Flying out to meet the Anzû proved to be a far more surreal experience than I had initially anticipated, and not for any reason that I could have guessed either.

I’d grown up in Light City, and had never left the island it was built on. I knew, intellectually, that there was a larger world beyond its shores, sure; I’d even seen maps of the world and seen how tiny the little mass of land I lived on was when compared to the Equestrian Continent and such. I was aware that there was―literally―a larger world out there.

All of that being said, I don’t think that there was anything which could have prepared me to actually experience the sheer scale of it all. While the door for the main cabin had long since been secured shut for our flight over the sea on our way to intercept the king’s warship, I was able to tap into the Health Harras airwagon’s external cameras with my arcanetics and take in the view from outside. And what I was seeing finally put into perspective what all of those maps had not been able to:

The world. Was. Big.

We’d been flying along for fifteen minutes at several hundred kilometers an hour. Light City was just a glowing haze against the pitch black night to our rear. And all around us was just an expense of water that seemed to stretch on into the infinite horizon. The whole world that I’d known was just a speck of light barely visible in the night. Marginal against the endlessly-spanning ocean. And within that tiny speck of light, I’d lived an almost insignificant existence.

Yet, here I was now, actually thinking that a being as small and inconsequential as me could actually make a difference in the world. It was lunacy.

“Hey, you doing okay?”

I jerked slightly as I heard Gerry’s question echo inside my head over the clairaudient link that most of the team shared for the operation. The Health Harras airwagon didn’t possess the greatest sound-dampening, and the roar of the engines carrying us to our destination was pretty hard to talk or hear over conventionally. So we’d arranged for arcanetics links across the group―save for Jenny, naturally. However, she was standing pretty close to Baton Rouge the whole time, so the batpony was able to convey to her any messages that the rest of us might have with relative ease.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I replied. Though the words themselves were easily drowned out by the din of the thrusters, the griffon sitting across from me heard them over the link as clearly as if the two of us had been sitting alone in a quiet room. Which was probably why he was able to pick up on my tone that I wasn’t being entirely honest with him.

“It’s normal to be nervous. I’m shit scared too.” I heard his faint chuckle as he watched my eyes grow wide with disbelief. “Oh yeah. We’re about to storm the flagship of the Griffon Kingdom with a rock band,” he pointed out. “If I saw an ad for a vid with that plot being advertised, I’d roll my eyes and immediately dub it ‘trash’ for being so absurd.”

That was a fair point, I conceded. Though that also wasn’t doing anything to reinforce my flagging confidence, if that had been the tiercel’s intention. “So…we’re fucked.”

Gerry shook his head. “Far from it. Because we’ve got the magic of Harmony working on our side.”

I frowned, regarding the griffon with a dubious expression. I recalled him mentioning the existence of ‘real’ magic and how that a group of creatures working together towards a noble goal―like we were―would invoke the alleged powerful forces of the Elements of Harmony or whatever, like those mentioned in the journal I was reading through. However, I had since begun to wonder if he hadn’t just been talking out of his ass. Because I had yet to see or experience anything like that.

The griffon chuckled once more as I told him as much over the link. “What? Did you expect to see rainbow beams and bright ethereal lights all over the place?” He flashed me a broad smile to ensure I knew that his chiding was meant in jest. “Magic is capable of being a lot more subtle than that.

“Didn’t you think that it was a little convenient that sneaking into Aeriesaka Tower and city hall just happened to go so smoothly?” He asked. “Two of the most heavily-guarded and secure buildings in the whole of Light City, and we were able to walk in, get what we needed, and walk out without so much as a scuffle? That shouldn’t have been how that worked.

“There were a thousand things that could have gone wrong for us―should have gone wrong. But they didn’t. Because we had something bigger looking out for us, making sure that we wouldn’t fail, because it wanted us to succeed―it needed us to succeed.”

I wasn’t sure that I was entirely convinced by the griffon’s reasoning. I mean, it seemed like a stretch to me to suggest that, because we’d been lucky, that was proof of some outside force intervening on our behalf. It could just as easily have been nothing but coincidence as far as I could tell. Heck, wasn’t it a sign of solid planning that things didn’t tend to go awry? And it had turned out that Jenny had been putting in a lot of work behind the scenes setting up these plans of hers. These operations weren’t all nearly as ‘last minute’ as they had sometimes felt, it had been revealed to me.

