“...Element of Kindness!”

“What?!” Exit Wound called back to her number two. The blue fur along the pegasus’ neck brought on an itching sensation against Exit Wound’s horn, as she continued to hold the intruder at hornpoint.

“I said, ‘Don’t kill her, boss! That’s Rainbow Dash; she bears the Element of Kindness!” Blunt Trauma cried again, pointing at the pegasus. “We ice her, we’d be just as bollixed as if we’d offed the white one!”

“Feck me pink and call me a flamingo!” Blunt could always be counted on to stay in-the-know about celebrities. Lowering her horn from Little Miss Kindness’ throat, Exit turned a scathing look at Lero Michealides.

“Dewy’s roight; yeh really ARE too shite-don’t-stink ta go ‘n’ rut an expendable nobody, huh, Moichealoides?”

But the human wasn’t paying Exit any attention. He was too focused on not looking at Little Miss Kindness.

“Lero… oh, Lero…” The pegasus looked like she was choking on a cube of ice. “What did they do to you, big guy?!”

The human kept his eyes on the floor.

“Do you like it?” asked Dewy, grinning at the Kindness Bearer as she leaned up against Lero. Her pleated miniskirt hitched up in the most titillating way when her tail swished. “Isn’t he studly? Isn’t he a hunk? The colt every filly dreams of? Don’t you just want him to plow you right now and have fifty foals off him?”

“You bit his face,” the Kindness Bearer said, stunned to see the blood on Honeydew’s teeth, along with the blood dripping down Michealides’ cheeks.

“He tasted awful,” Dewy sneered at her.

Blinking, Kindness finally seemed to see her friend Loyalty.

“Rarity!” Kindness cried. Even though the wounds Exit had given the mouthy snot weren’t bleeding anymore, they still made her quite a bit less pretty than she’d been earlier.

“Looks a bad soight, don’t she?”

Little Miss Kindness turned from the birdcage, facing Exit Wound.

“Oi got loads o’ questions for yeh, and Oi expect answers. Starting with how yeh snuck in. Yeh’d best cooperate, too. Otherwoise, yer two feck-buddies here'll be beauty queens compared ta what Oi’m gonna do ta yeh. Seriously, yeh’ll be looking loike yer face had been set on foire, and we had nothing but sledgehammers ta put et out with...”

“No, boss, no!” whined the diseased Diamond Dog off to the side. “Please don’t bash her and smash her! Not til Scrounger’s diddled her first! Yes, yes, oh yes… such a slinky face and such voluptuous rainbow mane! Scrounger’s certain it’s not even dyed…”

“You keep your filthy paws off her, you overgrown plague rat!” Lero warned, rising back up before Honeydew kicked him back down again.

“Well, Koindess?” Exit asked the pegasus. “What’s et gonna be? Me hooves? Scrounge’s diddle-stick? Or are yeh gonna start provoiding some answers?”

“Attention! Attention!”

“Who said that?!” Exit Wound snapped.

“You are completely surrounded! We wish to speak to whoever is in charge! You have three minutes to comply before we storm the building!”

The voice had been female and very loud… amplified, in fact. Either by magic or a megaphone.

“Twilight!” the Loyalty nag exclaimed happily, like a girl stuck on a burning building's roof spotting the firefighters.

The gears in Exit’s head spun fast.

“Glitter Dust!” she barked, shooting a dark look at Little Miss Kindness. “Go foind all them arse-for-brains that’re supposed ta be on patrol, and tell ‘em what they win after teh next intruder slips past ‘em: me feckin’ namesake through each of their oiballs!“

“Right away, boss!” Glitter said, galloping out the door.

“Oi want this perimeter secured, colts and fillies, NOW! All of yeh; armed and at yer stations!”

As her goons scrambled to comply, Exit turned to face the white earache in the birdcage. “Hey! When yeh said ‘Twoiloight,’ did yeh mean that was Twoiloight Sparkle whose voice we heard?”

The caged mare took a breath. Her face said she was preparing another scathing comeback. But then her eyes flicked to her primate love who’d wisely advised her not to make any noises Exit didn’t want her making.

“Yes,” Loyalty ended up saying. “that is correct.”

“Teh Element o’ Magic?” Exit pressed.

“She has that distinction, yes.”

“Attention! Attention!” Twilight Sparkle called again.

