Anomaly site 3139-15, Priority Beta
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Operation Eversun

Anomaly site 3139-15, Priority Beta

Operation: Eversun

Objective: Investigate site 3139-15 for possible anomalies/report findings to Command/capture anomaly if possible.

Lead agent: Grey Granite.

Mission Briefing: At approximately 04:00 hours ES, several residents of Ponyville reported seeing strange distortions and lights in the Everfree Forest. A.M.I.C.A. Command was notified at 05:13 ES, and immediately launched a full investigation. After questioning the local populace, the location of the sightings was discerned. Preliminary scans of the area show no unusual activity, further investigation must be done by a ground team. A team from task force TR-14 "First things First" Will be sent to scout the area for possible anomalies, and capture or eliminate if possible.

A bitter Autumn wind blew through Agent Lynch's short blonde mane, and across his dusky orange coat, chilling the parts of his bulky frame that weren't clad in the black bodysuit he wore over most of his body. It wasn't quite cold enough to warrant winter gear, but it was still cold enough to send shivers up the spine. Or perhaps it was his own nervousness. Agent Lynch was a veteran of nearly two dozen other operations exactly like this one, but his uneasiness while out on supposedly 'routine' investigations like this had never gone away, sure they had subsided over time, but the shakes still came over him now and again.

The Everfree was beautiful this time of year, the trees clad in golden and fiery orange. Every once in a while, a fresh gust of wind would blow a few leaves from the higher branches, which only added to the wonder of the scene. Of course, the black clad ponies moving along the path were hardly interested in sightseeing.

There were ten agents, spread out over about 100 meters. All moved with a cautious, purposeful gait. Every one of them carefully picking their way along the path or through the dense underbrush near it.

The agent at the front of the procession raised his hoof and signaled halt. The agents fanned out to cover all directions, moving with perfect precision to cover every square meter of ground. The lead agent signaled for Lynch to come to him, and the other agents adjusted their formation flawlessly.

The lead agent; a unicorn with a pale blue mane and a dull grey coat, took a map from his pocket and began studying it as Lynch moved up to join him.

"Problem sir?" Lynch whispered. It never hurt to take chances, especially in the Everfree.

"Sort of. By my reckoning, we should have reached the location of the anomalous activity twenty minutes ago, and yet I see nothing." He also spoke quietly, his voice barely carrying past Lynch's ears.

"Maybe there's nothing here to find?" Lynch sounded rather hopeful, but at the same time, a hint of worry was creeping into his voice.

"Maybe, but we're gonna triple-check every square inch of this place anyway, I don't want this trip to be for nothing, and besides, we're carrying a suspicious amount of gear for there to be nothing here." The 'gear' he was speaking of was the equipment carried by each of the mix of earth pony and unicorn agents in the group. Every one of the unicorns had a class 2 "Sparkler" Magic enhancer, designed to increase the ability of a unicorn's magical abilities. to the point where they could control localized pulses that acted as potent misslies. The earth ponies were equipped with shoulder mounted combustion weapons. Designed to fire magically enhanced rounds.

"Hmm. Could we have been turned around?" Lynch doubted this, but didn't want to rule it out.

"Possible, but unlikely. We've been following this same path, and according to this map, and Command, it leads in the direction of the anomaly. We should have seen signs of it by now." Granite was calm, the epitome of self-control, and Lynch envied him for that.

"Then it has to be around here somewhere." Lynch whispered suspiciously.

"Yeah." Snow said simply. He then touched his hoof to his neck to turn on his radio's mic. "Agents, we're right on top of ground zero, so fan out and search. You find a whisper of something suspicious, you call it in right away. Copy?"

All of the agents signaled their acknowledgement, and began spreading out to encompass a large area of space without losing sight of each-other. Their heads slowly sweeping back and forth like security cameras, hunting for their quarry. They struck out to the left, leaving the path to search for whatever it was they were looking for.

Lynch was on the left flank of the formation, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. The forest was quiet, too quiet. They should have run into some sort of animal by now, but there didn't seem to be any intelligent life in the entire area.

"Granite?" Lynch said into his radio bead.

"What is it? You see anything suspicious?" Granite muttered back, his voice slightly distorted by the radio.

"No, I don't see anything, and that's why I'm suspicious."

"What do you mean?"