On the other hoof, the sheer conviction with which Gerry spoke was starting to get me to waver on the idea. Could there be magic at play here that was subtly nudging things in our favor that could otherwise have completely undermined what we were trying to accomplish? I had gotten to parts in the journal where Twilight Sparkle was talking about a ‘Tree of Harmony’ and how it was tied to the Elements that she and her friends had been wielding. There were certainly implications there that whatever force was behind the magic of Harmony wasn’t averse to playing the ‘long game’ or taking steps to mold past events in order to ensure future successes.

So, maybe the griffon was right? Maybe there was something powerful out there that had a vested interest in our success on this mission? Maybe, if Harmony was looking out for us, then the operation wasn’t quite as hopeless as I thought. Which was certainly reassuring. Harmony had certainly helped Twilight defeat a lot of Equestria’s foes in the past, and those adversaries had sounded a lot more powerful than the griffon king.

On the other hoof…I was hard-pressed to think of an instance where the Elements had helped Twilight to outright kill any of her enemies. Even those who clearly posed very real threats to the nation―if not the whole world. Nor had killing anycreature been the goal of any of those prior missions where Gerry was insisting that the magic of Harmony had played a role in guaranteeing our success. However, taking a life explicitly was the objective this time. And, as necessary as it probably was to kill the king in order to ultimately help improve the situation in Light City, nothing I’d come across in that journal suggested that doing something like that was anything that the Elements would approve of.

Would Harmony be looking out for us this time? Would it use its magic to help us kill? I wasn’t so sure.

Honestly, the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that doing this ultimately would help Light City’s denizens. It was the system that was the problem just as much as it was the creatures running it. If we removed the individuals, wouldn’t they just be replaced with like-minded ones? Would those replacements change their approach to the rest of the creatures in the city out of fear of being killed themselves? Was that how that worked?

It wasn’t how that had seemed to work in the city’s boosterherds. Creatures in charge got killed by disillusioned members all the time, who would then assume power and start running things ‘the right way’. For a while, at least. Then they’d get killed too, and the cycle would repeat. It was the nature of boosterherds and the mentality that the system cultivated in their members. Light City’s oligarchic-styled leadership wasn’t―strictly speaking―a boosterherd, but it certainly felt like it operated on similar principles: the more psychopathic had an easier time rising to the top, and they exploited those who were weaker than themselves for their own personal benefit.

So, if killing the creature leading a boosterherd didn’t end the problems associated with boosterherds, then why did we think killing the king would end the problems associated with the system that put him there?

…So much for Gerry’s pep-talk, I guess.

“Target in sight,” Baton Rouge announced to all of us over the link. “Prep for insertion: two minutes.”

I swallowed back my nerves and took a deep, rattling breath, as I tried very hard not to think of all of the ways that this mission could go wrong for us. The doubts that had been swirling in my head were brushed aside with repeated mental assertions that Gerry had been right and that Harmony would be watching over us and wouldn’t let us fail. We were doing a good thing for the creatures of Light City. Jenny had put together a solid plan and her plans always worked out.

We would get through this, and everything would be okay.

I’d even managed to almost have myself convinced of those things by the time I heard our batpony pilot’s next clairaudient transmission. Which I wasn’t sure had been entirely intentional. “Putain de merde…that’s one big bitch.”

I quickly linked back into the airwagon’s external cameras in order to see what it was that had prompted such an exclamation from our pilot. It didn’t take me long to see what elicited the comment, and even less time to conclude that he’d very much understated the sentiment.

Once again I found myself in the position of having failed to properly prepare myself for how dramatically I’d managed to underestimate the size of something in my head. Much like the world itself, I’d known on an intellectual level that the Anzû was a big ship. It was a carrier as well as the flagship of the Griffon Kingdom’s Royal Air Force. I had known that it was going to be big.

I hadn’t realized that ‘big’ in this context meant that it was going to be a floating megasilo!

