Wolfenstein: Worlds Collide

A dim red glow was creeping around the corner, the sound of metal clomping on concrete echoing through the cavern, and it was all Twilight could do to stop herself from curling into a ball and praying to whatever had taken Celestia’s place that the source of those frighteningly familiar lights would just pass her by.

“You okay?” Blazkowicz asked, the stallion’s voice surprisingly soft.

“Yeah,” Twilight nodded, following the stallion out through the thin curtain, into the cavern beyond. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, sucking in a breath, counting to four, and then letting it out. That “counting to four” trick was surprisingly soothing, almost as effective as counting to ten while taking only half as long. No wonder Blazkowicz seemed to like it.

“If you say so.” Blazkowicz stepped away from her, his soft, barely audible footsteps approaching the opposite wall. “All I need is light so I can see who I’m shooting at. Can you spawn that purple light you pulled up earlier on top of them?”

Twilight opened her eyes, noticing that the sources of the lights were now visible, the red lights of human-made night vision goggles visible ahead. By the looks of it, there were about 5 regular soldiers, plus one whose visor had a singular, cyclopean lens. None of them were close enough to see them yet… but in a handful of seconds, that was going to change.

“I have a better idea,” Twilight responded, funneling her magic into her horn. The Equestria-wide anti-magic field the humans had managed to set up severely curtailed her magical abilities, but because she’d become an alicorn just a few days before all this madness broke loose, she could still call forth magical energy. Not a lot of it—she could only summon as much magical energy as a regular unicorn—but she didn’t need a lot for what she wanted to do.

She reached out with the magical energies she’d brought forth, out toward the six humans. She didn’t have enough magical power available to actually move them with her telekinesis, not from this distance and certainly not all six of them, let alone one. But that wasn’t what she was trying to do.

A soft violet glow enveloped all six soldiers, outlining them perfectly, said soldiers letting out several surprised exclamations as they glanced at each other. Twilight had to strain a bit to ‘touch’ all six of them like this, but not excessively so; she could keep this up for quite a bit if she had to.

“…clever.” Blazkowicz lifted the rifle-like device held in his tail, drawing a bead, and Twilight silently braced herself.

A ray of fiery orange light shot out of the device, striking the closest soldier right in his face, his entire head reduced to a smoldering stump in an instant. The remaining five let loose cries of shock and fury, and Twilight winced, the glowing telekinetic auras that enveloped the soldiers flickering as her concentration faltered for a moment. But she steeled herself, the glowing auras around the remaining soldiers quickly reasserting themselves.

Blazkowicz had already leaped forward, snatching something off of the headless soldier’s still-smoking corpse as he pelted toward the others, taking a brief potshot at another soldier. The shot missed, but Blazkowicz made up for it when he leaped up at a different soldier, a choked, gurgling cry slipping from the human’s throat as the stallion sliced his neck open with the hatchet he’d just grabbed.

The moments that followed quickly dissolved into a blur of gunfire and motion and orange-and-red lasers. Before all this, seeing someone get their head melted or their throat sliced open would probably have elicited a scream from Twilight, or a horrified gasp at the very least. But after Canterlot had fallen, the other Alicorn Princesses had disappeared, and her friends had been captured, she’d learned how to tune out visages of bloodshed and death with almost unsettling speed. She didn’t need to pay attention to what exactly Blazkowicz was doing to the soldiers or what they were trying to do to him, didn’t need to pay attention to the black liquid that shimmered on the cavern floor and the ways the fallen humans had been ripped apart. All she needed to focus on was maintaining her telekinesis and keeping those humans lit up. So that’s all she focused on.

Unfortunately, that meant that when one of the humans—the one with the cyclopean visor—took notice of what she was doing and decided to put a stop to it, she didn’t realize he was moving in her direction until his fist was streaking toward her face.

Twilight screamed, only barely managing to roll out of the way of the punch, the blow hitting hard enough to make the ground beneath her shake, the artificial earthquake intense enough to knock her off her feet. By the time she had regained her footing, her assailant had seized her neck in his metal-plated hand.