"I haven't seen or heard a single animal in almost twenty minutes. Not even a squirrel or bird. It's definitely not cold enough for everything to be gone."

"You're right. Be on guard, we're getting close."

'As if I hadn't been doing that before.' Lynch muttered to himself as he rolled his eyes and continued sweeping the area in front of him.

After about twenty minutes of walking, Lynch caught a stench on the air. The smell of rot and disease carried over the wind like a fetid mist. Lynch could tell that the others were smelling it too. Finally, the team walked into a clearing. It was like a great brown scar on the landscape. Everything inside it was dead and rotting. The smell of decaying plant matter and rancid flesh hung over the area like a putrid miasma of corruption.

"What the buck happened here?" One of the unicorn agents asked with evident alarm. Everyone was surprised by the enormous size of the clearing, and even more so by the rank odor emanating from it. The size of the rotted area was huge, easily 150 meters across.

"How could the pegasi have missed something like this?" Lynch asked Granite incredulously.

"They wouldn't have, unless it was too recent for them to have seen it." Granite replied darkly.

"What? That's impossible! It would take more than a day for something to rot like this!" Lynch spoke as if such a thing was insane, oblivious to the fact that Granite himself had seen stranger things happen.

"Trust me Lynch, the longer you do this job, the stranger things get. I'd be willing to bet this is our problem." Granite spoke with an almost paternal authority. Lynch seemed to calm down, then nodded his head.

"Good, I'm gonna call Command and see if they can get us some eyes in the sky."

"Command? This is lead agent Grey Granite of scout team Cursores."

"Reading you loud and clear agent Granite. Send it, over."

"We've come across what appears to be a giant clearing, but everything is rotted to crap. Did the scouts see anything like that in the area?"

"Negative Cursores lead, no breaks or clearings were reported when the scouting run was made."

"Well then we might have a problem. We're in a clearing filled with stuff that looks like it's been dead quite awhile."

"Roger Cursores, continue your mission and report and report any unusual findings. Over."

"Wilco. Cursores out." Granite let out an angry sigh once Command was off.

"Something wrong sir?" Asked one of the earth pony agents standing near him.

"Nothing unusual. Command wants us to do something, but leaves the how to me."

"Isn't that how it always is?"

"Yep, just another day on the job. Anyway, we have to figure out what did this, so spread out and search for clues. If we don't find anything inside twenty minutes we move on. Get to it." The agents spread themselves across the dead clearing to begin their investigation. Lynch began trotting for the northern edge, but stopped short when he saw a strange color a midst the depressing browns and blacks of the dead trees.

As Lynch drew close to it however, he began to wish he hadn't noticed it. The object was symmetrical, and about as long as his hoof, with a strange elongated kite-like shape. This wasn't what made it disturbing though, what scared him was the color. It was a sickly, mottled green, the color of pallid flesh, the diseased looking brown and black spots spaced across it only added to its putrescent look. Lynch was about to touch it, but then thought better of it and radioed for their resident egghead.

"Milli? It's Lynch. I've got something I need you to check out." He said evenly.

"I swear to Celestia, if you are trying to come on to me again I am going to beat you like a drum." Came the angry voice of Milli through the ear bead. Lynch had tried to date her in high school, and been shot down every time. Yet cruel fate had decided that they join the Equestrian military academy the same year, graduate the same year, be placed in the same guard platoon on the same watch at the same time, and be selected for acceptance into the agency at the same time. Now another strange joke was being played on the both of them, and the punchline was: the radios were set on the squad channel.

"Uhm no. I have an object here that I can't identify, and since your the one who knows everything, I figured you could ejumucate a dumb earth pony like me." Lynch now spoke sarcastically, he was always fond of making a little fun at her expense.

"Be happy to. What is it?" She replied with a falsely cheerful tone.

"What part of can't identify?" Lynch asked obviously.

"I'm on my way. Try not to break it before I get there." She muttered irritably.

Grey Granite was searching on the other side of the clearing debating whether to say something to either of them, but he decided that the best thing to do was to let the others have their little laugh. As long as it wasn't disruptive to the mission, there wasn't any harm in a little fun.

"Let me see what you've got there." said Milliliter with a slight sigh. She levitated the object up, looking it over with a discerning eye.

"It's a dragon scale. Strange, I don't think I've ever seen a color like that." She said after a moment of examination.

"What do you think?" Lynch asked as he looked out into the forest.