That was really the best way to describe it: like some crazed engineer who’d obviously been in the early stages of arcanopsychosis had taken a megasilo, turned it on its side, and given it the ability to fly. And then he’d sprinkled it liberally with guns like a street stall vendor dusting a churro with sugar. If they suspected even for a moment that we any sort of unauthorize craft―

My thoughts were interrupted by an audible alarm coming from the cockpit.

Oh, we were so fucked!

Jenny’s head whipped in the batpony pilot’s direction, her expression mirroring that of every other creature in the craft and the unspoken question plain on her face: had we been made? Meanwhile, Baton Rouge was clearly trying to discern the exact same thing as he queried the airwagon over the nature of the alert he was getting. His features creased in confusion. “Qu'est-ce que―? We’re receiving an emergency response request!” He declared, both over the shared link and aloud for Jenny’s benefit.

The donkey beside him relaxed visibly, frowning at her partner. “Well they’re going to have to ping another airwagon; we’re busy.”

But the batpony was already shaking his head. “Non, we’re receiving the request. As in: us, specifically,” he explained, much to the surprise of us all, “And it’s not over the Health Harras network. This is a proximity transponder notification.” He gestured out through the airwagon’s forward display at the gargantuan carrier floating ahead of us. “It is coming from the Anzû.”

Those of us in the main cabin exchanged looks. Our mission had either just gotten a lot easier, or a lot more complicated. Yet, somehow, I silently suspected the latter. In my head, I was only able to come up with a very short list of creatures who were on that vessel that were likely to have contracts with Health Harras. Granted, I was probably overreacting. After all, it wasn’t like only top executives back in Light City had such insurance plans. They just had the best with priority response times.

That was a big ship, and likely had a big crew to match. With how important it was, there were probably a lot of very high-ranking officers and such on it too who would undoubtedly have contracts with Health Harras. There were probably hundreds of candidates aboard who could be the source of that transponder. It didn’t have to be who we were all thinking.

…Right?

“Can you identify the patient?” Jenny asked, her mind obviously drawing the same conclusions that the rest of ours were. Though there did seem to be a more anxious edge to it. I’d have assumed she’d be more relieved. After all, if the king died before we got there, that sort of made things a whole lot easier for the rest of us, right?

The batpony was shaking his head. “Patient information is encrypted. Client confidentiality. I don’t have the credentials to access it.”

Jenny turned her head back to glance at the hippogriff nettrotter. She didn’t even have to give voice to the question for Harriet to know what she was going to ask. “I can try and crack the encryption, but it’ll take time. With only a remote link to Health Harras’ systems, it’ll be a lot harder to crack through their security wards.”

“...Would it be easier while you’re hooked into the Anzû?” The donkey asked after a moment’s pause.

Harriet considered the question for a moment and then nodded. “Once I’m on their network, I’d be able to use some of their access codes to expedite things, yeah.”

“Do it.”

To Baton Rouge, she said, “If the ship queries us, respond like we’re a legit response to the alert.”

The batpony hesitated for a moment, earning a raised brow from the donkey beside him. “Um…I am not getting much chatter from the carrier. None, actually. Only automated acknowledgements from the local air traffic’s guidance systems. I’ve uploaded our clearance and approach request. We do have a clearance to land.”

It looked like the new development was going to make it easier for us to land after all, I noted. The revelation allowed me to relax just a little, though it didn’t look like it did much to sooth Jenny. With a slight grimace creasing her lips, she nodded. The batpony manipulated the airwagon’s controls and banked up around the side of the massive warship. Through the external cameras, I was able to make out the small hangar on the top of the craft, facing aft. My attention became fixed on the pair of large turrets bristling with weapons that lay to either side of it. While both of them look, for the moment, to be entirely disinterested in our little aiurwagon, I felt myself holding my breath in anticipation of their barrels suddenly deciding to swing in our direction and blast us out of the sky.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. This time. I was unconvinced that they would be quite as dismissive of our presence after we’d killed the king. But that was a problem for later. We still had far more immediate pressing concerns.

Baton Rouge set our ‘borrowed’ Health Harras transport down beside a pair of luxurious skywagon that were more ornately decorated than any that I’d ever seen flown by an executive in Light City. Emblazoned on the side of the one closest to us was the crest of the griffon royal family: a crowned griffon head in profile with a pair of crossed spears beneath it. The whole thing was wreathed in golden laurels.