* * *

The building was situated along the thickly forested plateau that ran alongside Ghastly Gorge. Thankfully, the builders had the insight not to locate it near its perilous precipice, as it was situated well over a mile away from the edge towards the gorge. However, it was recessed into the ground.

It was an old, but very sturdily constructed two-story building in the middle of the forest. ‘BOULDER & DAUGHTERS QUARRY MILL’ read a huge old sign over its front entrance. The Boulder & Daughters Quarry Mill hadn’t done any business for years, and the dirt road leading up to it was halfway to being reclaimed by the forest.

However, many locations showed disturbed dust, recent scraps revealing ancient wood under the fragile paint, and many recent hoofprints around… Odd for what should’ve been a completely unoccupied building.

As soon as Twilight Sparkle had decisively ascertained that Rarity and Lero’s abductors weren’t unfathomably powerful superbeings on par with Nightmare Moon, Discord, or… The Others… that the culprits were ‘normal mortals,’ she had gotten Spike to write a letter to Princess Celestia, alerting her to the situation.

If this had happened closer to Canterlot, Twilight had no doubt that Celestia would’ve sent an elite tactical squadron directly from the palace, itself. But since it hadn’t, and time was of the essence, the team Celestia sent was a contingent from the local Royal Guard Reserves. They were led by a tough-looking pegasus who introduced herself as Corporal Wolf Pack.

Her team had the quarry mill well and truly surrounded, serviceponies stationed at every exit.

“You now have two minutes to comply before we storm the building! Don’t make this harder on yourselves than it already is!” Twilight warned, before lowering the magical megaphone from her lips.

“Corporal Pack?” she asked, at a normal, unamplified volume. “In your professional opinion, what do you think the chances are that these gang members will completely refuse to talk with us?”

“About 50-50, rough guess,” the corporal answered, smartly.

The corporal was an older mare, with a shaggy grey pelt, an uncommonly narrow muzzle, and three foreboding wolf heads as her cutie mark. She wore some armor and was equipped with tactical gear and weaponry, as were all the ponies serving her.

“I almost hope they DO refuse.” Spike spoke, from atop Twilight’s back. He was still wearing his Camp Mountain Peaks T-shirt, as well as a backpack. “I wanna see everypony here bust in and squash these grubs, and get Lero and Rarity out, ASAP.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Twilight answered. “It’d be much better for everypony if we can get Lero and Rarity back peacefully, with no bloodshed. I just hope we can get these ponies to see that too.”

Beside them, Cpl. Wolf Pack was issuing instructions to the other serviceponies around the mill using Wing Signalling; which was comparable to the Sign Language that deaf minotaurs had developed for themselves, only with wings instead of hands. Made it that much harder for hostiles to discover what they were planning when they weren’t speaking aloud.

“Well, they’d better make up their minds quick, I’m pretty sure they have less than a… LOOK!” cried Spike, pointing up.

Directly over the rooftop of the Boulder & Daughters Quarry Mill, an image was being magically projected for everypony outside to see. It was somepony’s head; translucent, and enlarged to the size of a hydra’s. She was a unicorn mare of skewbald coloration, wearing a hat and a pair of thin-rimmed glasses, maybe a few years older than Twilight, herself. Nopony she could ever remember seeing before.

The skewbald mare’s great floating see-through head spun in a slow circle, taking everypony in.

“Well, fart in me face and call me Stinky!” Her thick brogue marked her as a mare who must’ve originally come from the Emerald Isles. She, too, had amplified her voice. “Yeh weren’t kidding. Oi really AM surrounded!”

Spotting the megaphone floating in Twilight’s levitational field, the skewbald unicorn focused her attention on her.

“What gives?!” She was affecting indignation now. “This is a perfectly legitimate business operation we’re conducting, here, and yer scaring all me personnel!”

“Oh, really?” asked Twilight. “Well, if that’s the case, surely a quarry mill worker like yourself would have no problem whatsoever explaining to me what the word ashlar means.”

The skewbald unicorn opened and closed her mouth. “Well, yeh have me now.” She sounded sincerely disappointed in herself. “Feck. Oi really do need ta look inta getting meself a drama coach.”

“Let’s cut the horse apples,” Twilight told her coldly. “I have just one question for you: are Rarity and Lero safe and sound?”

The unicorn’s huge projected head considered Twilight for a few seconds. Either one of the lenses in her great glasses could’ve served as a tabletop for a small family to eat dinner off of.