"I don't know, it's not much different from a dragon scale, but the color is off, and it just looks wrong." Milli seemed more interested than afraid.

"Think it's worth taking?" Lynch asked.

"Might as well." Milliliter took a small plastic bag out of a pouch at her side and placed the scale inside before sealing it and putting it back in the pocket.

"Granite? This is Lynch." Lynch said into his mic as Milliliter sauntered away.

"Go ahead."

"I've found a dragon scale in all this dead crap."

"Great. This is important how?" Granite asked, annoyed.

"Milliliter says it isn't right, it looks rotted and sickly. It's not normal."

"Well, come on back anyway, we're about to get out he-. The hell?" The last part took Lynch by surprise. Granite was never startled, Lynch didn't think it was even possible for him to be surprised.

"What is it sir?"

"That's not good."

"Sir?"

"What? Oh, sorry. I wasn't expecting it was all."

"Expecting what sir?" Lynch was getting rather scared now.

"Uhh. How do I put this delicately? Zombie animals." Granite replied calmly.

"What!?" Lynch had to fight to keep from running then and there, zombies were never in the job description.

"This is not good. Everyone on me, now."

Lynch was galloping towards Granite in a second. He couldn't quite figure out why, he was running towards zombies after all, but he wasn't going to let Granite down. Not now. Lynch was at Granite's location in less than a minute, surveying the area with a critical eye. He saw a rotting squirrel, or what had been a squirrel, lying on the ground, its head crushed like a walnut.

"What the hell? You're telling me the thing was moving?" Lynch balked at the absurdity of something so dead being able to move.

"Moving? The damn thing tried to bite me. Got it though, so guess it's all clear on the western front." Granite said half-jokingly.

"How does something that looks two weeks dead attack somepony?" Lynch asked as he took a second look at the decomposing carcass in front of him.

"Not sure, but it's definitely not supposed to happen. Which means that we're going to call command, get extraction, and send a fully equipped team in here to take care of it."

*Grrrrrr*

"The hell was that?" Lynch said as he half jumped into the air. The rest of the ponies readied their weapons and faced towards the direction of the sound. Lynch got a hold of himself and readied his own weapon a second later. The team trained their weapons on the general direction of the noise for a few seconds before a pair of truly terrifying looking eyes peeked out through the foliage. The team had their weapons on it in a second, but then it jumped out of the bush it had been hiding in, revealing itself to be nothing more than a rotting bunny. While certainly disturbing, it was nothing compared to what they had been expecting, and all the agents shared a sigh of relief, followed by an amused laugh.

The animated rabbit corpse made a strange hissing sound in its rotted vocal cords, prompting Lynch to shoot it in the face. The magically enhanced piece of metal popped the bloated, animate remains like a meat-filled balloon. Prompting all of the ponies to stare in shock for a moment, before letting out a nervous chuckle.

"I guess it was nothing." Said one of the unicorns in the group. They would be her last words.

*ROOOOOAAAAAR*

The sheer power of the primal bellow caused the ponies to backstep. One of the unicorns was closer to the forest than the others, and she was nearly cut in half by the scorpion stinger that came down on her back and impaled her to the ground. Her body barely had time to spasm in its death throes before it was yanked into the underbrush. For a moment, everyone just stared. It had happened so fast, one second she was there, the next she was gone.To their credit, the agents' stupor didn't last long, and they were galloping away from the edge within the next second.

Granite was yelling into his mic. "We need evac now! I don't fuckin' know! Dead things! Walking dead animals are attacking us! What do I look like a fucking biologist? Just get something here now!" Granite seemed more angry than scared, even in the face of death and dismemberment, he managed to keep his cool. How could that be? Lynch wondered.

The agents reformed near the center of the clearing, looking towards the spot where their fellow had been taken. Lynch turned around just in time to see the source of their fear leap out of the brush. A rotting manticore. It's body was rotted and putrefying, its eyes had decomposed out of its head, and parts of its rotted muscle and bone were visible through holes in its skin. The manticore's coat and mane was matted and covered in grime and filth, what was left of its coat anyway. The thing turned towards the group and let out another terrifying roar from its festering vocal cords, filth and bile spitting out of its mouth and oozing between its yellowed teeth.