The moment the airwagon touched down in the hangar, its side door opened up. None of us wasted any time spilling out into the hangar beyond. It was only a matter of time before an organic being took note of the erroneously-cleared airwagon in a restricted area and sounded the alarm. Which meant that we had to move quickly to accomplish our objective and leave.

“Gerry, sort out the fuel situation,” Jenny barked as she finally stepped out of the airwagon. “The rest of you follow me.”

I swallowed back the nervous lump in my throat which had made its appearance once more, checked my pistol for probably the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes, and nodded. We fell into step behind the donkey as she led us to the hangar’s door. Harriet set to work bypassing the lock while the rest of us kept a lookout.

My gaze fell to the second luxury airwagon that I’d noted during our approach. My initial reaction was to come up with some sort of quip regarding the absurd excess of the wealthy related to the king’s apparent need for a ‘spare’ limousine. Only to stop up short when I noticed that the crest on the side of the second airwagon was slightly different. The crown over the profiled head was a much simpler and more conservative design, and the whole thing lacked the golden laurels.

Noticing where my attention was directed, Dandy was kind enough to provide clarification. “That’s the sigil for the crown prince,” the purple unicorn supplied in a hushed whisper. Then his own features creased in thought. “Odd. I’d heard he and his father were still estranged? I definitely didn’t hear about him coming along on this visit…”

Any further musings were interrupted by the sound of the door opening and Jenny ordering us through. We cantered out of the hangar and down the short corridor which led to the elevator. Harriet made short work of the door’s security here as well and got us into the spacious lift. One short trip up to the second level later, and we were once more greeted to a view of a single corridor, though this one was far more opulent than the one leading to the airwagons. It sort of felt like we’d been transported off of a warship, and were now inside of a mansion. Or maybe even a small palace, I supposed, given the nature of the owner. Plush purple carpet covered the floor and massive portraits decorated the walls. The lighting was provided by a line of small, but extravagant, chandeliers.

As we ventured down the corridor, I noticed that the portraits didn’t depict just griffons as I might have anticipated. There was a whole menagerie of creatures being shown on them. Griffons, ponies, hippogriffs, and even some races that I didn’t recognize. Nor did I have much time to puzzle over them before Jenny was snapping off more orders at us.

“Barkly, get to the service door. Harriet, find an access port and jack in.” The donkey then turned to Dandy and I. “You two, with me.”

I nodded shakily as the unicorn stallion and I followed closely behind Jenny in the direction of the king’s private suite. While we’d been assured that there wouldn’t be any security patrols in the area, I noticed that Dandy was still looking intently down any intersection that we crossed, the pistol hovering beside him always pointing in the direction that he was looking. I mimicked the tactic, feeling a little bit of relief every time I didn’t see anything down connecting hallways.

Nearly a minute later, Jenny brought us to a large set of double doors which were ornamented with the king’s crest. “This is it,” she informed us.

She then spun around on her forehooves and coiled up to deliver a fierce buck planted right along the seam between the doors, easily smashing the latch keeping them closed and slamming them open into the dark room beyond. Dandy charged in ahead through the now open door, and I was forced to scramble after him, a little unprepared for the abrupt entrance. In my defense, I was still fairly new to this whole: ‘assassination’ thing.

The darkened room beyond was quiet, save for the sound of the splintered doors swaying on newly-bent hinges and the pulsing of blood in my ears. I swallowed hard to try and curb my heavy breathing as my eyes darted around the room, seeking out any sign of movement. Our thunderous entrance should surely have alerted any inhabitant to our presence. Soon my attention rested on the large, four-poster bed laying on the far end of the chamber. Curiously, the wooden framing was carved with reliefs of various seashells, which I found to be an odd choice of aesthetic for a king of the griffons, a winged race who’s traditional home was the high peaks of mountains.

Dandy and I crept slowly forward, our eyes―and our weapons―focused intently on the bed…and the covered lump beneath the thick, quilted sheets, which denoted its slumbering inhabitant. Jenny shouldered her way between us, plodding on ahead with determined swiftness. Fair enough, I supposed. If kicking in the door like she had hadn’t been enough of a ruckus to awaken the king, then I highly doubted that stomping across the carpeted floor was going to do the trick either. Her arcanetic hoof slipped to the holstered weapon on her flank, drawing the signature weapon out.