“Fer now. Them and the rainbow-headed one.”

Rainbow Dash?! Twilight thought, with a sinking sensation.

“‘Ey, there, ya three!” The head suddenly vanished, though her voice still carried, like a film actress who’d momentarily walked off-screen while still delivering lines. “Sing us a pretty ditty; your fecking purple sweetheart wants to hear yeh voices! Go on, yah fecking canaries; SING!”

Twilight’s blood ran cold as she heard three panicked-sounding voices: Rainbow’s, Rarity’s, and Lero’s. Perhaps shock was preventing her from hearing properly; Rarity and Rainbow’s words sounded incoherent to her ears; indistinct babble. But Lero’s voice cut through theirs loud and clear.

“It’s Honeydew, Twilight!” Lero yelled. “She’s here! Honeydew made this happen!”

“Honeydew?” repeated Cpl. Wolf Pack, turning to Twilight. “Is that a name we should know, Lady Sparkle?”

Twilight felt as though someone had scooped a portion of her brain out with a spoon. Honeydew? Honeydew made this happen?! What did she…? How could she be…?

“I… she’s… Honeydew’s a neighbor... lives in Ponyville…”

“She hates us a lot,” Spike supplied, a little more levelly.

“That’s enough!” called the voice of the thick-brogued mare. “Choke ‘em!”

Twilight felt Spike’s quick little breaths on the back of her neck, and his arms clinging to her for security as Rainbow, Lero, and Rarity’s voices were all strangled by what sounded like unicorn psychokinesis being applied to each of their necks, then constricting down upon their throats like nooses.

“Release them!” Twilight bellowed at once.

“Unit One, prepare entry!” Cpl. Pack barked to the ponies of Unit One. “All units, stand by for full breach!”

Just as Unit One was getting into position, they all heard the psychokinesis release, and Twilight’s three captured herdmates gasping for air. The vast head reappeared, floating over the quarry mill’s rooftop.

“Release them, and surrender peacefully,” Twilight struggled to not let too much emotion enter her voice, “and I promise no harm will come to you.”

“That’s a moighty koind offer,” the huge head answered, “But Oi think yer koinda looking through teh wrong end o’ teh telescope on all this, Miss Magic.”

“Miss Magic…?”

“Now Oi dunno how yeh feel about name droppers, Twoiloight Sparkle…”

Cringing as she would’ve cringed at Spike’s claws dragging across one of her chalkboards, Twilight decided she would MUCH rather be called ‘Miss Magic’ by this mare than ever hear her real name butchered so horribly again.

“...But here’s a name yeh moight wanna listen up for: Discord.”

Twilight jolted, and she wasn’t the only one. Ever since the Day of Chaos, the name of Discord was one all ponies dreaded as they had used to dread Nightmare Moon’s.

“Snagged yer attention, did Oi? What yeh and yer Element-bearing gal pals did ta stop Discord way back on teh Day o’ Chaos was utterly butterly aces.”

And the skewbald unicorn actually smiled and winked at her, as though she and Twilight were friends.

“But that Rainbow o’ Loight… yeh’ll need teh full set o’ six tah cast et again, won’t yah, Miss Magic? And wouldn’t yeh know et, Oi got Lil’ Miss Koindness and Miss Loyalty as me guests o’ honor! Shame if something were ta happen ta them. Then Discord would know there’s nothing holding him back!”

The head kidnapper let them all soak that information in. It felt like falling through thin ice over a lake in winter, and splashing into the frigid waters below.

“Discord… he’s not like that anymore… we reformed him…”

“‘Reformed,’ yeh say?” The way the skewbald unicorn made a show of adjusting her glasses while staring back reminded Twilight of a particularly obnoxious college professor she’d once had. “Funny thing about ‘reformed’ lawbreakers… they tend ta just be boiding their toime.”

Surely… surely Discord wasn’t IN on this? Surely he hadn’t masterminded this kidnapping?! No, Twilight was letting her fears get the best of her. If Discord had turned traitor, if Discord wanted chaos, he’d’ve probably started with cancelling the Bewitchment or something like that. Also, he’d not bother using ponies as intermediaries; what would be the fun of that? Not to mention there’d probably be a lot more bizarre things flying through the sky.

However, the kidnapper’s threat was taking root. Alarm and dread were infecting the ranks; everypony was looking more like terrified colts and fillies than a dauntless team of rescuers.