The agents were nearly unnerved by this sight, and it took all of their willpower to stand their ground and face the beast. The manticore was facing them now,and the agents held their nerve and looked back. The manticore stuck out its rotted tongue and licked its teeth hungrily. Though it couldn't see its prey, it could still smell it, and its corrupted nostrils sniffed the air again, allowing it to locate its meal. The monster growled hungrily and pawed the ground, before suddenly crouching down and charging towards the massed agents. Growling and slavering in a way no corpse should ever have the right to.

"Grease that fucker!" Shouted Granite. The agents swiftly obeyed, the earth ponies opening up with single shots while the unicorns condensed their magic and added their arcane missles to the volley. Hoof-sized chunks of dead flesh were sheared off of the beast, but this didn't seem to hamper him much. The beast didn't even slow in its charge, and in fact seemed to speed up in the face of the firepower arrayed against it.

It likely would have ended then. If the beast had reached them, it would have torn them apart like so much tissue paper. Fate however, is not so easily deterred by what should have happened. And fate was with them in that moment. More specifically, fate was with Lynch. In what would become one of the luckiest moments of his life, one of the shots from his desperate fusillade managed to find the monster's eye socket. The round went straight through the manticore's brain, and blew clods of rotting brain and shards of skull out of the back of its head. The rotted slab of meat and bone tripped and skidded to a halt only a few feet from the group of agents. Close enough that the stench of the festering body caused some of the agents to gag and retch in disgust.

"Damn." Granite said, surprised at how close to death his team had just come.

"Can we go home now sir?" Lynch asked breathlessly. He too, realized how close he had come to dying.

"Thunderheads are on the way, we'll be getting out of here soon." Granite replied.

"Hey, look on the bright side. At least it can't get any worse. Right?" Said one of the earth ponies hopefully.

"Don't ever say that kid. Because trust me, it is always worse than you think." Granite said scoldingly.

"This is Sky-Hoof 1. Someone need a pick-me-up?" A female voice sounded over the radio.

"This is scout team Cursores, we could use a lift out of here."

"Roger Cursores, your chariot awaits in 30 seconds or less. Out."

True to her word, Sky Hoof 1 landed exactly 27.4 seconds later, the coherent cloud opened to reveal a magically bonded metal interior, made specifically so that earth ponies and unicorns could ride in it without having to have a spell cast on them. Team Cursores swiftly embarked into the Thunderhead, and was lifting off and heading for home in 38.29 seconds.

"Holy Celestia that was fucked up." Sighed Lynch as he collapsed into his seat and closed his eyes.

"Yeah." Granite replied, before he too closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.

"Uhhh all passengers may want to fasten their seat-belts. Things are about to get real- SHIT!" The pilot suddenly yanked the stick and banked hard right and down. Most of the agents were already fastened in and were not too affected by the hard turn. One agent however, was not buckled in, he flew head first into the opposite wall of the craft, his neck breaking with an audible crack.

The gunship continued to bank and turn madly, its pilot oblivious to the fact that its maneuver had resulted in the death of one of her passengers. The passenger in question was now flying about the passenger compartment. The body flopping about and running into walls and other agents alike. Until Granite grabbed the body by its boneless neck and threw it into a seat before quickly buckling it in.

"What the fuck is going on out there Sky-Hoof?" Granite yelled angrily through the mic.

"There's a Celestia-damned dragon on my ass and I can't shake it!" The pilot replied laboriously as she tried to evade the sickly looking beast that was tailing her ship.

"Persistent llittle bastard I'll give you that." The pilot muttered over the mic as she threw the Thunderhead into almost a 90 degree angle.

The dragon would not be denied however, and it continued to pursue them with a single-minded purpose. Until the pilot threw the ship into a left bank that quickly became a looping upward corkscrew. The dragon overshot, and the pilot of Sky-Hoof 1 eased in behind it and sent magically enhanced high explosive rounds straight into its body, raking it from wingtip to wingtip and sending fetid blood into the windshield of the Thunderhead. The dragon disappeared out of sight and the pilot let out a victorious shout. before pulling the ship back on course for home.

"Thank you for flying Sky-Hoof airlines, if you have any complaints, please file them und- OH FUCK!" The dragon had somehow managed to stay airborne, and now opened its maw to breathe its deadly fire on the ship. No fire exited its maw however, only a dark fog of blackness. This did not avail its passengers though, the diseased cloud of rot ate through the major systems of the ship in seconds, sending the ship hurtling towards the ground.