I very nearly seized up when I heard Harriet’s voice over the link. “I’m in the ship’s network,” the hippogriff announced, “and shit’s wild in here! The whole carrier’s on lockdown, and it’s not because of us. The lock was initiated just a couple minutes before we landed.”

Dandy and I paused and looked at each other. I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved that the unicorn was just as surprised and confused as I was, or worried that it was clear none of us knew what was going on any more. It was obvious from the nettrotter’s anxious tone that she wasn’t sure what to make of her findings either. “I also cracked the encryption on that HH alert…”

Jenny was at the side of the bed now, and still there’d not been even the slightest stirrings from the sleeper. Only now was the donkey finally looking like she recognized how odd it was to not have had any sort of reaction. She briefly glanced back at the pair of us. Dandy’s arcanetic telekinesis reinforced itself around his pistol as he trained it on the lump beneath the sheets. He nodded at the donkey. She reached forward with the barrel of her pistol and tucked it just beneath the comforter.

She whipped back the covers just as Harriet announced her discovery over the link. “...It’s the king. He’s dead.”

Judging by the slew of curses slipping from the donkey’s lips, it didn’t look like Jenny required us to relay Harriet’s findings. Again I found this to be an odd reaction from the singer, as I was under the impression that the king being dead had been the whole point of this endeavor. What did it really matter if he had died in his sleep rather than because of a bullet from Jenny’s gun? Dead was dead. Our mission was over; we could leave.

I breathed a sigh of relief and turned away from the bed, glancing around the rest of the room while Jenny made up her mind about what our next step would be. My eyes fell onto another portrait; this one far larger and more elaborately framed than any of the others that I’d seen in the corridors. I had half expected it to depict the griffon king, as it would have made sense to me for them to have been that vain. Instead, I found that it was an oil painting showing a pink hippogriff mare with a tied up graying blue and cyan mane. Just beneath it was a small vanity. Though, instead of being filled with perfumes and makeup, its surface was arrayed with a collection of framed photographs all clustered around a simple silver urn.

I slowly made my way closer to the shrine and idly inspected the images. They all featured the same hippogriff mare that was in the larger portrait above, presumably showcasing various moments from her life. In each of the images, the pink mare was either smiling broadly or laughing. In a couple, she was doing so beside an equally happy blue griffon tiercel who bore an uncanny resemblance to a much younger King Grover V.

I’ll admit that I was hitting something of a mental block as I studied the collection of photographs. The creatures in them just looked so…normal. These could have been family photos that any couple would have in their home. It was hard to look at them and think of the pair as being the monarch of the Griffon Kingdom and―I presumed from the one larger photo of the pair attired in polished golden armor and a flowing white dress―his queen; creatures behind the suffering of millions of Light City’s citizens. It felt…out of place.

About as out of place as the rather crude looking seashell necklace draped around the silver urn. It looked very much like something that one could have found being hawked by any street peddler in Haywood. Certainly not anything that would have been owned by royalty.

My attention was drawn from the shrine by Dandy’s mirthless cackle. “Right inconsiderate of his Royal Highness to up an’ die on us a’fore we could kill ‘im, eh? Just like the nobility to fuck over the li’le folk at every turn!” Jenny seemed less amused by the situation that the unicorn clearly was.

Then Harriet popped on over our shared clairaudient link once more. “This wasn’t natural causes,” she informed us. “The readings from the king’s arcanetics indicated he died of asphyxiation following a ‘traumatic tracheal event’.”

Once more the stallion and I exchanged confused looks. I echoed the hippogriff’s wording as I tried to discern its meaning. “‘Traumatic tracheal event’?”

Jenny glanced back over the body of the blue griffon tiercel lying on the bed, leaning in to take a closer look at the corpse. “His throat was crushed,” she announced. “Somecreature murdered him in his sleep.”

“Popular notion, that,” Dandy said with a hint of snark as he gestured between us.

