missiles streaked, curling to track the first banshee before the first hit.

An explosion bloomed off the port side of the banshee, a film of energy shielding separating the detonation from the hull by a few millimeters. The banshee was plucked out of the air by the force, tumbling sideways as the shields died and the second missile hit it head-on.

The craft disappeared into a cloud of fire and debris as Ishmir punched past the spiraling wreckage to close the gap on the second enemy fighter. He squeezed the yolk trigger when the cannon reticule lit up red and let a hail of armor piercing rounds fly.

The banshee’s shields – already weakened by the close proximity loss of its wingman – popped out of existence and the hail of machine gun fire tore through the alien fuselage. It bloomed into a fireball a moment later and Ishmir was pretty sure he saw the remnants of the brute pilot streak screaming past his cockpit.

A volley of return fire caught his attention, dozens of plasma bolts splashing over his starboard wing. The SCALPEL’s own shields flickered from a hail of debris peppering the airframe as well as volleys of plasma trying to box Ishmir in. He rolled a quart and pulled hard into a tight turn to try and throw his pursuers off. They tracked through and kept up with his movements.

That was until Ishmir punched the angel-wings countermeasures.

Banshee pilots didn’t have a glass canopy like Ishmir had. He would know, he’d flown banshees himself on some occasions. And he knew the alien pilots relied entirely on sensors to fly and track targets without crashing into the ground or being blown away. So he launched several volleys of flares that burned with the intensity of flashbang grenades.

Aptly named, the countermeasures threw the flares into a horizontal and downward pattern so that with the light and the smoke it looked like the fighter had just sprouted a set of angel’s wings. Wings that burned so bright it washed out the banshee flight monitors for a moment.

Just a few seconds to be exact, more than enough time for Ishmir to yank the throttle back and hit the air brakes.

Rolling, Ishmir looked up in time to see the three banshees overshoot him, missing his hull by mere centimeters. And before the brutes inside could have figured out what he was doing, Ishmir was behind them, gunning it to match their speed.

He was spamming them with a hail of cannon fire and had launched three air-to-air-missiles before the banshees could maneuver.

A trio of explosions lit up the sky, downing two of the banshees before the last led Ishmir into a dive. Limping on flickering engines the banshee made for the deck, but only halfway there a missile caught up with it and put the craft out of its misery.

However, when pulling up, Ishmir felt his eyes widen.

A shadow slid over the canopy first, and then one of the Kraken’s rock crushing limbs came into view, bearing down on the SCALPEL.

“Oh, not good!”

He rolled and dropped under before expertly righting the fighter and pulling up before he pancaked into a cluster of boulders. The Kraken’s mechanical tentacle connected with the ground, spraying debris and dust in Ishmir’s wake as he throttled full tilt towards clearer skies. But as he did several more patrolling banshees slid into view. Two more dropped onto the scopes on his tail.

As quickly as he could take out Covenant air defenses, more seemed to show up for every few he destroyed.

Throttling into the next scrap, Ishmir heard Twilight Sparkle’s voice on the squad-comm.

“Turrets are down. We’re just mopping up the infantry now,” she said between audible bursts of assault rifle fire in her mic.

“Copy that, Warlock. Good job.” Ishmir quickly switched out channels to not to spam comms between Marko and Twilight. “Flintlock-One to Solar Flare-Actual. Anti-air defenses are down, but I’ve got major aerial resistance in the area. I advise you wait one until I can thin out the banshees, how copy?”

Princess Celestia’s response was immediate and resolute. “Your advice has been noted, Spartan Ishmir. Prepare for immediate support.”

Ishmir rolled his eyes. “Of course my advice is simply ‘noted.’ Stubborn freakin’ princesses.”

Ishmir had just lined up his next targets when a pair of energy lances sliced through the banshee and its wingman. One lance was of golden sunlight, the other of pale night-sky coloured magic. Chasing the beams of energy and swooping under the spiralling wrecks of the alien fighters were two figures.

Princesses Celestia and Luna swiped across the SCALPEL’s nose and dove wings folded towards the Kraken.

Checking his scopes, Ishmir spotted two of the three banshee’s on his tail peel away. The Spartan wasted no time in throwing the SCALPEL into a tight turn to engage them.

Ahead the princesses’ wings spread and the pulled out of their dive to circle and survey the Kraken. The banshees tracked and unloaded bursts of plasma fire. But the alicorns proved to be nimble fliers, pulling into dives and turns that would shear even the SCALPEL in two.

As if reading Ishmir’s mind, the princesses stuck together and doubled back, forcing their pursuers to roll and boost to catch up. But by then Ishmir was on a perpendicular intercept course and he let a few hundred armor-piercing rounds fly.

The banshee shields flashed out of existence and the two fighters dropped out of the sky, not even exploding until they hit the ground.

The pedals under Ishmir’s feet rattled as a volley of plasma hit his tail rudders. Pulling up sharply, Ishmir maxed out the throttle, swooping dangerously through the open bays of the Kraken. The moment he passed out the other side he eased off and pulled a tight turn, glancing back in time to see the banshee had tried to follow.

One of the craft’s stubby wings caught on one of the decks as it tried to exit and the small fighter turned into a burning pinwheel.

His tail clear for the moment, Ishmir spotted several more contacts closing in on radar. Judging by their heading they were a wave of re-enforcements deployed from the carrier.

“Re-enforcements incoming,” he reported. “I’ll keep the fighters off you. You focus on the Kraken.”

He spotted Celestia look past one of her wings and nod. “Affirmative. Stay close, sister.”

“I am on your wing.”

Following her older sister closely, Luna dove after Celestia towards the base of the Kraken where the three mechanical tentacles met. Ishmir in the meantime pulled up and darted to meet the banshees head-on, guns blazing and the targeting computer struggling to keep up as he spammed the enemy with missiles.

Meanwhile the princesses found a section of hull and laid into it with everything they had. Celestia’s face was a mask of motivation and strife as she focused the majority of her energy into a single focused attack. A wide beam of golden light was joined by the crackling energy bands of Luna’s magic and they struck a single point at the Kraken’s base.

The light was so bright it washed out Celestia’s vision for a moment. But when she refocused she saw the Kraken’s hull shielding splash and ripple as the alicorn relentlessly assaulted it.

A stream of plasma bolts cut past Celestia and hit the side of the Kraken. She didn’t look so not to avert her focused aim, but she shifted her eyes just enough to catch the sight of a banshee lining up on them. It must have slipped past Ishmir’s assault… but only for a moment.

An explosion bloomed off the side of the banshee, throwing it off course before it was perforated by focused machine gun fire. The SCALPEL fighter slashed by moments later with a pair of banshees close on Ishmir’s tail.

Celestia focused on her job as Ishmir pulled out of his steep dive, the remnants of the banshee fighters on his tail. He glanced over each shoulder as he spun into a tight slalom. The two banshees tracked and persisted, firing bursts from the main plasma cannons that flashed over Ishmir’s wings.

No matter how he rolled and spiraled though, the brutes on his tail proved to be competent pilots.

Diving to the left as a fuel rod shot whipped past his right flank and struck a cluster of Everfree trees on the gorge edge, Ishmir decided this was getting old.

“So you guys don’t wanna play kindergarten rules?” he mused engaging orbital flight systems and stirring the RCS fuel tanks. “You wanna play juvie rules?”

He looked over his shoulder to confirm the banshees were nice and close, then punched the throttle and pulled sharply upward. “Let’s play juvie rules.”

The SCALPEL ascended quickly and the banshees followed, struggling to keep up even on a full boost, but matching the steep incline of his climb none the less. Anywhere Ishmir could fly, the banshees could fly. But what set them apart was Ishmir’s sense of imagination.

He spiraled, keeping the banshees guessing where to place their shots next, at the same time watching his scopes. The distance between him and the enemy grew. Thirty meters… forty… sixty…

At eighty meters Ishmir smirked and prayed this would work.

“I deny your reality,” Ishmir said to nobody in particular and stomped on one pedal while throwing the throttle back into the idle position. The SCALPEL stalled nearly immediately as he kicked the tail out to one side.

RCS thrusters fired immediately on maximum burn. While they weren’t as effective in atmosphere as they were in zero-gee, but they did the trick with a little nudge from the VTOL engines. The SCALPEL did a full one-hundred-and-eighty degree spin, lining the nose and weapons up with a pair of very surprised brute pilots.

“And substitute it with my own,” Ishmir finished saying as he lined his sights up on the banshees.

The banshees didn’t even have time to veer away. Three missiles head on gutted the banshee on the left and cannon fire turned the other to scrap a second later. The SCALPEL dropped out of the sky and past the exploding banshees a second.

Hitting the air-brakes, Ishmir eased the throttle forward again and pulled out of the stalling dive before he lost control, then made a controlled spiral back down to the Kraken’s airspace. As he spiraled down he pinged the comms.

“How’s it going down there, Solar Flare? I’m running out of ammo and my fuel has dwindled to half-and-hour.”

“We have cut through the shields,” Celestia responded. “But it will take too long to burn through the armor as well.”

Marko chimed in over a crack of his shotgun tearing through what sounded like a brute. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means we need a plan-B,” Ishmir explained as he levelled into a stable patrol of the area.

“Why doesn’t plan-A ever work? Now what?”

“There has to be some sort of heart to this machine. A power supply or something,” Twilight suggested. “We could focus our efforts there and take this thing down.”

“She’s right.”

Marko scoffed. “As usual.”

“Head below deck and see if you can sabotage that thing. I’ll clear some airspace and prepare for hot extract.”

“Rodge.”

“Incoming drop ships!” Luna’s voice suddenly interrupted.

Ishmir looked up and there were indeed more re-enforcements incoming. He didn’t even have to check his radar, the Covenant carrier was breaking its position from over Canterlot and was inching closer. A cluster of craft had dropped from its belly for another bout, this time the telltale sleek carapaces of phantom troop carriers escorted by a couple of banshee fighters.

“They must not be allowed to land on the Kraken until Spartan Marko and Twilight Sparkle complete their task.” Celestia called as she led Luna into the sky. “Spartan Ishmir, my sister and I shall focus on those troop carriers. Attempt to draw away their escorts.”

“Copy that.”

Arming the last of his air-to-air missiles and stirring the fumes in the fuel-tank, Ishmir punched the throttle and powered directly at the enemy formation.

Inside the Kraken was a deeper shade of purple. Not the Twilight Sparkle kind of purple. It had the kind of purple that would have looked quite at home in a hooker’s boudoir.

The halls and their support struts were was architectural as well, like a cathedral. It seemed to want to live up to the holy war that the vehicle was designed to wage.

Actually, no, not a cathedral; it was more like a nightclub after hours with the cleaning lights on, except the luminous mystery stains were the fluorescent splashes of grunt blood splattered across the deck.

Marko kicked one grunt in the chest, toppling the alien over for Twilight to materialize a bayonet of purple light pointed downward on the creature. The shard of glassy magic slid downward, slicing clean through the grunt’s neck, and after a few quiet kicks and hisses of escaping methane the creature stopped moving.

They had slaughtered their way through dozens of aliens and Twilight Sparkle was pretty sure there were still more to be had hiding in the dark corners of the Kraken’s underbelly, gathering for another push against them. But everything so far, from brutes right down to the grunts at the bottom of the Covenant pecking order had fallen before them.

Trying not to feel too overconfident, Twilight righted her assault rifle and stood ready, watching Marko’s back as he had originally instructed her to do. Marko in the meantime knelt and pushed his last bandolier of shells into his shotgun.

He had stripped down all the explosives he had been carrying, using the rest to demolish the shade turrets and uproot the brutes dug into cover. Behind them was a sea of eviscerated alien bodies. And ahead was a nearly empty chamber littered with the still forms of those jackals and grunts who had been placed on guard for the Kraken’s core.

The core itself was an orb of blue light set into the floor at the center of the siege tower. Pulsing and sliding around it were several curved beams of the same alloy the rest of the Kraken seemed to be made of. They span and tumbled like a bunch of concentric hoops around a centrifuge.

Getting to his feet, Marko gingerly approached the ledge and looked down. He glanced at Twilight, who shrugged.

Looking back down, Marko shouldered his shotgun and unloaded every shell he had left into the orb of light. Buckshot sparked and rippled across the core like projectiles splashing on a shield. Only his work clearly had an effect. The core turned yellow, then eventually bright red as if to visually register the damage that was being done.