A choked, strangled cry slipped from Twilight’s constricted throat as she was lifted by her neck and roughly slammed into the wall, her lungs already burning from want of air. Her assailant snarled something in that guttural language all humans seemed to speak, the scarlet glow of the singular ‘eye’ of his visor intensifying. Up until this moment, a tiny part of her had been wondering where the red lasers she’d seen earlier had come from.

Somehow, over the roaring in her ears, Twilight heard Blazkowicz shout her name, heard his hoofs pounding on the stone as he sprinted toward her assailant. But she somehow knew that he wouldn’t make it in time, that the glowing red lens would unleash a crimson ray of fiery death and her head would be reduced to a smoldering stump before Blazkowicz even came within hoof’s reach, let alone before he could do anything about it.

Unless she beat her assailant to the punch.

Her vision blurred, an all-to-familiar burning sensation welling up in the corners of her eyes as she funneled every last drop of magical energy she could muster into her horn. Her attacker recoiled slightly as the brilliant purple glow illuminated his steel-covered face, his grip on her neck loosening ever-so-slightly as he tried to backpedal… but by the time he realized what Twilight was about to do, it was too late.

Celestia… please forgive me. Twilight whispered silently to herself, and then let the energy in her horn out.

A lance of concentrated magical energy shot out from the tip of her horn, right into the visor’s ‘eye’. An instant later, said visor exploded, along with the head that was wearing it. The concussive blast from the detonation slammed into Twilight’s chest, knocking what little air she’d managed to get into her lungs back out. Twilight barely noticed, however, and didn’t really care, largely on account of the fact that an instant later, the metal-plated hand fell from her throat, leaving that sweet, sweet air free to come rushing right back in.

The young alicorn took in a huge lungful as she dropped back down to the cavern floor. The impact sent a shockwave of pain through her bruised, battered body, but she somehow managed to remain on her feet as she sucked in one huge, gasping breath after another, the burning pain in her oxygen-starved lungs slowly subsiding…

A loud, audible CLANG reached Twilight’s ears. She glanced up, half-expecting her attacker to have somehow survived the laser-to-the-face treatment, to be charging toward her to finish the job… but all he’d done was fall to his knees. For a long, long moment, neither the purple mare nor the armored human who’d just tried to murder her moved an inch.

And then, the armored human’s dead body began to tilt forward, its chest colliding with the stony floor with another metallic CLANG , the still-smoking stump that was all that remained of his head landing mere inches from her snout.

All of a sudden, bile was rising up in Twilight’s throat, and from more than just the smell of cooked flesh that flooded her nose. She staggered backward, suddenly feeling like she was being choked again, the enormity of what she’d just done crashing down on her like a sledgehammer to her soul.

She’d just killed him. Sure, he’d been trying to kill her, yes, but that didn’t change the fact that he had friends, family, maybe even a wife. He’d had dreams, desires, hopes and aspirations… and Twilight had just shattered them all in an instant. She’d killed him…

“Twilight?! You okay?” Somehow, Blazkowicz’s voice snapped her out of her spiraling thoughts. Inhale, count to four, exhale. She reminded herself, squeezing her eyes shut and forcing herself to take a slow, deep breath as she reigned her emotions back in, gathering them up and shoving them into a box deep inside of her, a box that had been getting rather cluttered as of late.

“…I’m fine.” Twilight finally said in response, her voice a flat monotone. Glancing back at the body in front of her, she noticed a familiar hexagonal pattern on the armor it wore. She flipped it over with one hoof, refusing to pay attention to its lack of a head as she reached for the triangle on the center of the armor. Sure enough, it began to retract the instant her hoof touched the triangular sigil, the damaged bits screeching and sparking as they were folded back into shape by the rest of the transforming armor.

“We can’t stay here,” Twilight murmured, half to herself, snatching up the black pair of metal boots with one hoof. Her body felt like it was moving on automatic as she staggered back into the cave she’d been living in for months now, her free hoof reaching up and flipping the switch on the generator as she moved past it, toward the dresser. “There‘ll be more patrols out looking for the one we just killed, we need to find a place to lie low until-” She continued, throwing open one of the drawers and pulling out a worn, rugged saddlebag…

“Twilight…” The purple alicorn froze at the sound of Blazkowicz’s voice. She’d heard that tone of voice before. Princess Celestia used a similar tone whenever she recognized that Twilight wasn’t telling the whole story but didn’t want to outright call her out on her bluff. “Are you really okay? Because you do not look-“

Flashes of memory shot through her mind, flashes of roaring flames, of glowing red eyes, of the expression she’d seen on her teacher’s face before her hastily-cast teleport spell spirited Twilight away.