“Somecreature with claws,” the donkey added further before pulling away from the dead king. He glanced towards the unicorn. “Ask Harriet how long ago the crown prince landed.”

While Dandy queried the nettrotter, I looked at Jenny. “You don’t think they left the kingdom together?”

She shook her head. “Junior and daddy had a falling out years ago. Probably inevitable.” She gestured towards the shrine that I’d been studying a moment ago. “Mommy died in foaling. That drove the initial wedge between father and son. King threw himself into running the kingdom, while shipping the little prince off to whatever schools and academies he could find. They were barely together for anything other than a couple official functions until the prince was an adult.

“Then he all but dropped out of the public eye for a decade. Emerged back onto the scene a few years ago. King decided he wanted to set things right and bring the prince back into the fold. Offered him effective control of Aeriesaka as a peace offering. That was when the company started to get really bad,” Jenny sneered.

“No big public arguments, but word around the palace was always that the two were bickering about something or other.” The donkey glanced back towards the body in the bed. “Frankly, I’m not surprised by this. But if the prince really is on board, then it’s just as important that we take him out too.”

Dandy’s eyes ceased flickering orange as he finished up his clairaudient conversation with Harriet. “Harriet says there’s an active transmission originating in the throne room,” he gestured above us, sounding decidedly unhappy.

“Calling for help?”

“She doesn’t think so. It’s being transmitted directly to GlimTech, on one of their executive bands.”

Jenny grimaced as she reupholstered her weapon. “Junior moves quick. The king’s body isn’t even cold and he’s already trying to negotiate with Aeriesaka’s biggest competitor.” She turned from the bed and started trotting for the door. “Let’s get a move on. Update the crew.” Once again Dandy and I fell into stride with the donkey as the unicorn informed the others of the recent developments and the slight alteration to our plan on Jenny’s behalf.

It was a short trot back the way we’d come to the elevator, which we boarded and commanded to ascend to the third floor, and the king’s ‘away’ throne room. Dandy and I both braced ourselves, our pistols hovering at the ready, grasped in the telekinetic fields of our arcanetics. Jenny’s remained holstered, as she had no magic with which to hold her weapon while she walked. However, I did note that her prosthetic leg seemed to be flexing in anticipation.

The doors finally opened up to reveal the throne room. Like so much else in this part of the warship, it was extremely capricious with its use of space. It was a singular circular room ringed with ornately carved pillars and capped by a stained glass dome. At the far end was a raised dais and an elegantly styled gold and crimson couch. Sitting upon it was the buttercream form of the creature who I presumed was the former prince, now turned king, of the Griffon Kingdom: a hippogriff stallion with burning red eyes and the same two-toned powder blue mane that I’d seen in the portrait of the queen.

However, it was not the new king of the Griffon Kingdom which drew my―or Dandy’s, for that matter―focus. Rather, it was the presence of one of the other two creatures in the room whom neither of us had been led to expect. Granted, one of them wasn’t technically actually ‘here’ , in the strictest sense of the word, so their omission from the list of possible encounters could be forgiven, I felt. Which didn’t make the sight of them any less shocking though.

Although I’d obviously never met her before in my life, considering my station, I did instantly recognize who the mare was. Her pictures were fairly common around Light City. After all, GlimTech was one of the most prominent megacorporations on the island, and thus its founder―and nominal owner―was not unknown to the city’s citizens. Not that she featured in interviews or made public appearances anymore. It had been decades since she’d been seen in the public eye in any capacity as far as I knew.

That didn’t mean that I didn’t immediately recognize the projected illusion of the alicorn Starlight Glimmer standing larger than life in the center of the throne room. Nor was the image merely part of some sort of ‘art installation’ or something like that, as the projection was in the middle of actively conversing with the griffon seated on the far end of the room.

“―don’t think you understand the nature of the work your father and I are doing here, Grendel,” the pink alicorn was saying as the doors to the elevator opened up and allowed us to hear the exchange going on. “He wasn’t coming here to ‘tighten our grip’, as you put it,” Starlight said, sounding a little exasperated, “We’re more hooves off than that―”

“And how wonderfully this ‘hooves off’ approach has been working for you,” the younger stallion sneered, clearly making no attempt at all to conceal the low opinion he held of the alicorn, flicking his clawed hands into the air and pantomiming quotation marks around the words he was throwing back at her. “How’s the search for that thaumanuclear device you managed to lose last week going, by the way, hmm?”