Eventually though, Marko ran out of ammunition and holstered his empty shotgun. It took some looking around, but he knelt by a dead jackal and relinquished one of the blue orbs adorning the dead alien’s belt and gave it a testy toss.

“Is this still part of the plan!?” Twilight asked.

Marko shook his head and activated the plasma grenade. “Nope! Now I’m improvising!”

The grenade flared and pulsed like the blue core had been earlier and Marko threw it. The smart technology in the grenade registered the grenade had not hit a hard target and the grenade bounced. It however became wedged in one of the undulating struts rotating around the orb.

Marko quickly pushed Twilight into a corner and huddled over her, and a second later the grenade exploded.

At first it was like they had made a black hole. All the surrounding light seemed to have been sucked into the center of the core. Then a shockwave staggered the duo and made the deck of the Kraken buck like it suddenly wanted to repulse them from its confines.

The centrifugal hoops collapsed into scrap and disappeared from sight. Alarms were blaring a second later. Conduits hidden in walls exploded and hissed steam. Lights were flickering all over, some even blowing out and sparking viciously.

Standing, Marko quickly pinged his comms. “Ishy, I did something dumb! You ready for our extraction?”

“No time like the present!” was Ishmir’s immediate reply.

Twilight Sparkle didn’t need any telling. As soon as it was established Ishmir was on the way, she was running after Marko like the worst demons of Tartarus were nipping at her tail. It didn’t take a genius to realize that if they did not extract immediately they would explode along with every alien still left on the Kraken.

Marko caught the corner at the top of the final ramp and swung out of sight. Thundering after her, Twilight skidded on all fours as she attempted to match the sharp turn. She could smell the acrid smoke of detonated explosives and cordite on the outside air. Ash was raining across Ghastly Gorge, swept up from the gutted banshees and phantoms Ishmir and the princesses had been blowing out of the sky non-stop.

Ahead the SCALPEL was hovering low, just over the edge of the Kraken’s main deck. Marko had closed the distance and leapt forward as Twilight Sparkle scrambled after him. The Spartan slammed into the side of the cockpit and grabbed hold, hanging like he had when they dropped in.

He turned to look at Twilight just as a blur of motion collided into her side.

“Warlock!” Marko screamed, half contemplating to leap back onto the Kraken as he saw a jackal dive out of nowhere and tackle Twilight Sparkle to the ground.

However, even as he called out, Twilight proved to have the situation under control. Rolling onto her back she grabbed the jackal by the neck and pulled it off her, slamming it into the ground with her magic tugging her pistol from its holster at the same time. She shoved the barrel to its temple and put two clean taps through the brain.

The jackal went limp where it lay and Twilight scrambled back to her hooves, re-holstering the pistol as she galloped.

Marko reached out at the same time and Twilight leapt for it, kicking her legs for balance and flapping her wings as hard as she could for extra acceleration. A moment later Marko caught her by the hoof and she swung forward colliding with the side of the SCALPEL.

“I’m beginning to wish you were as good with your wings as you are with guns,” Marko said, effortlessly lifting Twilight up and into his arms.

Together they mantled over the side of the fighter and settled back into their seat before the cockpit canopy slid shut again.

“We’re in!”

“Secure and away.” Ishmir flicked three switches across the dashboard and punched the throttle.

The main thrusters narrowed and threw the SCALPEL forward. Rolling right Ishmir pulled up hard and spiraled them around until they were pointed straight upward. Gravity shifted and pulled Twilight Sparkle into Marko’s chest as they burned straight up at the sky.

Twilight turned and looked back at the Kraken. The various glyphs and running lights glowing across the hull flashed and flickered before dying entirely. Bolts of purple lighting arched across the siege machine and the limbs holding it up went slack. Teetering first, the Kraken then toppled and slammed side-down into the hole it had been digging.

A cloud of dust and rock consumed the Kraken for a moment, then as the dirt settled revealed the lifeless mechanical creature was dead.

“That’s it?” Twilight asked with surprise. “I was expecting an-…”

Light consumed the Kraken in an instant, flashing bright enough to put spots in Twilight’s vision. The Kraken exploded, spitting plasma fire and jagged chunks of debris into the air with a shockwave that shook the SCALPEL despite their range from the epicenter.

Twilight gripped the sides of the cockpit for a moment as they wobbled, but as Ishmir got it under control again she cracked a smile. “Ah, there we go.”

The explosion did not mark the end of the fireworks display through. As the Kraken debris was raining back down to the earth, the ground began to rumble and shake. Soil and boulders displaced as the world began to quake at a shattering frequency.

And a moment later it was like Equestria shattered.

Boulders the size of ponies were catapulted into the air, smaller pebbles rattling along the SCALPEL’s hull. Ishmir rolled from side to side, glancing over his shoulders to anticipate the incoming debris. But eventually the clouds were too thick and something hit them.

There was a grinding noise in the engines before the turbines rattled and choked. Something struck one of the wings, jolting them violently to one side before Ishmir was forced to level out a good distance under the cloud cover.

Looking down, Twilight saw a tear had formed down the centre of the crater the Kraken had dug, running almost perpendicular to the ends of Ghastly Gorge to form an X-shape in the earth. The crack widened, and then split down the edges, crumbling into the darkening abyss as more hairline fractures began to form. Finally a column of dirt and rubble sprayed into the air, mesas forming within an instant and geysers of soil bubbling and churning violently. Clouds of dust formed thick banks of mist that engulfed not only Ghastly Gorge, but a good chunk of the Everfree Forest that began to sink away into the earth.

And rising up out of its billion-year-old tomb came a structure the likes of which Twilight Sparkle had never seen before.

When the dust settled, Twilight could see what had pulled itself from the earth, but she couldn’t make sense of it. She blinked once, twice, and then finally unraveled the optical illusion of patterns, colors and shadow.

There were pillars and arches spread over the circular, disk-like base, elevated aqueducts; columned towers with crowns of three-dimensional alien symbols; a forest of sculpted geometries of spheres, cubes and tori spread over the base; outer walls folding up like the flaps of an aircraft to form erratic looking defenses – it was a vast alien city.

Four columns placed at equal quadrants around the structure rose up like enormous blades. Bits of rock and soil still cascaded off the edges of the construct as the pillars cut upward, disrupting the errant Everfree clouds and the tops faded into the blue sky beyond. Even as they hovered just a few meters above the surface of the city the lights and oblique surfaces on the towers reconfigured, constantly moving and shifting as if there was something inside working away at some mysterious task.

At the center of the construct was a recess, smooth alloy forming a gentle crater to where a black hole sat at the very center. A wavering, uneven orb of crackling blue energy was dwarfed by the surrounding architecture. The center of the orb seemed to fade into pure darkness, with a tiny pinprick of white hovering in the middle.

And only then did the scale of the structure register. It must have been at least three kilometers in diameter, larger than any single solid state building constructed by ponies that she knew of.

Twilight’s mind rebelled at the scale of this technology, the effort it had taken to construct such a thing and then bury it, only for it to excavate itself a billion years later. She glanced at Marko. While he intently studied the structure, he did not seem the slightest bit impressed.

“Uh, is that a fucking forerunner structure?” Marko finally blurted out after a pause.

Ishmir glanced over his shoulder, partially trying to confirm Marko’s analysis, partially struggling to keep the SCALPEL horizontal. “I’d love to make architectural comparisons and as soon as we land I promise to take metallurgical samples so we can be absolutely sure; however I seem to be having a little trouble flying right now.”

“Oh, well. By all means, focus on that.”

Twilight Sparkle couldn’t wait until they landed though. “What’s a forerunner?” she asked over the groaning airframe.

“Ancient aliens. Older than us,” Marko explained. “Older than you. Older than planets probably. Looks like they were here before ponies at some point.”

Before Twilight could properly process that brief yet rounded explanation, something groaned and there was the distinct wail of tearing metal. The reassuring hum of the engines died out all at once and a second they dropped like a brick. Bracing herself, Twilight clenched her eyes shut, but it did nothing to stop her stomach from jumping in her throat.

Marko felt every muscle clench as he dug his armored fingers into his harness. “Hey, you okay up there?” he snapped at Ishmir.

“We lost something.” Ishmir’s voice was irritatingly calm.

“No shit!”

The view through the canopy changed. One minute Marko was looking at sky and horizon. The next thing it all span and spiraled out of control. They were tumbling, diving nose first at the surface of the forerunner structure.

Another violent bump hit the SCALPEL and kicked the tail out, throwing them into a stalled spin. Casting his eyes sideways Marko spotted bits of shrapnel tearing from a battered wing.

“Oh, this is not happening!” he cried, bracing arms and legs to supplement his safety harness. “Don’t let me die like this, Ish! I got so much blood left to shed! So many aliens to kill!”

Ishmir didn’t reply. His eyes were fixed on the ground as he battled with the throttle and the yolk. The pedals were locked in place and no amount of stomping or kicking would un-jam them. The tail flaps were either locked or gone. And if the right wing’s perforated condition was anything to go by, Ishmir figured the latter was a safe bet.

In seconds the ground rushed in so close Ishmir could open a window and touch it. He kept himself braced, but didn’t look away.

“Brace for-…”

Golden light washed across the cockpit and the falling sensation in their guts turned into a tight swooping like the SCALPEL had suddenly pulled up at the last second. Impossible, Ishmir thought at first. All control was gone. There was no way…

Then he saw Princess Celestia drift in near their right wing, her horn aglow with the same magical energy enveloping the fighter.

“Impact?” Ishmir finished on a surprised note.

He looked down and saw Celestia had caught them mid-air and pulled them out of their lethal dive. With minimal effort she levitated them in place for a moment, then she gently set them down into the smoothest landing of the SCALPEL’s short life.

“Now that’s a landing!” Marko whooped as the SCALPEL settled into its landing gear and the magical light faded.

Leaping from the cockpit, Ishmir landed lightly and tipped a courteous salute to the princesses. “Much obliged.”

He caught Twilight Sparkle as she dismounted the SCALPEL and waited for Marko to follow quickly.

“And you were worried,” Ishmir chuckled.

“Oh, shut up,” Marko sniped back, just glad to have his feet on solid ground again.

In the meantime, Princess Celestia landed gently beside Flintlock team, her eyes fixed on the sky. She was following a fleet of phantom drop ships descending from the Covenant carrier’s belly. As the dozen or so drop ships left the airspace, a glow of white hot energy gathered under the prow of the carrier.

A moment later a beam of intense energy descended from the ship and connected with the earth, burning everything it came in contact with.

“They’re bombing the Everfree Forest,” Celestia gasped. “They intend to focus their efforts on burning us out now they have uncovered this alien structure.”

The princess seemed torn for a moment. Even as the blue pinprick that was Luna was already orbiting the carrier and sticking it with the might of her magic, Celestia seemed reluctant to take off. Her gaze turned into the forerunner structure with a mixture of awe and suspicion.

“What are the Covenant after?” she asked quietly.

Ishmir shrugged. “Flintlock is grounded anyway. We’ll focus on figuring this out. You and Princess Luna should focus your efforts on the carrier. We’ll call if we need support.”

Celestia considered this for a moment, then nodded in agreement. “Very well, Spartan Ishmir. Remain in contact. Twilight Sparkle; be careful,” she added lowering her head to Twilight.

Warlock met the princess’ affectionate nuzzle before Celestia turned and shot into the air, leaving just a dust cloud and a few fluttering white feathers.

She skirted around the phantoms as they flew in close. Either the aliens didn’t see the downed SCALPEL and the headhunters, or they didn’t care. The sides of the drop ships hung open to reveal the blood-thirsty troops within. And in one of the phantoms at the heart of the formation they spotted a familiar figure.

Flanked by a mighty blue armored hunter, the brute chieftain the Spartans had fought in Canterlot stood with one hand clutching an overhead handhold, the other its war-hammer. Its armor was rightfully battered, considering the last they’d seen of it was on the wrong side of an exploding grenade bandolier. And while the brute did seem to be standing unevenly on a bandaged leg, the chieftain seemed alive and fighting fit.

Marko immediately pointed it out, his finger following the chieftain like the barrel of a sniper rifle followed a target. “It’s that hairy motherfucker from the palace! What’s it take to kill that fucker!?”

“He’s heading for the portal,” Twilight added, prodding her hoof into the center of the structure.

Indeed the fleet soared quietly by and made a bee-line for the wavering portal at the center of the crater.

Twilight Sparkle cocked her head as she conjured up the duffel bags containing their fighting equipment. “Where do you think it leads? And why?”