Discord had scarred so many ponies… and he was completely invulnerable to all conventional weaponry and magic.

“Y… you can’t… please, Miss,” she hated the quaver in her voice. “You CAN’T have forgotten what it was like during the FIRST Day of Chaos! You would REALLY want to bring that back?!”

“Why not?” The Sicklefin boss was growing bolder; it was clearly just now dawning on her what a wonderful prize had fallen on her back. “From where Oi stand, chaos offers a lot more open-ended possibilities than jail. Maybe even Discord’ll loike a change in career, an’ join me club! In fact, teh longer Oi cogitate on et, teh more Oi realoize that with these girls, Oi’ve got teh whole woide world by teh throat! So unless yeh want Discord ta have us all switch soizes with teh creepy crawlies in the beehoives and anthills or whatever, yeh wanks will do EXACTLY what Oi say!”

“….What is it you want from us?” Twilight asked through her megaphone. “A million bits? Two million bits?”

“PISS on yer bits!”

The Sicklefin boss’ jaw fell, seemingly stunned by her own brazenness. However, her jaw snapped shut into a ghastly grin.

“Oi can’t believe Oi just SAID that… but… YEAH!” She repeated, “PISS ON YER BITS! Piss on every coin! Drown all teh moneymakers o’ teh world in a LAKE o’ urine! Eee hee hee! Discord could probably DO that too!”

And Twilight watched the skewbald unicorn draw a long, calming breath, forcing herself to come down from her great power high.

“What Oi want… is YEW, Miss Magic.” Twilight actually saw some of the bespectacled unicorn’s arm point at her. “Oi’m gonna send a couple o’ me girls down ta put a horn wrap on yew, and yer gonna let them. Yer gonna surrender noice and submissive-loike, and they’ll take yeh insoide ta join yer herdmates. Whoile teh REST o’ yeh…”

Here, she looked outward past Twilight, addressing Corporal Wolf Pack and all the ponies in her units.

“...are gonna SIT STILL and DO NOTHING ‘cept AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. Ask me what’ll happen if yeh don’t.”

“What’ll happen if we don’t?” Twilight asked.

“Teh human doies.”

“DON’T SURRENDER! DON’T SURRENDER, TWILIGHT SPARKLE!” Twilight was shocked anew to recognize whose voice that was, speaking next to the Sickelfin boss’, even if she couldn’t see her face.

“Wha...?!” The disbelieving Sicklefin boss turned to her right. “Feck, Dewy, who’s soide are yeh… oh. OH. Oi get et. Eee hee hee… Dewy, me auld flower, if hate were food, we could ship yeh off ta Zebrabwe, and there wouldn’t be no starving zebra foals no more.“

Twilight glanced over at Corporal Wolf Pack. “May I have a little time to reach a decision?” she asked the gang leader.

“Sure!” the giant floating head answered cheerily. “Oi’ll give yeh ta ten whole seconds! NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN!”

“Don’t surrender, Twilight!” The emotion borne in Honeydew’s voice combined earnestly feigned camaraderie with a transparent attempt at reverse psychology. “I think she’s bluffing! Show her you won’t fall for stupid bluffs!”

“FIVE! FOUR! THREE!”

The face of her sweet human stallion, smiling as he held her head in those warm, loving hands of his, sprang into Twilight’s mind.

“I surrender!”

“Twilight, no!” cried Spike.

“I surrender,” she repeated again, soft and defeated. Her megaphone gave a long, piercing squeal of feedback.

“Knew yeh were a smartie,” said the Sicklefin ringleader before her enormous head finally vanished from sight.

Twilight Sparkle hunkered down to the ground.

“I’ll be okay, Spike,” she whispered to the dragon. “Write to Princess Celestia. Tell her what’s happened. She’ll know what to do.”

“I… I will.” He hugged her and got off her back.

Twilight stood back up as the quarry mill’s front doors opened, and two weaselly-looking ponies stepped out. One was a unicorn, holding a horn wrap in her telekinetic grip.

* * *

As much as she approved of her lackeys all calling her ‘boss,’ this wasn’t entirely true. Exit Wound wasn’t truly THE boss of the Sicklefin Gang. Not its founder, and certainly not its capo di tutti capi, (to steal the phrase those garlic-gargling Bitalian mafiosi were so fond of.) No, THE Sicklefin Boss was Exit Wound’s aunt, who was still busy managing the bulk of the Sicklefin power, way back home in the Emerald Isles.