I noticed the corner of Jenny’s lip curl into a small smile even as the projection of the pink mare’s features grew more sober. “My team still hasn’t managed to recover it,” she acknowledged.

“And that’s not a reason the city shouldn’t be placed under martial law to you?” The hippogriff king said with a heaping of scorn. “‘Laissez-faire’ is an economic policy, not a security posture!

“We should be locking down the city. Conducting thorough sweeps of every room in every building, street by street. I can have two divisions of my Guard in Light City tomorrow if I put the call in right now!” He jabbed a talon towards the illusionary mare, “And don’t think that I need your permission to do it! You don’t technically ‘run’ Light City any more than my father did.

“Officially, I only need the mayor’s approval.” The stallion then leaned back in her seat, steepling his claws as he flashed a wicked smile at the alicorn. “Unofficially…there’s nothing they could really do to stop me, is there?”

Even from where I was standing behind her, I could see that Starlight Glimmer was less than thrilled by that proposition. However, she still kept her tone calm and controlled as she responded to the not-so-thinly-veiled threat from the new king. “That isn’t necessary,” she insisted coolly. “And it would completely undo decades of work. Surely your father explained to you how important it was that Light City be―”

“Fuck my father!” The stallion snapped, abruptly silencing the pink alicorn, who recoiled in shock. “You’re dealing with me! Whatever bargains the two of you made ended when he passed. I’m the king now, and I intend to do things better than that old fool ever did!”

It was at this point in the conversation that Jenny seemed to think it was a good time to announce her presence to a room that had been largely oblivious to the three of us up until this point, embroiled in a heated discussion like they were. The donkey stepped forward, glaring imperiously through the large pink illusionary alicorn at the young hippogriff sitting on the throne at the far end. “‘Passed’, huh? That’s a pretty delicate way of describing strangling the life from him while he slept.”

Both the hippogriff stallion and the projection of the alicorn mare jerked in surprise at the donkey’s announcement, directing their gazes to us. Each wore a mask of confusion as they beheld the trio of intruders. Their obvious shock, and the evidence that her plan to infiltrate the massive airship had succeeded spectacularly, only seemed to further stoke Jenny’s sense of superiority and her feeling that her ultimate triumph was soon at hoof.

I, on the other hoof, wasn’t quite so sure. Now that the conversation between the king and the alicorn had been brought to a halt, and all eyes were on Jenny, I found myself finally sparing a moment to take in the third creature who had been in the throne room when we entered. Had it not been for the distraction that was a four meter tall pink Starlight Glimmer in the center of the room, I was sure that this creature would have been impossible to miss, even while they stood next to the young king.

At least, I presumed that they had, at one point in the past, been a living, breathing, ‘creature’. What race exactly, I could only guess at. They were neither pony, nor one of the winged species, I could tell that plainly from the horns mounted to either side of their low-hanging head and lack of any perceptible neck. But that was all that I could tell through the bulk of metal and gemstones that was standing at the base of the dais leading to the throne. At this distance, it was hard to make out anything which might have, at one time, been organic. The glowing pale-green eyes which were staring back at me were almost entirely lifeless, it felt like. I found myself doubting that they’d ever been a living creature at all, and that it was just some new variety of robot.

I felt myself taking a half-step back as the vacant eyes continued to bore into me. I had a bad feeling about this…

Starlight finally found her voice as the confusion at the appearance of so many unexpected creatures was supplanted by the revelation made to her by the donkey. She turned her attention back to the hippogriff. “Grendel, no…Tell me you didn’t…” My attention was ripped from the mass of arcanetics at the sound of so much genuine anguish audible in the alicorn’s voice. Heartbreak was evident on her projected face as well.

The new king’s eyes widened in shock and anger as his attempted ruse was revealed. With a quick motion of his talons, he dissipated the illusionary mare. Then his attention focused on us. “You dare?!” The stallion seethed. “Who are you? How did you even get in here?!”