“I don’t know,” Ishmir said honestly as he knelt by the bags and produced himself a rifle. “But whatever it is, the Covenant can’t have it. Get ready, Flintlock. We’re going in!”

As Ishmir racked his weapon and Marko grabbed more ammo for his shotgun, Twilight’s horn began to glow and she brought her own assault rifle forward with an excited grin. “Roger the fuck that!”

“Don’t ancient master races ever build anything small?”

Materializing on the other side of the portal behind Marko and Twilight, Ishmir kept his M392 DMR shouldered and eye angled behind the battle scope. Aiming as he walked, the Spartan aimed into Twilight Sparkle’s blind side as the three of them swept the area on the other side.

The transition through the portal had taken less than a second, and all three of them had expected to be marching into a Covenant ambush. Twilight had even stowed her weapons and erected a large magical bubble for them to step through in. but there was no welcoming committee on the other side.

She lowered the shield and the Spartans were able to look around without the purple polarization of her magic.

They had appeared at the top of a large tower, almost like a giant anthill within a massive dyson-sphere. The tower had a uniform slope to it for the most part, rising along the staircases steeply before reaching flat platforms every twenty or so meters. Crowns of fins circled each platform like hard-cover points making the tower an attacker’s nightmare.

“Flintlock to Solar Flare-Actual,” Ishmir reported on the comms. “We’re through safe and sound.”

“Affirmative, Spartans,” came Celestia’s uneven reply. “Communications through the portal are deteriorating. We shall go silent until you require our assistance.”

“Roger that. Flintlock, out.”

Lowering his rifle, Ishmir tried to take in the entirety of the vast warehouse laid before him. Although ‘warehouse’ was wholly inappropriate to describe the cavernous wonderland.

From their perch stretched a space so large that he detected a slight arc like the curve of a planet in the lay lines etched into the cavern walls. The roof was beyond his VISR’s range finder and thin black clouds drifted throughout the space like it had its own weather system.

The walls were home to a massive honeycomb of storage containers, all of them home to pieces, parts and equipment. There were floating islands in the midst of it as well, cradles holding what looked like forerunner starships, platforms where dormant bipedal walkers remained in hibernation clueless of the phantom drop ships floating over their heads. There were long fabrication lines of still robotic arms. Cold and inactive forges the size of battleships.

There was altogether too much to take in all at once. And so much of the machinery was so alien none of Flintlock could discern their function.

“Don’t ancient master races ever build anything small?” Marko commented quietly.

“Clearly not.” Angling his gaze downward Ishmir spotted the fleet of phantoms taking off across the cavernous space.

They were clearly exploring, looking for something. Then again a hunch told Ishmir the aliens had found exactly what they were looking for. A forerunner tech stockpile like this could tip the war against humanity into their favor significantly.

As if the Covenant needed an upper hand in the first place.

“Check it out,” Ishmir pointed, lowering his gaze a little further.

Hovering at the foot of the tower under the portal hovered an idle phantom. Its engines were powered down and gathered around under it were a small collection of alien infantry.

Shouldering their weapons the trio silently descended the steps towards the phantom. On the platform just fifty meters above the gaggle of aliens chatting below, Flintlock went to ground and crawled quietly into firing positions.

There were only a pair of grunts with a pair of jackals standing guard. They were facing away, down a corridor leading into a floating facility attached to the tower’s hip. Likely they were left behind seeing off a larger expeditionary force sent to explore.

Ishmir sat up and aimed his scoped rifle carefully. “I’ll cover from up here. You two go in and take them out quietly.”

Marko beamed a green acknowledgement light and Twilight quietly nodded. Like shadows they skulked down the last flight of stairs and swept behind the ignorant aliens.

The Spartan drew his blade at the last moment before he fell upon the jackal and grunt on the left. Twilight pounced on the aliens to the right, her horn glowing as she conjured a bayonet of glassy purple light.

Her hooves connected with the grunt, catching the alien by surprise and forcing it to the ground. At the same time her magical knife came up and stabbed the jackal in the throat before tearing away sideways to skewer the grunt’s skull.

It was over in less than a second. Marko double checked, stepping into the grav-lift under the phantom and ascending to the drop ship. There was a sound like a cat being strangled, and a moment later Marko descended again, fresh blood dappling his armor.

“All clear,” he reported as he landed and Ishmir descended the steps to join them.

As they were orienting themselves, Ishmir looked down and caught Twilight staring at the dead grunt under her. Walking over, he leaned sideways and stepped into her line of sight.

“Hey, Warlock. You okay?” he asked. “Did the fight on the Kraken shake you?”

Twilight glanced up like he’d startled her, then paused to think. “No… it didn’t.” She shrugged. “And somehow that worries me a little more.”

Ishmir honestly wasn’t sure what to say about that. He wasn’t a combat shrink… in fact, he’d never even met a combat shrink. He’d been so fueled by hate and revenge himself that he’d been killing Covenant for a very long time without feeling any sort of remorse. He’d never even considered them worthy of remorse.

And three guesses as to how exactly Marko felt about killing the aliens, but I bet you’ll get it in one.

“It’s alright,” Ishmir figured. “We’ll focus on doing the job now. We can sort out how you feel about all this later.”

Twilight Sparkle smiled. “Okay. Just so long as you are there to help me through it.” She lifted her gaze a little and looked at Marko. “Both of you.”

“Heh. You can’t get rid of us that easy, princess sparkle-butt.”

Readying themselves, the trio pushed on into the corridors of the attached facility. Comfortably enclosed when compared to the exposed, open spaces behind them, the corridors were perfectly straight with smooth walls widening slightly from the ground before they angled smoothly to taper up towards the high, narrow ceiling. Glowing lights were evenly spaced along the buttresses and ceiling, the buttresses forming little alcoves of cover for them to dip in and out of.

Turning the corner they came to a particularly long stretch. Standing at the end were three hulking figures. The brutes were all clad in crimson power armor, two of them stood watching as the third sat hunkered over the door at the very end. They were barking and snarling, clearly complaining at something. It wasn’t until the third hunkered over the door stepped back that Twilight realized what they were doing.

They had made a mess of the doorway. It was buckled and smashed like they had failed to open it the normal way and were now resorting to relentlessly punching it until it yielded.

Ishmir held up a hand, halting his comrades, then gestured to Marko. The olive green Spartan nodded at Ishmir’s cryptic hand signals before translating for Twilight Sparkle by holding up three fingers.

Then two.

Finally one…

Marko broke cover first as Ishmir took aim. The DMR cracked, peppering the brutes with several neat shots to the chest plates and helmets as Marko rushed in close, his shotgun hungry for death.

Twilight mimicked Ishmir, stepping around cover and let her assault rifle tear into the brutes. They howled and swatted at the sparks erupting from their armor. But they were only stunned for a moment.

One of the brutes turned with a weapon in hand. It was a heavy looking mechanical contraption sporting a massive blade along the grip, heavy enough the brute had to fire from the hip. And when it did the weapon let out an intimidating bark, propelling a projectile into the wall beside Twilight.

The grenade round exploded on impact. Twilight’s teeth rattled with the overpressure and she was flung sideways. Her head was spinning well before her face made contact with the ground.

Her MA5C clattered where it landed just beyond her hoof’s reach, but Twilight Sparkle was too groggy to do anything about it at first. By the time she pressed her hooves to the ground and clawed her way closer while firing up her magic, there was a beastly howl.

Looking over she saw one of the brutes rush her. The alien was down on all four, berserking right past Ishmir, making contact with the Spartan’s rifle as it bounded, knocking him over. Ignoring the human however the brute made a bee-line for the princess, leaping high into the air with fists raised over its head and bearing down on her.

Twilight dropped her levitation spell and erected a shield just in time. The brute’s fists came down and slammed into a thin film of purple light. Ripples cascaded across the shield and sparks spluttered from Twilight’s horn where she concentrated on keeping the shield erected. She widened it to a disk shape, like a giant contact lens so the brute couldn’t reach around it and grab or punch her.

Though as she was exerting herself the brute let its fists fall with methodical hammer blows, thinning the shield out and bending it’s edges inwards. Twilight tried to focus on widening the shield, but she could barely keep it erected, never mind in shape. Soon enough he barrier was no more than a flickering cocoon practically wrapped around her body; Twilight even pressed her hooves against the inside to give it some more integrity.

The brute slid its fingers over the shield, growling and drooling as it crushed, no doubt itching to do the same to Twilight’s windpipe. The alicorn huffed and tried to press outward, but only found that her efforts allowed the shield to collapse just a little more. Cracks, as if the shield was made of glass, formed across the surface.

At the same time she saw Marko further down the corridor going toe to toe with another brute. Both had stowed their primary weapons and Marko had his custom knife in hand.

He ducked and darted under the brutes clumsy blows, but every strike the Spartan made glanced off an armored surface. Until finally the brute caught Marko’s wrist in its beefy hand and locked his arm over his chest. Marko cried out and struggled, but the towering brute pushed with ease, pinning Marko to a wall and lifting him up so his armored boots only kicked air.

At the same time the alien reached back, drawing a long, terrible knife, its blade lined with horrific nooks and edges. The brute wasted no time in spinning the hilt between its fingers and sliding the blade forward.

Marko caught the brute’s hand and pushed with all his might, but it only served to slow the stabbing motion. The point of the knife found a soft surface between the Spartan’s chest plate and shoulder pad and gently plunged forward.

The headhunter screamed with every inch that passed into his shoulder, ruby droplets of blood spilling down his side until the weapon was hilted in his flesh.

Twilight’s heart stopped at the sight. “No!” she screamed, her voice suddenly picking up to a volume she thought her throat could not handle. “Marko!”

Her eyes squeezed shut and she focused her magic harder. But something else happened. Something unexpected. A surge of electricity rose from around her heart, a sensation she’d felt once before a very long time ago. A spark of magic that resided within her soul.

Her eyes jerked open and instead of looking into the innocent disks of purple like before, the brute looming over her was blinded by the pure white light spilling from Twilight Sparkle’s skull. The light around her horn intensified. Her shield thickened and with a cry she expanded the bubble until it exploded into a shower of energy shards.

Several embedded into the ceiling and wall. A whole swarm of the shards were sticking out of the brute’s chest as it was flung backwards. While the alien was stumbling for balance, Twilight’s magic caught her assault rifle and brought it up before she emptied the magazine, turning the brute’s face into pulp.

She was on her hooves as it fell. The brute holding up Marko looked back and spotted her.

Drawing the knife from Marko’s shoulder, the alien aimed for a split second, then drew back and flung the weapon at Twilight.

However before it even got close the alicorn had holstered her rifle and caught the spinning knife in her magic. Charging forward, Twilight turned the knife around and slashed forward. The point plunged straight into the base of the brute’s spine, dead center and just above the tailbone.

The alien slumped nearly instantly, its legs giving out from under it. The sudden sag gave Marko enough space to work with.

Curling into a ball he kicked both feet against the brute’s chest and shoved it off him before dropping forward and slicing his knife clean through the alien’s throat, sending a spurt of black blood spraying across the ground between is boots. The cut was clean, effortless, and didn’t quite decapitate the brute.

Twilight’s eyes returning to normal, she finished it off by levitating her pistol around and putting a single dead-check into the gasping alien’s head.

Across the corridor while all this was happening, Ishmir was suffering his own minor struggles. His rifle had popped the last brute’s armor before he’d been disarmed. But with pistol in hand and the range between them reduced to the maximum engagement range for influenza he had issues finishing the brute off.

It loomed over him, swiping and striking, and for every block Ishmir watched his shield energy readout drop a sliver.

Ducking and letting the brute punch a wall, Ishmir brought his pistol up to press against the brute’s eye socket, but before he could shoot it brought up a forearm and deflected the weapon. Instead Ishmir put a round in the ceiling. His wrist flexed and he fired twice more, only shaving a few hairs from the brute’s ear.

Drawing back, Ishmir tried to fire from the hip, but the brute kicked him in the side, making his aim go wide. Another attempt let the brute catch him by the wrist, putting three more round into the wall before it twisted sharply like it wanted to tear his arm off.

Ishmir purposefully dropped his pistol, then caught it in his free hand, bringing the barrel to the brute’s gut and letting his last four rounds fly through the alien’s exposed abdomen. The creature howled and doubled over, letting Ishmir drop it with a sweeping kick to the back of the legs. The larger, heavier alien went down hard, and after a lightning quick reload, Ishmir finished it off with a double tap to the head.