“I SAID I’M FINE!!!” She snarled at the top of her lungs, spinning around to face Blazkowicz, her horn emitting a crackling flash of purple light that sent the blue-eyed stallion stumbling backward.

For a long, long minute, there was nothing but dead silence, neither of the ponies present saying a word as Twilight struggled to repress the memories running rampant in her mind’s eye, to clamp down on her out-of-control emotions and regain her composure.

“…let’s go.” Twilight finally said, her voice once again monotone and emotionless as she gathered up what little personal belongings she had, trotted over to the generator, and switched it off for the final time.

B.J. stared up at the blood-red moon looming high in the sky, squinting in the dim red light. He’d caught a glimpse of the orange-red sky earlier, but this was the first opportunity he’d had to actually take a good look at the unnaturally bright moon, at the twilight colors that moon cast.

“Is the sky here normally that color?”

“No.” A cold, icy voice answered him, completely devoid of all the energy it once had.

B.J. glanced over at Twilight as the two of them stepped out from behind the foliage, noticing the unfocused look in the purple pony’s downturned gaze. Her expression wasn’t exactly a thousand-yard stare… but it was concerningly similar to one.

For a while, neither of them spoke as they trudged through the foliage, Twilight leading the way and B.J. following close behind.

“…feels like you just took a sledgehammer to your own soul, doesn’t it?” B.J. offered at last, finally breaking the long, awkward silence.

Twilight flinched a little, a small shudder running through the pony’s brightly colored body. “Yeah…” Her voice was soft, barely higher than a whisper.

“When I first shot someone, I felt the same,” B.J. said, thinking back to the first time he’d shot a Nazi. Just like Twilight, he hadn’t really had much of a choice, but that didn’t make the nausea any less intense, the scream of agony and horror his opponent had let out as he bled out on the floor any less gut-wrenching.

“…why …why did we have to kill them? Why can’t they just leave us alone?”

B.J. let out a long, drawn-out sigh. “Far as I can tell, it boils down to how they see the world around them. They’re completely certain that their worldview is the correct one, and don’t want to acknowledge anything that proves that worldview wrong. So they get rid of anything that doesn’t fit.”

“Why can’t they just acknowledge that they’re wrong?”

B.J. shrugged. “Not sure, honestly. Probably a combination of fear, arrogance, and narrow-mindedness, if I had to guess.”

The purple mare let loose a small huff. “I… I wish I could just tell them that they didn’t have to hurt people, that they could just live and let live…”

“Same here. If there was some magical phrase I could’ve said to get those six Nazi bastards back there that could’ve made them realize the error of their ways and renounce their allegiance to the Third Reich, I would’ve been shouting it at the top of my lungs.” The captain admitted, and Twilight stifled a small giggle. “But you can’t convince someone that what they’re doing is wrong when they’d rather kill you than hear what you’re saying. When they’d rather die than let you live.”

B.J. glanced down at his front hoofs, at the flecks of blood scattered across them. “All you can do is try and kill them first, and hope the world will be a better place without them.”

Another long silence descended over the two of them, feeling like it lasted far, far longer than it actually did

This time, Twilight was the one to break it. “Do… do you ever get used to it? The killing?”

“…you do, but you also don’t,” B.J. responded. “You stop feeling like you’re gonna heave every time you put a bullet through someone’s brain, but the nausea never completely fades. You get inured to the blood and the screams, but a part of you still cringes every time you hear a man cry out in pain as a bullet punctures their guts. It stops hurting as much when you slit someone’s throat… but it still hurts.”

“And you know what? It’s good that it still hurts. Because that means that deep down, you’re not a monster. The day it stops hurting is the day you become a heartless killing machine, the day you start killing because you can, not because you have to. The day you become no better than the people who forced you to kill in the first place.”

Twilight just nodded, one of her wings reaching forward to wipe away the tears sliding down her cheeks. “Thanks, Blazkowicz. I… didn’t realize I needed to hear that”

“You can just call me B.J.” The captain said in response, a little impressed that Twilight hadn’t mangled the pronunciation.