Exit, herself, was just one of the underbosses.

Originally, Exit had been sent here to Equestria to spearhead a certain business venture on her aunt’s behalf, (which Exit was still managing, to this day.) And it was here, in Equestria, that Honeydew had made her fateful entrance into Exit’s life. One thing had led gradually to another, and they had come up with this mad, daring, unreal wondrous scheme. A scheme that would at last bring true greatness to the Sicklefin, and especially to Exit Wound’s name.

The life of a career criminal was one that, statistically, was practically guaranteed to be brought to a sudden and violent end, long before anything remotely resembling natural causes could kick in, (unless you were sentenced to life imprisonment.) Exit had often thought about how she’d be brought down. Maybe one of her penthouses would get bombed while she was asleep in it. Maybe she’d get shot in the back of the head while slugging down booze at a bar. Maybe it’d be a killer from the Barracuda Cartel, maybe a poison needle jabbed in her neck by somepony in the Unagi Clan from Neighpon, maybe some backstabbing Sicklefin, maybe even a cop. Regardless, no one would care. One less criminal in the world.

Exit Wound didn’t want to just be ‘one less criminal.’ She wanted to be a big shot for all time. Even if she was doomed not to live forever like those stinking alicorns did, at least her NAME could be immortal.

Just like Bellerophon Michealides.

Word had it that there’d briefly been some second man called Gus Wainwright, living in Ponyville. Briefly. But Gus had died due to an incurable terminal illness he’d had before crossing over to this world, according to the papers.

Since Mr. Wainwright’s stay in Equestria had been so short, (and he’d reportedly not had much of an emotionally engaging personality,) Gus had made very little impact on the pony worldview, outside of Academics and diehard Human Enthusiasts, who still fiercely debated Gus’ discoveries and ideas.

But now there was definitely only one human — ONE!!! — existing in this world. Celebrated, famous, adored, and connected all the way up to the top. A living legend who Exit could tell would continue to remain legendary 900,000 years after some taxidermist had stuffed him up and put his oh-so-unique carcass on display in a museum next to all the dinosaur skeletons for the rugrats to gawk at.

And she’d be the one to kill him. The world’s one and only human: NO other copycat killer would be able to copy THAT killing! Bigger than the infamous mares who assassinated royalty! She’d be famous forever! They’d have A-list actresses playing her in the biopics, painstakingly recreating this very moment in time she was now living through! The world would mourn the human’s death forever, as they would mourn the death of some religious messiah or world-famous rock star, and curse Exit Wound’s name for equally as long... and when they did, she would just laugh and laugh at them all forevermore from her little corner of Tartarus.

But it wasn’t enough just to simply murder him. The criminal underworld was choked with professional killers like Exit’s aunt who would’ve been all: headshot between the eyes, collect payment, call it a day. Exit Wound sincerely prided herself on her sharpshooting, and she was more than capable of hitting a target’s brain or heart or any other vital you’d care to name. Especially when her heart wasn’t really into the job.

But that’d never been Exit Wound’s style.

One of the most satisfying kills she’d ever performed had been on a mare out in a lonely forest in Conneight, back on the Emerald Isles. She’d blasted the filly’s liver to smithereens. It had taken over an hour for the sad sack to croak, and Exit had spent that entire time taunting the mare relentlessly from a few yards away while she tried uselessly to stop herself from bleeding to death, all while the toxins and poisons that her liver had been containing and nullifying spread throughout her body.

Absotively glorious.

If Exit’s aunt were here, she’d have told Exit to just snipe the human from the rooftop of an adjacent house in the dead of night and get on with her life.

Exit’s soulless stone of an aunt could go eat her own horn.

A once-in-not-just-a-lifetime-but-once-and-probably-NEVER-AGAIN target like Lero Michealides didn’t warrant cold, impersonal professionalism like he was just another fat politician or something!

The biographers would all pay more attention to Honeydew, then!

No, a legend like Lero deserved a legendary extravaganza of a death. Shameful and agonizing, just the way Exit Wound loved them. Once things had settled down a bit more, Exit would call Scrounger back to do what he did best. Scrounger would take aim, build up the power within himself, then fire his life-destroying shot deep inside his helpless prey.