The last two brutes were dead checked at the same time before Ishmir and Twilight holstered their M6C/SOCOMs again.

“Are you okay?” Ishmir asked as he approached the others, scraping up his fallen rifle as he did.

Marko huffed, taking a knee and pulling an emergency biofoam canister from his gear. “It’s just a flesh wound.” He still winced as he popped the nozzle into the gap between his armor the brute had exploited and filled the gaping knife wound with biofoam.

It stung like hell, but the foam would stop bleeding and hemorrhaging. Within moments the pain had been numbed, but that had never bothered Marko much anyway. At least while it hurt he knew he was still alive. Tossing the empty can, Marko retrieved his shotgun and stood ready again.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Twilight commented with a frown. Calming down she suddenly found herself inexplicably angry with Marko, and the Spartan noticed.

“Right. Like I let myself get stabbed on purpose just to fuck with you. Grow up, Warlock.”

The pony snorted in response, bucking him lightly in the shins.

While they were going back and forth, Ishmir checked the damage the brutes had done trying to force the door that stood in their way open. It was buckled and shattered, but they had only succeeded in opening it a crack. And despite how the lights illuminated when the trio closed in, there was no way the door would open on its own anymore.

With a sigh, Ishmir stepped in, pushed his fingers between the seams and pulled hard to one side.

“I knew the brutes were stupid,” Marko chuckled, “but I never thought they were too stupid to operate doors. Even Ishmir can operate doors.”

Ishmir sighed, proven to the contrary as he struggled. “Could you shut up and help me with this?”

“You need a big, strong man to do it for you?”

“Yeah, find me one will you?”

With Marko taking one side and Ishmir on the other, they managed to peel apart the battered doors with a groan of the alien metal screeching on their broken tracks.

Stepping through the arch the Spartans aimed their weapons in to the chamber beyond. It was only four meters across. After the agoraphobia-inducing space of the facility so far, this room looked suffocatingly small.

As the trio stepped forward holographic glyphs – dots, dashes lines and polygons – sprang from the stone floor and twisted around them. The sudden motion snapped the headhunters into combat mode, the two of them sweeping for contacts.

Only Twilight didn’t have her weapon ready, gently levitating it to her side and snapping it into the magnetic holster on her armor. As she stepped forward, her hooves echoing through the hollow space, Ishmir reached out to stop her.

“Careful, Warlock,” he warned, eying the readouts on his HUD in case of foreign radiation or gasses they would have otherwise missed.

Even though she couldn’t see the green readouts on the SPI armor’s systems, Twilight shook her head and kept moving towards the center of the room. “No, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, eying the glyphs as she went. “Stand perfectly still. Don’t touch the glyphs.”

“Okay… why not?” Marko asked, clearly having trouble holding position as one of the symbols was practically kissing his visor.

“I recognize these symbols,” Twilight said with some awe as she brushed past some of the glyphs. They seemed to dart about, reacting to her presence. She could even spread her wings and brush them from side to side, juggling them around the room like they were suspended in zero gravity.

In the middle of the room she reached up and tapped a small blue square with her hoof; it blinked in response.

“These are similar to old Equestrian symbols,” Twilight explained, observing the square from all sides. “Very hard to read. There are simple two-dimensional translations, but to really get all the detail you need observe them from all sides.”

“No time for details, purple-turd,” Marko told her.

Twilight frowned almost irritably. “All the meaning is in the details, dipshit.”

“I promise Ishmir will bring you back on a date later,” Marko retorted, drawing a sharp gaze from Ishmir.

Biting her lip, Twilight concentrated on the symbols, then looked up. “This way.”

They crossed the room and the floor lit a brilliant blue before Twilight as if it were reacting purely to her presence, ignoring the Spartans altogether. On the far end they ran into a blank wall where the princess pointed to a slightly brighter blue dot on the wall.

With Marko and Ishmir in firing positions to either side of her, Twilight lightly pressed her hoof to the dot, ready for trouble.

The wall slid apart and revealed for them a spherical chamber at least twenty meters across. The platform they stood on was suspended in the midst of it and in the center was a control panel glowing with bands of light at the very center.

Entering, Twilight quickly trotted into the middle and observed the holograms shifting and changing before her eyes.

“This looks like a control center.” She ran a hoof over the symbols as if she were reading braille. “We should be able to find, ah” – she tapped a small triangular glyph – “a map.”

The lights on the console faded, replaced with a single vertically spinning disk. As it turned to face them, it was revealed to be a symbol representing some kind of star-topped scepter with a pair of curved flanking blades ending in points near the top of the glyph.

“Caretaker?” the Spartans heard Twilight whisper under her breath. “What does that mean…?”

She barely finished the thought when light exploded around her. Holographic geometry flashed and zoomed into a distant perspective. A sphere of symbols, topology lines and shapes swelled over the console until it touched the apex of the room.

“A map?” Marko asked. “Great. Figure out where the fuck in the galaxy we are.”

Twilight scrutinized the spherical object before her, then looked at the small dot she called ‘caretaker’ somewhere in the heart of it. Then her eyes widened with realization, spotting familiar landmasses and bodies of ocean across the sphere of symbols.

“We didn’t teleport to another planet,” she explained with awe. “We’re still on Equis… well, we’re actually inside the planet. This is the planet’s core!”

Marko coughed. “Is it really that impossible, or does it just sound that way?” He looked to Ishmir for support, but his buddy just shrugged.

“Why not though? We know forerunners are masters of slip-space technology. This could be a bubble dimension within the planet the size of a refrigerator. On the outside it might be small, but it’s infinitely huge on the inside.”

Flintlock-Two shook his head, palming his visor. “… my head hurts.”

Rearing up, Twilight touched her hooves to a couple of symbols and played with them. A holographic structure passed through Marko as the map expanded. She focused through layers of the surrounding structure until she had closed in on their representative location. The Spartans found themselves looking at their current spherical map room, with two tiny little armored Spartans flanking the scaled down forerunner symbol for caretaker between them.

“Well, at least we know where we are. Any idea how we kick the Covenant out?” Marko asked.

Twilight though for a moment and swept through the map again. Soon enough they were looking at a scaled down version of the enormous forge chamber they had seen the Covenant explaining. It looked like the phantoms had set down and there were foot mobiles exploring the various rows of machinery and equipment.

She blew up the image and then tapped a few other icons. Several lines of alien text scrolled down in front of her face, and Twilight had to read them from three angles before she got the full picture of what they were trying to say.

“It says the security ancillary is offline,” Twilight Sparkle translated slowly. “But sentinels are prepared for manual tasking.”

“What’s a sentinel?” Marko asked Ishmir.

“Don’t know. But whatever they are they’re waiting for target data.” Twilight Sparkle nodded to confirm and Ishmir mulled it over a moment. “Set the Covenant as targets. Let’s see what happens.”

Twilight nodded and set to work touching a series of panels and glyphs. Soon enough the Spartans were able to see she had programmed in the targets as the miniature representations of the Covenant and their drop ships turned from a cool blue into red.

Twilight finally stepped back and as quickly as the map had materialized, it faded from view.

The trio stood around, glancing at each other and waiting. Nothing seemed to be happening. They listened but there was nothing to be heard.

“Did it do anything?” Marko finally asked.

And as he did the Gods answered with thunder. The noise of battle rushed in all at once rolling in the way Flintlock had come. There was a wail of Covenant energy weapons as well as the hum of some kind of weapon they hadn’t heard before in retort. Explosions rang out, and by the sound of grinding metal it sounded like a whole phantom was plucked out of the air and smashed into the ground.

The screams of the Covenant sounding a retreat followed.

“Sounds like something is slaughtering the shit out of them out there,” Marko said. He paused, then tilted his gaze to his fellows. “Wanna watch?”

Ishmir and Twilight shot each other a glance and then shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”

“And to the dust we shall return.”

Marko and Ishmir had suffered their fair share of defeat at the hands of the Covenant. It was frustrating to say the least – spending days, sometimes even weeks behind enemy lines to line up one shot on a high ranking alien official or to sabotage a high value supply line. And then turn around and receive orders to retreat again as the Covenant pushed the UNSC navy back regardless.

So imagine their glee when they saw the sizeable Covenant force driven before them.

There was some disappointment that the guns doing the killing wasn’t theirs, but the way the Covenant exploded on the wrong side of golden beams of light was kind of cool regardless.

The forerunner ‘sentinels’ they had activated flew out of the woodwork, swarming the main facility and converging on the Covenant drop ships. The sentinels themselves didn’t look particularly intimidating; a simple spherical core with a glowing eye surrounded by stubby wing-like boons that pivoted and reconfigured based on whether they were hovering, flying or lining up for a shot.

Their central ‘eye’ would glow white hot for a moment, then spill forth a thick beam of golden energy that evaporated anything it came into contact with. And ignoring the two humans and their alicorn compatriot, the sentinels cut into the Covenant like a hot knife through butter.

The tower leading up to the portal glowing above them was littered with handfuls of Covenant infantry scrambling to defend themselves from the wave of incoming sentinels. Several piece of phantom wreckage smoked where they had landed across the tiers of the tower. The drop ship the trio had liberated only a few minutes ago was a shouldering pile of slag at the bottom treads of the main staircase.

At the top of the tower a single phantom still held the line. All its guns were flashing, spreading streams of plasma into the sentinels as they approached. Several of the forerunner machines flashed, their bubble-shaped shields flashing and disappearing before the plasma overwhelmed the chasse and sent them plummeting to the deck.

The retribution was relentless. Six tracer beams of forerunner particle weapons connected with the phantom, boiling the armor before the golden light skewered the craft. Explosions rippled somewhere inside the cockpit and the vehicle listed heavily, sliding into the portal and disappearing in a flash.

Their fire support down the aliens doubled their retreat, throwing themselves at the portal to escape. But several of the sentinels vaporized them before they got halfway.

“Focus your fire!” a mighty roar bellowed, automatically translated by the headhunters’ SPI armor systems. The synthesized translator sounded familiar, and looking up both Marko and Ishmir spotted the head of the Covenant snake.

The chieftain who was running the show had his hammer slung across his back and was stepping back to slip around one of the pieces of phantom wreckage it used for cover. A pulse carbine gripped in both claws, it held up the weapon and took down a sentinel with a few precise shots before waving to its fellows.

“Stand your ground!” the chieftain encouraged. “Remain on the line!”

The orders seemed to rally the Covenant. Brutes in particular stood their ground and let the sentinels have it. Shields popped by the dozens and the forerunner automatons dropped from the air like a deadly exploding hail.

Twilight cried out and dove to one side when one sentinel slammed into the ground beside them.

“We need to move,” Ishmir yelled, thrusting a fist forward in a gesture for them to attack.

“Got it! Last to put a bullet in that chieftain is a rotten egg!”

Gathering themselves, Flintlock dashed for the bottom of the steps. At the same time enemy fire stitched the platform beside them. Pink crystalline shards of energy fired from a needler exploded leaving a trail of scorch marks in the ground as if tracing their footsteps.

Marko and Ishmir fired their weapons while the trio pounded up the first flight of steps along the tower’s side. The air filled with crisscross patterns of pink energy shards, plasma bolts and streaks of shotgun slugs and M392 tracers.

They captured the first platform out of the four leading to the portal at the top. Marko was in first, diving forward and firing his shotgun one-handed into a jackal’s face. The alien plummeted over the side of the tower and fell out of sight as Marko hit the deck and slid into cover. Twilight followed closely, snapping up her assault rifle to cover Marko’s blind flank with Ishmir watching her opposite side.

Then she spotted it. Up the next flight of stairs a grunt loomed into view, waddling over the summit. Its weapon was missing, but it held a glowing ball of light in one hand. Rearing back, the alien prepared to peg a grenade down at Flintlock. But Twilight Sparkle had the little fucker in her sights…

The trigger pulled all the way back and nothing happened. Twilight was stunned, frozen on the spot wondering what the hell was happening. She took her eyes off target and looked down at the ammo counter. The MA5C’s readout was red with ‘00’ blinking across the LCD.

She gaped, torn between running for cover and reloading. But by the time she considered switching to her pistol it was too late.

The grenade left the grunt’s hand and came sailing downward…

“GRENADE!”

A freight train slammed into Twilight Sparkle’s ribs, lifting the princess from her hooves and shoving her heavily into Marko’s back. Her vision blurred for a moment and it took some effort to focus and right herself.