The blood-red moon that loomed high in the sky never set, never rose, never even moved, so Twilight had only the vaguest idea of how long it took for her and “B.J.” to reach their destination. If she had to guess, she’d probably say that they’d been walking for several hours.

This was where Celestia’s teleport spell had dumped her goodness-only-knows how many moons ago. It was an old campsite, marked as such by the fire pit in the center of the clearing and the worn, tattered tent sitting in front of it, the latter still standing despite at least a year’s worth of neglect. She’d spent her first week in the Everfree Forest curled up in that tent, venturing out only to forage for food, too confused and terrified and miserable to do anything else.

“We should be able to rest here for a day or two,” Twilight announced, pushing aside the tent flap and stepping inside. The tent’s interior was empty, save for a wooden platform that served as the tent’s floor, but that was okay; she’d brought a few sheets and blankets for bedding, enough for both her and her companion.

“And after that?” Said companion asked as he followed her in.

“Well, I’m not completely sure what we’ll do then. But I have a pretty good idea.” She reached into her saddlebags with one hoof, pulled out a folder, and set it down in front of her. With that done, she opened it, pulling out two maps; one pilfered from an office complex in the monument to dystopic brutalism that Canterlot had become and covered in her annotations, and another entirely of her own making.

“I take it, based on what you just pulled out, that that “idea” involves breaking somebody out of a Nazi prison?” B.J. guessed, his sky-blue eyes analyzing the first map.

“Yeah. Eisenberg prison, to be exact.” Twilight responded as she unfolded the second map, this one of the tunnels and caves under Canterlot. Specifically, the tunnels and caves caves they’d have to go to in order to reach the prison. With the maps out, she pulled out the last two things in the folder; a pair of sheets with Häftlings-Personal-Datei emblazoned on the top of each. Beneath those words were photos of the Häftlings—a.k.a. prisoners —in question.

“The first pony we’re looking is an old friend of mine.” She tapped the first of the two “Prisoner Personal Files”, the one whose photos featured a pegasus with a yellow coat and a pink mane. In both, Fluttershy had her eyes closed, the still images somehow managing to capture the motion of her flinching away from the camera perfectly. “Her name’s Fluttershy. She’s been locked up there ever since the nazis took over. She’ll probably come off as a nervous wreck when you first meet her, but trust me when I say that she’s a lot tougher than she looks.”

“And the other pony?”

“Shining Armor. He’s my older brother.” Twilight said, gesturing to the other file. Unlike Fluttershy, he wasn’t shying away from the camera in any of his mugshots. Quite the opposite; he was standing straight, his posture rigid and braced for a fight. And if looks could kill, the cameraman would have died long before he’d had a chance to take the unicorn’s mugshots. “He was also at large until a few moons ago; that’s when the humans caught him and threw him in here. I’m willing to bet that he was part of a resistance movement of some sort before he got locked up, and can probably help us link up with said movement.”

B.J. nodded in agreement as his attention turned from the files to the second map. “...this map’s hand-drawn. Did you scout all this out yourself?”

“Yeah, I sneak into Canterlot using those tunnels every once in a while. Can’t say the same for the prison; the guards patrol the area around it really heavily, and I could never figure out how to get past them all without killing any of them.” Flashes of what she had done filled her mind’s eye, flashes of brilliant purple light and fiery conflagrations and smoldering flesh. She did her best to push them aside. “I… I don’t think that’ll be too much of an issue now.”

“We can worry about that once we get there.” B.J. declared, looking over the maps and files one more time. “For now… well, I’m getting pretty damn tired, and you’re not looking much better.”

“Yeah… that fight took a lot out of me...” Twilight said in response, folding the maps back up and tucking everything back into the folder, stowing it all in her saddlebags once again. With that, she pulled out the bedding material she brought, tossing half of it B.J.’s way before pulling out her own set of sheets and blankets. “Tonight, we rest. Tomorrow…”

“We give those nazi bastards a very thorough object lesson on why they shouldn’t go stomping around this place like they own it.” B.J. declared as he straightened out their piles of blankets and sheets, flopping down on top of it.

Twilight chuckled a little as she buried herself within her own pile of sheets. “Couldn’t have put it better.”