Jenny slowly started to saunter forward, sneering at the hippogriff. “Well, I was going to be the implement of your father’s demise,” she said. “But you stole my kill, and I’m a little personally put out by that. You see, I put a lot of effort into all of this. It’s a whole ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’ sort of deal for me right now.

“I came here to kill a king.” Jenny’s demeanor shifted suddenly as she leveled a glare towards the stallion on the throne. “And I don’t intend to leave until I do.”

The young hippogriff visibly recoiled from the threat, his face growing pale. “Initiate security alert response!” he screamed, followed a moment later by, “Yona, protect your king!”

No sooner were the words out of the hippogriff’s mouth before the lights in the throne room dimmed and took on a blood red hue, and on the heels of those lights came the banshee’s wail of a klaxon that pierced the air. I flinched in response to the cacophonous alarms. In doing so, I missed catching the sight of the heavily augmented creature beside the thing charging forward with the unnaturally high speed granted to it by its entirely arcanetic legs.

It seemed to go for Jenny first, being the clearer threat to the king. However, the donkey was able to deftly slip out of the way, having anticipated that she would be the clear target for any sort of attack. The charging behemoth adjusted quickly to the dodge, but not in the way most would have expected. Instead of trying to stop or turn and make another pass at the donkey, they instead made a slight diversion towards a new target, so as to maintain the momentum that they had built up.

That new target turned out to be me.

Still recovering from the assault on my senses that had been the shipwide alert, and far from a veteran of close-quarters combat, I was not at all prepared to deal with the sudden threat presented to me in the form of the hulking metal form barreling towards me. I felt my legs lock up as fear took hold of me, planting me firmly in place with its grip. I saw my death coming, and there was nothing that I could do to stop it. All I could do…was despair.

“Pel!”

Something hit me, hard. Not as hard as I would have been if this ‘Yona’ had made contact, I was sure, but with enough force that I was shoved out of their path at the last moment. I went sprawling across the floor of the throne room with little in the way of grace or coordination. However, I was at least freed from the hold that my terror had had on me. I rolled onto my side just in time to see Dandy, who’d been the one to knock me out of the way, take the hit which had been meant for me.

Seeing the unicorn get hit was like watching a marionette get its strings cut. The charging steel airwagon with legs masquerading as an augmented creature slammed into Dandy’s side with so much force that the left half of the stallion’s body was instantly caved in. The LCPD barding that he was wearing did absolutely nothing to dampen the blow, from what I could see. Dandy was likely dead in that moment. At least, I sincerely hoped that he was. If for no other reason than so that he didn’t have to suffer through what happened to him next.

“YONA…” I heard the beast growl in a voice that might have been feminine in nature at one point in their life. However, it was hard to tell through the layers of mechanical distortion that colored their words. They flicked their low-hanging head up into the air with a hiss of hydraulics. It was only now, watching as the limp form of the unicorn was hurled up into the air, that I realized that those horns on its head had impaled the stallion’s body. A spray of blood and gore was flung into the air along with the corpse.

The arcanetic demon followed through with the flick of its head and reared up on its hind legs. Dandy’s body peaked in its low arc and fell to the floor with a low ‘thump’. A heartbeat later, his assailant slammed their legs of steel and pistons down onto the unicorn’s chest, soundly imploding it and sending a spray of blood, organs, and gemstones out in every direction. A small splatter caught me across the face, but I was too shocked to register it in the moment, my eyes fixed on the grim scene playing out before me.

“...MASH!”

My eyes were locked onto the uniformed lump of pony that had once been Dandy. His baby blue eyes were wide with shock, but his dilated pupils were completely devoid of life. Standing over him, the metal monster slowly turned her head towards me, her own eyes devoid of ‘life’ in a very different way as they locked onto me once again.

No.

Not again.

I wasn’t going to let this all happen again. I wasn’t going to sit idly by why other creatures fought―and died―to protect me. I wasn’t some helpless filly, and I wasn’t just going to lie here and let all of my friends get massacred.

“Not…” My arcanetic implants alit, their telekinetic magic seizing hold of both my own pistol and the one which had been dropped by Dandy when he’d been struck by this monster. Both weapons flew to my side and aligned themselves at the abomination. “...Again!”

I opened fire…

Author's Note

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