Finding her hooves, Twilight looked up to see Ishmir crouched over her. His shields were alight as he took some small arms fire. But that wasn’t what he and Twilight were staring at. Reflected in the alicorn’s eyes was a flaring blue ball of light latched to Ishmir’s left forearm.

His gold-tinted gaze snapped up in a split second to lock with Twilight’s eyes, and it was as if a beam of telepathy connected the two.

Twilight’s mouth moved, but even as she started to say; “Wait, don’t…!” he had his hand on her back and he shoved her back to the ground.

“Stay down, Warlock!”

He was out of Twilight’s sight a second later, like he had enabled his active camouflage and faded into the night. But in reality he had slipped around the low wall Marko and Warlock used for cover and was sprinting full tilt up the next flight of stairs.

Twilight screamed, she was sure she meant to articulate actual words, but all that came out was a scream of terror and anger as she tried to follow. However Marko grabbed her and forced the princess to the ground again.

There was no way he could have known what was going on – then again with the near telepathic connection between the headhunters perhaps he did – but Ishmir had told her to stay put, so Marko made sure she stayed put. It didn’t stop the alicorn from struggling as best as she could to wriggle free of his gauntlets. It turned out to be a waste of energy.

In the meantime Ishmir was halfway up to the next platform. He was climbing the steps four at a time, the servos in his legs whining as he disabled the armor’s safeties and pushed the SPI as hard as it would go. His HUD was out, as well as thermal support and life support. He had even routed power away from his active camo to boost his shields as high as they would go. If the crackling of the shield generator was anything to go by this would be his trusted armor’s last run.

Something came to mind in those fleeting milliseconds. Not a lifetime worth of strife and suffering at the hands of a merciless foe; not the lessons Lieutenant Ambrose had drilled into him during training; not the thrill of success after that first victory, the memories of Marko and he delving into the depths of hell and coming out the other side kicking and cursing and ready for more…

It was a passage he had read in a dusty old book. A passage he had recited many times when looking for motivation or courage. A passage he knew by heart.

“Cursed be the ground for our sake,” the headhunter whispered.

Plasma washed over him, spiking the internal temperature to an unbearable degree, but Ishmir pushed through the blistering pain and sweat. Arcs of golden light surrounded his body as he kept his rifle shoulder and fired on the run.

Bullets snapped through heads and torsos as they exposed themselves. Grunts dropped streaming, jackals toppled away gargling. Finally Ishmir hit the summit of the second platform and the cool relieve of a massive shadow loomed over him.

“Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for us.”

The brute squad leader locking down the second platform roared as it held up its spike rifle. The two curved bayonets along the front of the weapon were ideal cutting weapons and a single swipe could take Ishmir’s head clean off.

He ducked sideways while firing, the blades just about nipping the edge of Ishmir’s shields. And whereas the brute’s swing went wide, all of Ishmir’s shots hit their target. Fire rounds flattened against the power armor before it overloaded and practically exploded, allowing the next two rounds to tear through the alien’s mid-section.

Grabbing the dying brute by the face with his off hand, Ishmir pulled hard to one side to get the obstacle out of his way, his rifle still shouldered and still barking out shots into a jackal just behind…

Everything muted. The world had suddenly turned a blinding shade of blue and the Spartan’s inner ear told him the world was spinning all around him. It was only when the ground gave him a reassuring kiss that Ishmir realized the grenade latched to him had exploded.

But there was no pain. Just a comforting warmth, and an itch somewhere on his chest that would need later attention. Pushing his shields must have worked to stave off the concussive blast of the grenade.

The alarms in his helmet indicating catastrophic armor failure kept him a notch above unconsciousness, right on the threshold of a deep and profound desire to just fucking die.

Unfortunately he couldn’t just slip. There was still work to be done.

Finding his balance the Spartan-3 pushed to his feet and looked around. Blood pooled under his boots and there was a crack across his field of vision. His HUD was still dead so there was no telling what state his shields were in. no matter.

He looked for his rifle. It was nowhere to be seen. That could be problematic. Ishmir still didn’t worry about it though. He felt down his side and pulled his trusty M6C/SOCOM from his thigh. Then looking up the next flight of stairs, he raised the gun…

He was thrown as he tried to aim with two hands. It was only then that he looked down and realized his left arm ended just under the shoulder. His armor was shattered, melted away with the edges fused into his charred, blackened skin. He noted some exposed ribs and the flash of red underneath where his heart was beating in overtime.

This was a one-way trip after all.

Ishmir leapt up the next flight of stairs with the last of his energy reserves, firing his weapon one-handed.

“For out of the ground we were taken, for the dust we are.”

He wasn’t as steady as he would have liked, but he still saw wounded Covenant go down to a plethora of shots. Their return fire was all the more punishing though. Each plasma hit burned like a thousand hellfires. One lucky needler shard hit him in the side and exploded into a cloud of ruby colored flesh. Ignoring the bitter pain was easier said than done, but dropping to his knee for a moment, Ishmir was able to push off and press on.

On the top tread of the third platform Ishmir sighted his target. It stepped into view the same way the brute on the previous platform did.

The towering mountain of a chieftain stepped back from a low wall and put some shots into a hovering sentinel, gutting the little machine and sending it crashing to the deck. The world was moving in slow motion as Ishmir aimed.

His finger squeezed carefully and he put a round clean in the side of the chieftain’s face. The bullet hit the soft flesh of its cheek and sent the alien reeling.

The chieftain did a small pirouette, stumbling over its own feet as it struggled for balance, spitting out globs of blood. When the alien looked up again, squaring off to Ishmir he saw his round had torn a chunk out of the chieftain’s face.

Ishmir cried out as something hit his leg. It burned and forced him down to one knee. But still pulling the trigger he powered through and stood again. His following shots slammed into the chieftain’s armor, sparking and failing to penetrate.

At the same time the brute raised its pulse rifle and let loose a single shot.

Ishmir didn’t feel it. What he did feel though was the whiplash snapping his head back sharply. His vision blurred and blood filled his eyes by the time his gaze drifted downward. Through the cracked hole in his visor the chieftain had put there, Ishmir saw two more shots spark harmlessly on the brute’s chest.

Twip-twip, his pistol let loose two more blind shots before finally; click.

Ishmir’s knees hit the ground and his arm weakened.

Click-click-click, the empty gun clicked as his finger still reflexively worked the trigger.

His vision narrowed and everything seemed to go darker. By the time he slumped forward and hit the ground face down – click-click-click – everything had gone black.

“And to the dust we shall return.”

It was the last conscious thought the synapsis fired through his brain. The electrical signals faded. His finger no longer pulled at the trigger.

Ishmir-G314 was no more.

Down below, Twilight Sparkle had seen the pulse round pass through Ishmir’s head before he went down and she stared in stunned silence. The crack of Marko’s shotgun went unheard and the hiss of a plasma bolt whirling past her ear didn’t even make her flinch.

Her mind was racing. But she wasn’t in the fight. She was in a dangerous spiral of ‘what if.’

What if she had reloaded her rifle after their last engagement? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, STUPID mistake! She could have killed that grunt before it threw the grenade.

But even then, why didn’t she switch to her sidearm? Why didn’t she erect a shield to deflect the grenade? Why wasn’t she faster? Why was she so damn slow? So fucking slow!

She could have even torn the grenade from Ishmir with her magic. She could have isolated the grenade in a magical bubble. She could have teleported it back up at the Covenant.

So many things she could have done. If only she had been faster. If only she had been better…

He’s dead, she finally thought. He’s dead and it’s my fault.

Tears were stinging Twilight’s eyes when she heard a muffled cry. It was small at first, hushed and barely audible. Then it grew in desperation and volume very suddenly.

“WARLOCK! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?”

Marko reached back to grab her, but Twilight was already gone. Her horn was a flare with furious purple flames as she broke cover and ran up the flight of steps to the next platform. She was screaming as she ran, not just with anger and frustration. It was a rage reserved for a wounded beast that threw everything it had into a final desperate act of suicidal defiance against its foes.

Plasma splashed against the shield surrounding Twilight as her eyes changed just like before. Only instead of going pure white with the magic of friendship, her eyes went a smoky black and green. A magic of pure rage lit up inside her and could only be quenched in Covenant blood.

Wings flared, Twilight Sparkle threw herself over the top steps and onto the second platform. Her weapons lay forgotten in her holsters as she laid into the Covenant troops remaining after Ishmir’s initial push with her magic. A shield of light stopped incoming shots while a blade of magic tore through the aliens. Arrowheads turned jackals into pincushions. A large magical battle axe cleaved a brute skull clean in two while a plethora of small glass-like daggers rained on the remaining grunts.

Her first checkpoint clear, Twilight abandoned magically manifested weapons and switched to her MA5C. A full magazine clicked in place as she sprinted up the next set of stairs, flapping her wings to gain more momentum.

The assault rifle barked short bursts, keeping the covenant on the third platform pinned as she closed in. the slaughter on the platform below was doubled in intensity. Breaching over the next summit, Twilight let the aliens have everything she had.

Gutting a jackal with a magical bayonet as she passed, she put a few rounds in a grunt’s face at point blank range then laid into a staggering brute. The taller squad leader had one of those grenade launchers with the long bladed hilt. The brute swung the weapon, but Twilight teleported out of the way, appearing behind the brute in the blink of an eye.

She swung the rifle stock around so hard it was a miracle the impact with the brute’s head didn’t snap the weapon in half. The brute’s skull yielded to the now gore-splattered weapon and the creature slumped. Twilight was already moving on to the next collection of aliens.

Reloading she turned and immediately sprayed a group of fleeing Covenant, mowing them down before they reached the thread of the final flight of stairs leading to the portal above.

As she focused on them however something howled past her face. Blinking away the spots in her vision, Twilight went to turn when she took a round to her barrel. The impact drove the wind from her lungs and threw Twilight to the deck where she slid to a halt in a rainbow pallet of congealing blood.

The plasma round sizzled against her armor, boiling away the top layers. It felt hot, but only for a short while as the magical ceramic in the armor cancelled out the energy of the plasma and saved her from third degree burns.

But she wasn’t watching the sparkling and sizzling of plasma on her armor. She had landed right next to Ishmir’s still body, and she stared at his broken visor for a moment. She couldn’t even see his face with the amount of blood that pooled in his helmet.

Turning her gaze she saw the brute who had nailed her standing one second, then with the roar of a shotgun the creature’s belly was torn away and the alien fell, replaced by Marko. The Spartan turned and continued laying into the Covenant stragglers. He had Twilight and Ishmir’s backs until the bitter end.

Staggering to her hooves and finding her pistol, Twilight looked up the last flight of stairs. At the top she spotted the chieftain who had ended Ishmir. Only instead of standing to face them, its back was turned as it made for the portal.

“No you fucking don’t,” Twilight snarled, running after it.

She made it up the stairs five at a time, her pistol letting out whisper quiet shots. The jackals who paused their retreats to turn and slow her down didn’t even have time to raise their wrist mounted shields. Each fell and tumbled down past Twilight as she put clean headshots through them. She only veered to avoid crashing into their tumbling bodies, leaping high to jump clean over the last one.

Giving her wings one mighty flap, Twilight Sparkle rose up like an angel of death and landed heavily on all fours before the portal in the center of the top platform. Dead aliens and broken sentinels littered the space, and ahead she saw the chieftain disappear into the portal.

She was about to run after it, thinking she was the last thing standing. Only then did the walking tank in her path move.

The hunter was a might blue armored behemoth. Usually one of a pair, the last hunter standing stood its ground beside the smoking remains of blue armor fused with the platform beside it. Surrounding the dead hunter were at least a dozen trashed sentinels.

The hunter still standing was wearing charred, blackened armor. Globs of orange blood and dead, withered eels pooled around its boots and the right arm, usually reserved for the fused fuel rod cannon, was missing entirely. But despite that the mighty behemoth still hefted its heavy arm-mounted shield and slammed it into the deck between Twilight Sparkle and the escaping brute chieftain.

In one final act of defiance, the wounded hunter let out a bellowing roar, the thousands of aliens in the colony making up the creature vibrating in perfect harmony.

Twilight Sparkle matched the roar with her own voice and threw her pistol into its holster before charging the beast.

As she built up speed, the bubble of purple energy forming around her picked up in intensity until finally she shot forth a beam of blinding light. The magic connected with the hunter, picking the giant up and throwing it backwards through the portal.

