Now, I know you're all wondering why I've called you all here today, and I promise you won't be disappointed!

Cicadas and crickets sang their nightly song as mist draped over all below the clouds. Wind blew gently. Trees, mostly pines, shook in that reverberating chorus they seemed to always sing. The air smelled of salt, as always. Pine sap, too. Sulfur. Ozone. Zinc.

Crumbles, a Knight in the ranks of the Steel Rangers, Trottingham Chapter, sighed through her broken helm. She, in full power armor, was halfway through a cement wall, unable to feel most of her body, with the vaguest notion that her lungs were getting a little tighter with every breath. They, her squad, had been out on a routine patrol, as per usual, when they had been directed to respond to a sudden alarm coming from a cluster of buildings in the woods. Likely had been a town, way back then. The higher-ups thought it might've been some Ranger personnel who had gone MIA two weeks back, using whatever they could to signal for help. Boy, were they wrong.

The racket of gunfire and screams picked up again, nearby this time. She breathed. In. Marsh. Wood. Sap. Ironic, she thought, how she'd be dying in a place so full of life. She'd been living most her life in a dead land, so, in a way, she preferred this over dying back home, on some flooded farmland barely scraping by under the constant rain plaguing most of mainland Equestria.

An explosion, flesh tearing apart wetly, bones broken and flung like and with the shrapnel of fragmentation grenades. She breathed. Out. In. Sap. Sulfur. Zinc. Blood. She was fairly certain her lungs were punctured. Maybe something in her throat was torn? It was hard to tell, what with having a broken spine and all.

The shooting stopped. Metal clang. A tree falls. Screams. Different screams. Stonethicket's screams. A crunch. Growls. Wet slurps and meaty tears. A wretching from something higher. Something fluid hitting something meaty. No more screams. Just those damnable alarms, loud, blaring, looping. They had fallen for it. The other Rangers from the other week probably had too.

She breathes, one last time. Out. In. Out. Her helmet light shines prettily on the mossy ground, she thinks.

A minute prior, Stonethicket, also a Knight, fully adorned in a rather well-kept suit of mechanized metal and tech, was biting down hard, eyes squinted as the blinding yellow and red flashes coming from his side-mounted minigun contrasted with the heavy dark around. A cascade of ghouls were pouring in from the woodwork, screaming and wailing as they stampeded right into a river of lead. Bodies were piling and he was having to blast through falling corpses just to hit the ghouls behind. All the while he stayed mobile, backing toward a metal exit door as the ghouls pushed him down the thin hallway. The only light came from his headlamp and his minigun. The shadows stabbed at the light with every flash. The screams only grew louder. The irradiated abominations he was mowing down weren't dying immediately. More came. More fell. More screams.

The minigun, its barrels glowing with unfeeling wrath (and, you know, the heat from all the bullets going through them), only stopped for a moment as Stonethicket's shoulder-mounted grenade launcher lobbed a volley into the crowd. He turned around and bolted as the explosives went off in a cacophony of percussive beats. He rammed the door, heart racing wild, and was wishing Crumbles hadn't, well, crumbled so soon. He hadn't seen what had hit her, but she was the energy weapon specialist. Her guns and munitions incinerated organic and inorganic matter alike, and, well, were damn good at killing ghouls. His guns were best suited for the living. Killing what was already mostly dead was considerably-

A loud, magnified, blaring beep was the only herald to the tremendous whollop he was then subjected to. Something broke somewhere, or maybe a lot of things, and his HUD went dark. His adjusting eyes weren't able to see the silently sprinting and sloshing horde making their way over to his body. He was making noise. Quite a bit, really. Something had broken somewhere, and while his suit's lights were out, his weren't.

There was a small garage at the edge of the little ruined town. Once it had been a mechanic's shop of some kind. Rusting tools littered the floor and engines and other old bits and bobs were all stacked neatly on shelves, in boxes, or on the ground in rows. A dinky little lightbulb hanging from the ceiling flickered now and then, casting everything in a dulled, yellow-brown light. The garage door, which had recently been shut by the press of a button, was splattered in fresh, crimson blood. The front half of a unicorn stallion was sprawled out inside. The back half, outside, was being quietly torn apart by the horde of ghouls.

A stack of chairs blocked the door the rest of the interior of the shop. Huddled in the back corner of the garage was a terrified Field Scribe, who had just watched her senior Scribe get dragged back under a closing garage door not five minutes ago, and was not daring to make a single sound. The third Knight, still alive and well, was sitting in the other back corner of the garage, side-mounted anti-material rifle aimed at the pile of chairs, headlamp off, radio off, helmet speaker off. Mistakes were made. Someone had to survive to pass the info along. "Oh! There's a thing in the woods, and a bunch of ghouls too! Do anything and you're dead!" The official report would have to come later, once they got out of the current mess.

It started raining not too long after. The pittering of water on the tin roof of the garage made it hard to hear the sloshing and the shuffling fading away deeper into the mire. A fluttering of wings and a shaken branch briefly sounded, dismissed as a bird by the horde. Maximus, the small griffon who had just glided off, had heard more than he had seen. The smell was...something he wouldn't be able to forget. There'd be news in the town of Mirelight, just a few miles south, before dawn. "Trottingham Rangers Torn To Tids and Tads!" The tiny bird would have chuckled at the stupid headline idea had sound been less of a concern. Right then, he was focused on getting into what was left of the Griffish Isles as fast and quietly as he could. Only a few towns had held out, after all the years, and someone had to get stories for the paper.

And so the night moved on. Cicadas and crickets sang their nightly song as mist draped over all below the clouds. Wind blew gently. Trees, mostly pines, shook in that reverberating chorus they seemed to always sing. The air smelled of salt, as always.

Author's Note

I said I'd be making more bird content.

Well, here I go.