Only getting warmed up, Warlock plunged through the exit portal after it.

“Spartans never die.”

As Marko stepped through the portal, slouching under Ishmir’s dead weight, he had been expecting to see an ocean of carnage with a single alicorn standing among it.

What he saw did not disappoint.

A carpet of bodies littered the platform before the portal. The remains of a hunter lay eviscerated to one side, a little piece of armor melted into the deck here, a puddle of orange viscera there. The shield once mounted to the walking tank’s arm was shorn clean in two, laying discarded in a pool of blood.

Twilight Sparkle stood up to her belly in alien blood, her MA5C levitated to one side, her pistol hovering by the other side. The weapons bobbed as she breathed heavy to catch her breath. Her helmet smoked with a smoldering scorch mark along the side, and she was either ignoring the heat of the blast that had nearly taken her head off or she just didn’t care.

She focused on dumping empty or partially spent magazines and conjured full mags in their place before holstering the weapons to her sides again.

She lifted her gaze, but not to look at Marko. He figured the sight of Ishmir’s body was probably too painful to see. Instead the alicorn looked up to the sky to notice the air was clear of hostile fliers.

While Flintlock had been fighting in the planet’s core, the fight for Equestria on the surface hadn’t stopped.

High above them the princesses had done a real number on the Covenant carrier. It listed ever so slightly to one side. There were hull-fires, bright sparks of blue and purple showering from the errant blazes. One of the glowing engine pods was leaking what looked like coolant and some of the craft’s skeletal structure was visible under a few breached hull-plates.

Both Princesses Luna and Celestia came descending from the sky like Valkyries over the battlefield, landing carefully among the eviscerated corpses.

Luna trotted overlooking weary. The battle she had just waged had clearly been a tough one. Marko wondered if it compared to what Flintlock had just been through.

“Twilight Sparkle, are you-…” she began to say with her head held proud until her hoof kicked something soft. Looking down she balked from a jackal torn in two and cauterized by what could have only been an intense beam of magic. Her eyes travelled upward and finally rested the dead bodies sprawling out from where Twilight stood as if she were at the epicenter of the devastation.

In truth, she had been.

“By the creator.” Luna looked to her sister, almost as if begging for help. Celestia’s face was a mask of concern as she watched Twilight closely, but she said nothing.

The wail of thousands of tiny anti-gravity generators caught their ears. The ponies lifted their heads and looked to one side. Rising out of a crevasse between two flat forerunner structures came a hazy cloud of silver orbs.

Sentinels, the same kind that had forced the Covenant beyond the portal into a retreat, rose up in a sprawling formation like an enormous flock of migrating birds. The cloud of sentinels curled around one of the towers, then swarmed towards the Covenant ship.

The subsonic thrum of the struggling engines rumbled in Marko’s chest cavity as the ship began to maneuver in the opposite direction.

The sentinels moved to engage none the less, and pinpoint laser artillery swatted many of them out of the air. But repercussions took the form of hundreds of golden lances cutting into the ship’s weakened shields. Portions of the energy bubble failed and the alien alloy underneath boiled away while the Covenant limped into orbit.

The outline became hazy at first, before the Covenant carrier vanished entirely from view, escaping to where the sentinels could not follow. Their prey having out run them, the forerunner automatons turned and returned to the structure, streaming by like they had before on their attack run, and disappeared politely into the nooks and crannies of the sprawling alien facility.

“The chieftain?” Marko asked as he moved up beside Twilight.

Twilight Sparkle shook her head, then nodded to the Covenant ship had gone. “He got away.”

It was only then that Celestia and Luna saw the headhunter with the bloodied figure draped over his shoulders. The younger regal sister gasped, raising a hoof to her mouth.

“Oh, no. Spartan Ishmir. Is he…?” she paused, somehow unable to finish her sentence.

“He’s dead,” Marko said, his voice cracking. Were it not for that crack it would be impossible to discern the Spartan’s flat tone from icy sociopathy. Looking up he gave the sky the Covenant ship fled into a long glare. “It’s over.”

Twilight Sparkle shook her head in disagreement. “No. It’s not over.” She was trembling with rage. It was evident in her fiery gaze and cold voice. “It’s not over until every one of those fuckers is dead…”

Four days later…

The days that followed passed slower than the days in the panic of battle in Twilight Sparkle’s opinion. She realized this was probably because she would sometimes spend hours at a time staring at a disassembled weapon or piece of armor on the table in front of her.

It had been Marko or Spike who usually reached out and patted her, drawing her out of her trance. Usually when Spike caught her staring he offered a warm hug and offered to make some hot cocoa. When Marko caught her he gave her a light swat upside the head and asked if she needed extra mags or gun grease.

Twilight had no idea which was a greater comfort.

Life seemed to go on around her though. Construction companies moved into Ponyville and Canterlot to assist with the extensive repair of damage done by the Covenant. The Royal Guard were deployed in mass, still picking off the odd alien straggler hiding in the forest or searching for those still missing.

Twilight had not seen reports on how many had died, but she quickly lost count of the sobs and cries that would drift in through the open library window.

Her friends tried their best to stick around as much as possible, but Twilight didn’t blame them for having to take off. Fluttershy was still helping search for lost pets and livestock. Rarity had generously transformed the boutique into a temporary shelter for ponies whose homes had been completely destroyed, even sewing blankets and tents around the clock for ponies who didn’t fit in her overcrowded home. Even Applejack and Rainbow Dash opened their homes as temporary shelters and spent their days assisting the Royal Guard in the grisly task of tallying the missing and dead. Pinkie Pie was completely swept off her hooves as well, doing her best to keep ponies motivated as she helped with getting food to as many hungry bellies as possible.

Everypony was doing their part in Equestria’s rebound from a terrible attack. Twilight Sparkle sometimes felt guilty, cooped up in her library tinkering with guns and armor, or sometimes hiding on the balcony and quietly bawling her eyes out. Princess Celestia insisted Twilight take personal time though.

“You’ve been through enough to protect us all,” Celestia had said. “It’s our turn to take care of you for a while.”

The fourth day after the Battle for Equestria ended was the end of Twilight’s rest period. It wasn’t because Marko had gotten antsy, itching to do something violent. It was because Twilight couldn’t stand being cooped up anymore. She couldn’t sit idly by knowing the Covenant who had attacked them were still out there, escaping back home to tell their friends what had happened. How they had swept in, ruined the lives of innocent ponies and then just took off again without retribution.

Twilight Sparkle had seared the image of the brute chieftain in her brain. She demanded justice. She demanded his blood.

Standing over Ishmir’s memorial, she couldn’t help glare.

“You okay?” Marko asked shortly, his voice muffled against the inside of his helmet. He didn’t even turn to look at her, just kneeling by her and staring at the memorial.

“I’m fine,” Twilight responded just as shortly.

She read the words engraved on the simple stone obelisk again and again.

G314. M.I.A.

Missing in Action. Marko had insisted Ishmir be labelled as missing rather than killed. Something about Spartan tradition. Twilight wasn’t sure she understood fully. She realized there wasn’t very much she understood about Ishmir really. She didn’t know where he had grown up, how many friend she had before Marko…

It was not knowing the trivial things that hurt her the most.

Standing, Twilight Sparkle looked across Ponyville square and stepped out of the shadow of the statue that stood in the center. Ishmir’s body had been transported to Canterlot where Celestia presided over a military funeral. Ishmir had received the highest honors Equestria was fit to give. It was good enough for Marko.

They had wanted to erect a statue of the Spartan in the Canterlot Gardens too, but Marko had talked them out of it. Spartans preferred to keep things modest. So Mayor Mare of Ponyville elected to put a small memorial to the fallen in Ponyville square. Ishmir’s stone stood beside the many others who had lost their lives in the Battle for Equestria.

Approaching the tall alabaster figure waiting for them by town hall, Twilight flexed the unfamiliar weight of her new armor. She had worked on it four days straight with Marko’s help. It resembled the Semi Powered Infiltrator armor the headhunters wore. A suit of dark purple-ish blue, the same shade as in her mane and tail, covered her body from the neck down to her hooves. Slotted over the top were the interlocking plates of light lavender armor.

Marko hadn’t cared much for the paint-job, but Twilight Sparkle had insisted upon it. Ponies seemed to like garish, bright colors. For all he knew they thought olive green was for sissies.

Each impact plate had sleek, stealthy angles like Marko’s suit, and bulwarked Twilight’s body in a way that looked cumbersome and heavy for a pony, but she moved like it weighted nothing at all. Shards of armor covered over the limbs of her wings, leaving the feathers exposed.

Her helmet hung by her side, the golden visor that covered the region around her eyes tinted over. There were very few gaps, just articulation so she could move and a hole in the forehead of the helmet for her horn.

Princess Celestia felt naked, looking down at her former student, then let her eyes drift up to Marko’s visor.

“It’s time,” Twilight Sparkle announced. They had gone over this plan plenty of times before over the past few days. It was finally time to implement it.

And judging by her expression, Celestia was still in opposition as she had been when it was first suggested. “Are you sure you two wish to do this? There is no evidence to indicate the Covenant will be back.”

Twilight nodded. “There is no evidence to indicate they’ll never return either. I have to be sure. I need to protect my home.”

Celestia frowned, lowering her face to Twilight Sparkle’s level. “Is this about protecting Equestria, or is this about avenging your friend?”

“Both.”

Celestia’s gaze dipped, then straightening up she nodded and turned to Marko. “And you, Spartan Marko? I can probably hazard a guess you agree with this course of action?”

Marko didn’t move as he answered. “You’re pretty astute for a talking horse.”

Celestia ignored the joke and continued to say, “There is no need to looking for a fight if that is what you’re actually doing. You have a place here with us.” She glanced down to Twilight again. “This could be a one way trip. You could both die.”

“Die?” Marko interjected with a mirthless chuckle. “Spartans never die. We just go to hell to regroup.”

The princess sighed and nodded. “Very well. Prepare yourselves.”

As Celestia’s horn began to glow with golden light, Marko reached back and drew his shotgun across his chest. Twilight did similar with her magic, her fully loaded MA5C hovering diagonally across her front before levitating her helmet onto her head. They chambered rounds at the same time.

Standing ready, they watched Celestia’s eyes clench with focus.

“Remember the spell I taught you that will bring you back, Twilight sparkle,” Celestia re-affirmed through the strain of the spell she was casting.

“I remember.”

Celestia’s magic intensified as she reached out across the solar system to find her target. The Covenant carrier was only just on the edge of the solar system, even after all this time. They were limping by, the tendrils of Celestia’s targeted magic could see that much. But the hull was intact, and the Covenant aboard were still dangerous as ever.

It was too late to stop it though. Marko and Twilight had made their minds. There was no stopping them, and if Celestia didn’t help them target that alien ship for one last assault they’d only find another way to pursue their suicidal endeavor.

At least this way, with Celestia teleporting them one way, Twilight Sparkle would preserve her magic stores for the fight and hopefully a trip home.

Locking the target in, Celestia opened her eyes and threw her magic forward. Rings of golden light surrounded Marko and Twilight, slowly consuming them. And in a flash they vanished from Equis.

With his forces decimated and his ship falling apart around him, Chieftain Nerbyus opted for a more traditional jiralhanae style of command.

It involved a lot of shouting.

“How many left?” the chieftain roared, buckling a corridor panel under his fist.

“Thirty, chieftain,” the jiralhanae officer reporting troop numbers said, shuffling slightly. He was joined by three other jiralhanae in crimson armor, each looking as dejected and nervous as the one who spoke. “Not counting the unggoy servants we have armed just in case. We even lost all of the engineers.”

His army of little over a thousand had been reduced to a mere handful of warriors in only a short campaign. Nerbyus braced for worse news as he considered the state of his ship.

“How are repairs to the slip-space engines proceeding?”

“The external radiation shields on sub-level six need to be replaced before we can safely pass into slip-space. However the only EVA suits left undamaged are for kig-yar.”

“Then gather some of the jackals and send them out to effect repairs!”

The jiralhanae glanced at each other awkwardly before the officer delivering the report said, “They are all dead.”

Nerbyus stood in stunned silence for a while before he growled. So his handful of crew only consisted of his higher ranking jiralhanae and a few unggoy servants. On the one hand he didn’t have to deal with the typical kig-yar disciplinary problems anymore. But on the other hand…

“Send the unggoy,” Nerbyus finally said, turning away.

“But chieftain, their pressure suits are not rated for…”

“Send them anyway!” Nerbyus barked over his shoulder, making his underlings flinch. This was a side to their leader they had not yet seen.

Gone was the calm and collected chieftain built on the confidence of hundreds of successful campaigns against the humans. That chieftain had been broken, by only two demons and a hand-full of colorful equines no less. In his place stood an impatient, cracking leader desperate to request re-enforcements from Covenant space.

The Gods had forsaken Nerbyus, he was sure of it. And as he stepped onto the bridge it seemed the Gods were only just getting warmed up.

Firstly, much of his bridge staff were hard at work on their terminals. All of them were jiralhanae, minimal armor and armaments, relying on several unggoy servants who had been armed for bridge security. It was not a nice feeling knowing their fate lay in the clumsy paws of the small sub-creatures.

A feeling that grew worse as the worst trials the Gods had to offer materialized in the center of the bridge.

It started out with a glow. Golden ribbons of light strobed up the center of the bridge. The unggoy and jiralhanae stopped what they were doing to watch in awe as the light faded…

And standing in its place were an olive green demon and a purple armored equine.

All the warriors were stunned at the sight. Particularly the unggoy standing closest to the duo trembled, completely forgetting it had a weapon trained in their general direction.

The grunt’s armor-wetting terror reflected in Twilight’s visor as she stared. The building fear turned explosive a second later as the alicorn uttered a sharp, “Boo.”

The grunt bolted screaming, throwing its needler into the air. Twilight Sparkle immediately caught the weapon before aiming both her guns towards the chieftain.

Marko had his shotgun up at the same time, but a pair of brutes leapt between them and the chieftain. They didn’t have firearms, but drew blades from their belts and held the knives ready for a fight.

Nerbyus in the meantime backed out of the bridge, claws reflexively going for a weapon that wasn’t there. “Kill them!” the chieftain roared before turning and running the other way, presumably to the armory to arm himself.

Twilight and Marko took the order personally and made short work of the bridge crew. A hail of exploding energy shards tossed one brute into the ground as her assault rifle gouged through the few grunts milling about looking for a hiding place.

Marko systematically worked his way through the brutes with each gut-churning blast of his shotgun. He prioritized them based on proximity and let them come at him, ending every one of them before they came within stabbing distance. The mending wound in his shoulder throbbed with the memory of his last encounter with a knife wielding brute. He wasn’t going to make a habit out of getting stabbed.

“Right clear,” he commented a moment later.

“Left clear,” Twilight echoed.

Dropping the needler, Twilight levitated a fresh magazine into her weapon and racked the MA5C for good measure. Only when the ammo counter told her she had ‘32’ rounds ready to deal some death did she move to the door the chieftain had escaped through.

As if sensing her presence the doors parted down the middle and slid away. Marko took cover by the opposite side, and sharing a nod the duo stepped into the corridor beyond at the same time, weapons ready.

Pausing, Twilight took the time to peer across the ship’s unusual architecture. It was like the interior of the Kraken. The bulkheads were violet; or was that lavender? Strange patterns marbled the material, like the oily sheen of a beetle’s carapace. Whatever it was it didn’t seem to look right. The low lighting hurt Twilight Sparkle’s eyes and made it hard to focus, like stumbling through a woodland in the twilight hours of the day.

The lighting flashed, red dashes strobing slowly along the ceiling. There was an alert of some kind, and Twilight wasn’t sure if it was because she and Marko were tearing up hell on board, or because the ship was going to shit anyway.

“Contact!” the pony called suddenly.

A patrol of aliens rushed around the corner with weapons drawn. It surprised Twilight how they were all brutes. They must have butchered their way through all the other species aboard back on Equestria. It didn’t change her feelings though.

Rushing forward the duo opened fire. The Covenant returned fire. Only theirs was nowhere as accurate.

Twilight worked in short bursts, peering through the small smart-scope projected alongside her MA5C’s ammo counter. She’d pepper one brute, dip the barrel to sight the next one, aim and then pepper away again. Each rattle of the rifle popped and cracked helmets, then subsequently dropped an alien.

Diving into closer range, one brute with a short rifle let loose a stream of superheated spikes into Twilight’s face. Each of them glanced away, causing a purple barrier of light to flare around Twilight Sparkle’s body.

Sweat flooded her body as Twilight struggled and exerted herself just to keep the shield raised. Short bursts she could deflect with ease, but anything sustained quickly sapped her strength. Luckily the brute didn’t seem to realize this and quickly held fire, as if trying to conserve ammo.

Cocking its weapon back, the brute lunched forward and stabbed violently with the twin bayonets affixed to the weapon. Twilight ducked sideways though letting the alien stumble past her. Aiming her rifle down, Twilight stepped around the brute then turned and emptied her mag into its back.

The brute’s armor cracked and the creature fell howling to the deck.

At the same time Marko’s shotgun gave one last roar sending a hail of buckshot over Twilight’s head. The blast caught a brute leaping onto her back mid-air, flinging the creature into a wall where it bounced before falling to the ground.

Feeding some shells into his M90, Marko led Twilight onward, checking his helmet readouts.

“I’m detecting a source of radiation down this way,” he commented, turning a corner.

Twilight switched magazines and followed to a set of doors at the end of the corridor.

They entered the next room. It was a vast space and descended three decks under them, made accessible by the crisscross bridges and gantries spider webbing across the room. A cylinder land the length of the chamber and red light pulsed along its length, like a liquid sloshing back and forth.

Ahead leaned up against one of the support struts holding the cylinder vertical was a smooth angled surface – a control panel at the looks of it. On its surface were tiny symbols; glowing green dots, bars and squares.

“This is the source of the radiation,” Marko commented. “I’m guessing it’s the slip-space drive core.”

“It’s big. It’s glowing. It looks important.”

“Let’s blow it up,” Marko said, reading Twilight’s mind.

Scrambling forward, the duo took up positions around the console and Twilight took a crack at the ciphers. It wasn’t anything like ancient Equestrian, but there were some odd similarities. Like the Covenant numerals were based around the forerunner glyphs they had encountered back on Equestria.

There was some fiddling and fidgeting and finally Twilight lifted her head a little.

“Ah! I think this is the control panel for the core’s cooling system.” She punched a glyph and a moment later gouts of steam hissed from several conduits at the top of the core. Hazard lights brightened and an alien alarm began to cry out. “Temperature climbing. I forsee exploding Covenant ship in the near future.”

“How long do you think it’ll take this thing to explode?” Marko asked, and Twilight Sparkle thought for a moment.

“At the rate of temperature climb… I give it thirty minutes.”

Looking down to a gantry below Marko spotted a response patrol of brutes moving below them, searching. “Think we have time to hunt that chieftain down?”

Twilight was already mantling over the platform’s guard rail. “Only one way to find out.”

She dropped hooves first into hell, followed closely by Marko. her wings spread, Twilight directed her body straight onto the back of one of the brutes, then holding on to the stumbling alien and riding it like a bucking bronco she brought her assault rifle and blasted two other brutes in the face while passing.

Marko fell on the last brute, snapping it’s spine with the impact, then brought his boot on its skull for good measure. At the same time Twilight levitated the barrel of her rifle into the flailing brute’s mouth and squeezed off a short burst before riding the creature to the deck.

Fire swatted their shields, identifying the next set of enemies for them. A trio of brutes on one side of the gantry sealed a door leading out of the core room, then took up defensive positions by the set of support struts holding the platform above them in place.

Further up the gantry another pair of brutes had appeared and gunned for the duo. Marko and Twilight Sparkle immediately divided to conquer. Twilight made for the two brutes assaulting them while Marko moved to uproot the aliens defending the exit.

Tucking, Twilight rolled onto her flank and surfing a spray of sparks she slid behind a support strut for cover. Ahead the brutes were just as careful, seeking out hard cover before popping up to take shots at the alicorn.

As they danced from side to side, pelting bursts of fire at each other, Marko systematically marched towards the brute’s securing the exit. His first blast dropped the first brute to one knee. He quickly pumped the next shell into the chamber and polished the creature off before aiming up slightly.

One of the brutes taking cover whipped out with a fully charged plasma pistol and let loose a wavering ball of energy. At this range it was impossible to dodge and the high yield plasma bolt clipped Marko’s shoulder. The Spartans tumbled, reeling from the blow. But at the same time he still held out his shotgun in one hand and squeezed off a shot.

The buckshot caught the brute in the throat and the gargling scream from the alien was louder than the wailing alarms in Marko’s helmet indicating his shields were dead. Normally he would have dived for cover but there was none, and there wasn’t any time.

He shifted right to sight the last brute taking cover on the opposite flank of the gantry, struggling to bring his off-hand forward to rack the next shell into the chamber of the M90 CAWS. The brute already had its grenade launcher levelled though.

The weapon let out a thud and Marko caught a bone shattering explosion in the chest. His armor felt like it cracked clean open and the force of the blow pushed all the air out of his lungs. He left the ground for a good few seconds then slammed onto his back, sliding to a halt with smoke rising from his blackened armor.

Catching the sight in the corner of her eye, Twilight backed into cover and watched him slide to a halt on his back.

“Marko!” she screamed before pushing forward though.

Breaking cover she ignored the flash of plasma evaporating against her shield and sighted one of the brutes, putting it down with a neat shot through the eye-slit in its helmet. She swiveled to the other, but it backed into cover and there would be no telling when the alien would pop out again.

Without any patience to waste, Twilight plucked a grenade from her gear and pegged it down the gantry with an under-hoofed throw. She didn’t stick around to watch what happened, but while running to Marko the sound of an alien howl following the loud thump of the explosion told her the grenade’s single mission had succeeded.

Marko had sat up in the meantime, just enough to prime one of his own grenades and throw it at the last brute. The device bounced then hit true, exploding between the brute’s feet.

Armor charred and one leg missing, the alien splattered into the deck, exposed so Twilight could put a burst into it for good measure as she slid into position next to Marko.

The Spartan reached up and grabbed one of the gantry’s railings, pulling himself into a seated position. He looked down and like Twilight Sparkle, suddenly realized the extent of the damage.

His armor had indeed cracked and split open. Second and third degree burns had boiled off the liquid-ballistic layer under the plating. The bones of his rib cage were exposed, and deeper, black congealing blood pooled.

Dropping her rifle Twilight conjured a healing spell and wrapped Marko’s wounds. He winced, then breathlessly reached out to touch her horn, stopping her. He shook his head, knowing what she knew only less afraid to admit it.

“Marko, no.” Twilight’s voice broke as she forced the words out through the lump in her throat. “Don’t leave me, Marko. Not you too. Please don’t leave.”

Marko coughed, watching his own bio-signs on his HUD. They were going crazy, which was strange. He didn’t feel different. A little winded maybe. He couldn’t even feel anything.

“Sorry… Warlock…”

“No, don’t go. Don’t go Marko. Please.” Twilight Sparkle sidled in a little closer feeling something sting in her eyes. “Marko, I’m scared.”

“It’s okay… it’s okay to be scared…” Marko’s hand bobbed awkwardly to one side, and for a moment Twilight thought he was losing motor function. But that was when he closed his fingers around the hilt of his knife and pulled the blade free. Flipping it between his fingers, he pressed the handle to Twilight’s chest. “It’s… okay, Warlock.”

Gently reaching up, she touched his hand with her hoof. Through his armor he could feel she was trembling.

His visor de-polarized, turning clear to reveal a small comforting smile under the young human’s tired eyes. “Ish and I will see you at the last rally point… Spartan.”

He let out a quiet breath and his arm turned weak, slipping from Twilight’s grip and falling to the deck with a soft clang. His head rolled forward, chin against his chest and Marko-G301 died.

Hanging her head, Twilight Sparkle let tears flood her helmet. She didn’t make a sound bar the sharp inhale between her silent sobs. The princess always knew what to do. Always knew how to approach a friendship problem. Always had a plan when it all went to shit.

She had even developed an entirely new set of skills for application when friendship didn’t do the trick. But there and there she was lost. She didn’t know what to do anymore.

Until an explosion tore her back to the real world. Blinking away tears and licking the salty water from her lips, Twilight looked up to see the slip-space core was destabilizing.

Explosions tore chunks out of the sides and gouts of flame and plasma shot from the breaches like foam from a shaken soda can.

Setting her jaw, Twilight Sparkle took a shuddering breath and looked at Marko knife in her hoof. She tucked it away into her gear. Reaching out she briefly touched her hoof to his helmet, then she turned to glare at the exit.

In the corridor just outside the sealed pressure door, two brutes glanced at each other uncomfortably. The sounds of battle inside had faded, but now the loud explosions and vibrations of the deck were starting to worry them.

Then a purple glow they didn’t know what to make of enveloped the door.

A second later Twilight Sparkle’s magic exploded, tearing the doors asunder and throwing the brutes backwards.

Galloping through the smoke and debris the armored equine swung Marko’s shotgun around in an aura of her magic, unloading a shell into the nearest brute’s head. Spinning around, Twilight levitated the barrel of the shotgun against the other brute’s chin with enough to force it up into a kneeling position.

Painting the ceiling with its brain, Twilight quickly fed the weapon some shells, knowing suddenly why Marko had favored the weapon so.

Chaos reigned inside the Covenant ship. Charging, Twilight fought her way through a maze of interlocking corridors. She lost track of the sharp turns she made. She definitely lost track of the body count.

Adding to the fray were exploding conduits, deck and wall panels fell away and geysers of steam and fire filled some of the corridors making them impassable. With ever shake of the deck, with every explosion the slip-space core inched closer to catastrophic meltdown and subsequent destruction. For a moment Twilight thought she might die on that ship, because there was no way in hell she was leaving before she beat the brute chieftain to death with her bare hooves.

Finally after what felt like hours of running and gutting the sporadic little parties of disoriented brutes, Twilight sighted her target.

Chieftain Nerbyus had descended into a calm, like he had suddenly accepted this would be his fate. He was facing Twilight a she approached him in an empty corridor. One hand rested on the hilt of his mighty hammer.

“This ends one of two ways, fuck-face!” Twilight screamed, halting in front of him, just beyond his hammer’s reach. “Either I walk out of here, your teeth hanging from a string around my neck, or I die with my hoof down your fucking throat!”

Nerbyus huffed, drawing the hammer from his back and transferring its weight into a two-handed grip. “Come then, vermin. Have your resolution.”

Twilight cocked the shotgun loudly and charged with a scream.

Nerbyus let her come, waiting until the last moment before swinging his hammer around. The weapon swept horizontally, but Twilight ducked in time and pressed the shotgun to the chieftain’s abdominal armor.

The gun let out a roar and the brute stumbled backwards. The armor breached, blood streaming from the holes the blast had left, but it was only a scratch as far as Nerbyus was concerned. He let the force pushing him back from the pony work to his advantage, swinging the hammer up in one hand then bringing it straight down on Twilight.

The princess quickly rolled to one side to avoid and the weapon buckled the deck plates where it landed.

A shockwave emanated from where the hammer struck and plucked Twilight from her hooves. She was flung sideways hard enough that she bounced off the wall when she made full contact.

Slumping to the deck, Twilight quickly found her hooves and locked onto the chieftain again. He found his balance again and raised the hilt of the hammer defensively, searching for an opening to strike at Twilight again.

She didn’t give him the chance.

Leaping sideways, the pony slammed her hooves into the nearest wall and bounced off, propelling her like an armored bullet at the brute. Her front hoof hooked around and caught Nerbyus in the side of the face. The blow caught the chieftain entirely off guard and forced him to pirouette.

As the brute was falling, Twilight Sparkle’s body corkscrewed and she raised a hind leg, catching the alien in the face again with an armored hoof.

Nerbyus crashed into the deck as Twilight landed lightly beside him. The chieftain wasn’t out of the fight though. Scrambling on all fours the brute roared and tackled the princess.

She landed hard on her back, feeling pain shoot through one of her wings as it folded awkwardly under the heavy angles of her armor. Her gasp for breath was her last for the moment as the brute brought the shaft of his hammer down and pressed it under her chin and against her throat.

Twilight gagged, struggling to breathe as pain lanced through her throat. The building pressure of blocked blood vessels only pressed harder on her crushed windpipe and made her head spin. Black borders formed around her vision as her sight tunneled.

She tried to push off with her hooves but the brute’s weight was overwhelming. Grinning wickedly, Nerbyus threw more of his weight on the hammer. Twilight felt something pop and she closed her eyes though.

Swimming in darkness, she focused her magic as best she could. It wasn’t easy without knowing which way was up. But somehow – be it luck or just a lifetime of practice with magic – she managed.

A purple glow caught the hilt of Nerbyus’ hammer and he looked down with some surprise. Slowly but surely the hilt of the weapon started to rise. A rush of air whistled into Twilight’s lungs as she gasped for breath.

A second later Nerbyus noticed a similar glow settled around the sidearm holstered under the alicorn’s wing.

The weapon came free and let loose three shots into the brute’s head. But each bullet only cracked the chieftain’s helmet. But in his hasted to back out of the way, Twilight was able to levitate the hammer up higher and lift the heavy alien off her.

Nerbyus tugged at his weapon, but despite the alicorn rubbing her sore throat and still catching her breath, Twilight Sparkle’s grip was firmer than his.

The pommel end of the shaft swung up and hit Nerbyus in the side of the head. As he stumbled the shaft levelled and the hilt drove forward, cracking the chieftain across the throat.

His time to gasp and choke, Nerbyus felt his grip slip from the weapon and he could only watch in horror as Twilight’s magic swung the business end of the weapon. It made contact with Nerbyus’ head a second later.

Time seemed to slow as the brute was lifted off his feet and thrown sideways. His head was turned with whiplash velocity as the cheek-bones making up the alien’s facial structure splintered and buckled. Jaw dislocated, several splintered and bloody teeth flew through the air.

The chieftain was driven into a wall where the force of the impact re-located his jaw. He slumped to the deck and lay still, dazed and clinging to mere shreds of consciousness.

Twilight gave the alien’s gravity hammer a brief inspection, then considering it a heavy, clumsy weapon tossed it down the corridor. Opting for a more hooves-on approach, the alicorn jumped on her prey and with one hoof holding on to the chieftain’s collar she cocked back her opposite foreleg.

The armored hoof came down to make contact with Nerbyus’ face. Slowly at first, she made long drawn out strikes. Then as her fury grew, Twilight’s jabs became faster and shorter. Teeth shattered and shrapnel of bone cut the creature’s tender, pulped face.

By the time she was reducing the chieftain’s flat nose to the consistency of year-old paint that had congealed in a shed over a hot summer, Nerbyus began to laugh. Twilight thought it was pleas for mercy at first, and ignored the low rumbling sound. Then as she slowed down, muting the wet smacks of her hoof pummeling his battered and bloody face, Twilight Sparkle heard the chieftain’s chuckle rise into muffled, thick laughter.

Sneering, Twilight pulled him into a sitting position. “What’s so fucking funny!?”

Nerbyus paused for breath before he spoke. It was hard, his jaw was broken and his fattened lips poured blood. No doubt there were tooth fragments in his tongue as well. It was a miracle he was at all intelligible.

“It is over for you, puny creature.” He shook, chuckling again. “More Covenant are on their way. They will find me, and I will lead them back to your world. Your planet and its forerunner secrets will be ours!”

“Maybe. Maybe more Covenant will come and pick a fight. But consider this.” Twilight wrapped a band of magic around the brute’s throat and squeezed. “One puny creature just slaughtered your army and destroyed your ship.” A curtain of energy slid down her visor, turning the gold tint transparent as it went to reveal her daggers glare. “Imagine what a whole planet of puny creatures prepared for your return will be capable of.”

Moving her face closer to his, Twilight added, “But you won’t be coming back to Equis. You’ll be on your great journey.” Her magic reached back and touched the hilt of Marko’s custom knife, pulling it from her gear and levitating it in front of Nerbyus’ face. “In fact, I’ll send you on your way right now.”

Twilight was all over the brute’s limp body, wrapping her forelegs around his head to get a good grip as her knife plunged in and tore from side to side with brutal sawing motions. The chieftain’s body convulsed for most of the activity as Twilight Sparkle calculated the logistics of what she was performing and continued mercilessly, trying and exploring as she went.

Eventually she figured out the trick to it and with a few last sawing motions, twisted sharply and then fell away with a wet pop.

Stepping back from the chieftain’s body, Twilight Sparkle tucked the knife away and levitated Nerbyus’ severed head in front of her. Tiredly she wondered if headhunters really made a habit of doing this. It wasn’t exactly easy… or efficient. Or maybe it just required a little practice.

Pulling a face, Twilight nonchalantly dropped the chieftain’s head to the deck and gathered her magic. With a flash of purple she teleported away, back to Equestria.

And as if fate had choreographed it all, the Covenant carrier exploded literally a second later.

WARLOCK

Several months later…

The earth cracked as if yielding to his steel hooves. The air around him wavered with heat emanating from the hellish power within him. The grass in his wake died as if snuffed out of existence by the mere proximity of his black heart.

Even without alicorn magic, Tirek was nearly at full power. He had consumed nearly every drop of magic in Equestria. The centaur was so close to ultimate power, he wouldn’t let anything stand in his way. Not the ponies and their friendship. Not poor deluded Discord. Not even Equestria’s newest little princess.

Only one remained. One alicorn left to consume and he would be unstoppable.

“Princess Twilight!” the centaur bellowed. “You have something that belongs to me!”

He swung a hammer-like fist around and smashed it through a tree, sending splinters scattering like embers over sand. Charging his magic, Tirek gathered his power into an orb balanced between his horns and unleashed a beam of fiery destruction. It cut a clean swathe through the ground, starting a small wildfire that spread over a small knoll.

Through it all it was a miracle anypony could hear the screams of despair coming from the citizens of Ponyvile. But over the racket of destruction a single, clear voice cried out and caught Tirek’s ear.

“Hey, fuck-face!” it yelled without breaking or wavering. “Over here!”

Turning, Tirek looked towards a field on the edge of town. Standing there as if she had appeared out of thin air stood a single pony, fearlessly answering his challenge.

She was puny by comparison to the princesses Tirek had sent to Tartarus. Even more so in Tirek’s looming presence. But she did not falter. She even wore the faintest glimmer of a smirk.

The small lavender alicorn lit up her horn. The purple light spread in little bioluminescent slivers, sliding down across her coat and connecting to her cutie mark which began to glow with the intensity of a sun.

Then they appeared. A second skin the shade of her dark made slid across her body, wrapping around her neck and covering her down to her hooves. The armored plates followed suit, materializing out of thin air and interlocking to leave only gaps where her body needed the articulation. The eldritch suit of matte purple was completed by several segments of armor sliding over her jawline, folding across her muzzle to hide her smirk, wrapping up around her temples and covering her head, leaving only a gap around her eyes and some space for her horn to protrude from the forehead.

A jigsaw of glass built up over her eyes before the screen polarized to gold, sealing the young princess in a sleek suit of armor; transforming her into part tank, part warrior goddess.

Finally an MA5C assault rifle popped into existence by her side, and Princess Twilight Sparkle gave the charging handle a telekinetic yank.

“Let’s dance, fucker.”

The End

Author's Note

Heroes get remembered.
Legends never die.

To everyone who read the FLINTLOCK Saga; thank you for joining me on this great journey. It’s been a ride; and if at least one of you was entertained along the way then it’s all been worth it.

Stay dangerous, friends.

Your pal,

~ PseudoFiction

LEGENDARY

Deep in the flickering darkness the lights stabilized. The colossal forerunner structure, silent for untold millennia, suddenly came to life with a low hum.

The forges heated as their lights came on. Within moments the optimum heat was reached and they engaged.

Several lines of machines the size of starships spewed a rivers of molten alloy into the air. This liquefied metal arced up and then cascaded into hollow towers that pulsed with bioluminescent strands. Molds were cast, cooled, tempered and instantly cracked open. From the bottom pieces of fabricated plates, armor and other bits of equipment were rolled out on glowing treadmills of light.

Parts were then carried into assembly machines, thousands of little arms cooperating to cut the plates apart and reconfigure them into a plethora of machines that were then levitated onto the rows upon rows of shelves and cubbyholes lining the planet’s inner walls.

The forge had sparked to life and the space was filled with the roar of construction and fabrication.

But in one corner of the seemingly infinite space of complicated fabrication and activity was a little hovel of quietness. Far away from the thrum of machines and the screech of cutting metal was a small pile of disused equipment and debris. It had collapsed, as if at one point a long time ago served as a little fort.

Among the debris a small broken sphere of forerunner alloy began to twitch. The pile shifted and one of the girders forming the peak of the pile slid away.

A single amber eye flickered slowly to life, and the monitor gently awoke from hibernation…