(...Life would’ve been so much better if she’d been born a male unicorn…)

And not only had everything gone as planned: the BEST part was this development of getting the Element Bearers as hostages. Now Exit could demand a clean getaway back to the Emerald Isles!

After all, who else could possibly save everypony from Discord, if not the six Bearers? The Princesses? What a joke! Yes, Exit had indeed lived through the Day of Chaos for herself, and it was just like the human had said: Discord had taken Their Majesties’ sun and moon, and made them chase each other like racing greyhounds, and there hadn’t been one damn thing Their Majesties had been able to do to stop him!

Hee hee… to think, she’d be getting THREE of them! Once she was back on the Isles… Exit could even probably SELL one or two of these Bearers off to a freedom fighter friend of hers, while keeping one for herself! From then on, NOBODY would ever DARE refuse her anything, not with the threat of eternal chaos to keep them in line!

She’d be as good as a Queen Of The World For Life!

* * *

If ponykind had instilled itself with a huge human-style nudity taboo… the Sickefin gangsters now leading Twilight Sparkle to their boss would probably have thought to frisk the clothes she’d have been wearing for concealed weapons.

Since this wasn’t the case — since Twilight had come to them unarmored and without weapons holstered to her body, and now wore only the horn wrap they, themselves, had put on her — the Sicklefins assumed Twilight Sparkle had been rendered helpless.

None of them had any real idea just how powerful, skilled, and clever Twilight Sparkle really WAS at magic.

Shrinking spells were not the sort of magic an average unicorn could pull off. Thus, the gangsters didn’t suspect that there was a special surprise clinging to the hair in Twilight Sparkle’s mane, shrunken so small as to be nearly impossible to detect with the naked eye.

The particular spell which Twilight had used to shrink this special surprise of hers was a uniquely customized bit of magic. She had specially tailored it so that only two things would break her spell and restore the surprise to its true size. Either the passage of twenty-four hours, or the utterance of a special deactivation phrase.

Though this phrase was VERY exotic-sounding, it was not an incantation. These weren’t ‘magic words‘ of any sort. That had been a very purposeful choice on Twilight’s part.

It was called a ‘Trigger Word.’ A completely unmagical being could speak this string of syllables just as easily as a magical one, and still caused the shrink spell’s deactivation. Lero could’ve spoken them. Jabbers the parrot could’ve spoken them.

A unicorn whose horn was in a horn wrap could’ve spoken them.

Which was why the phrase she’d selected wasn’t anything commonplace, like ‘Nice weather we’re having.’ It was something unique to Lero’s home world, something no fellow Equestrian would think to say, to ensure it would only go off at the moment Twilight chose.

* * *

Though the melted wax on Lero’s body had cooled, the burns they’d caused were still painful. All the pony fur now attached to him was unbelievably itchy… nothing at all like how fur felt on him those times when Twilight had transformed him into a true stallion. Within his new obsidian hoofs, his hands were scrunched up very brutally.

The manacle chained around his ankle clinked and rattled as he drew his leg a little further in. The stony gorilla statue he was attached to stared down at him with an expression much like Honeydew’s, as though to say, ‘You’re just another dirty ape, exactly like me. Stop thinking you’re anything special.’

The jaundiced, herpes-riddled eyeballs of Scrounger The Dog stared at Lero as well, from where the human sat chained on all fours. Followed every slight shift and shuffle of his body. As though Lero were a squirrel up a tree. As though Lero were performing the most erotic pole dance in the history of all pole dancing, just for Scrounger.

Lero couldn’t bear to look over his shoulder at Scrounger again, for fear of exciting him all the more. But he could HEAR the Diamond Dog, oh yes. Lero’s ears had grown horribly attuned to Scrounger; the things he was doing cut over a lot of the other noise in the room. His panting. His drooling. The slimy squishy slapping of Scrounger pawing that festering meat between his legs.

Lero did his best to pretend it wasn’t happening. Every one of them was. But the difference between them and him was that Scrounger wasn’t looking to diddle any of them. But even Scrounger The Dog wasn’t the worst of it.

“A toast!” the skewbald unicorn crowed, pouring herself a stein of black-colored single-malt whiskey. “Ta our good friend, teh Chaos God!”

She lifted her glass. “Dizzy, if yeh’re listening in on all this roight now: may yer booze be cold and yer mares be hot, and may trouble slide off yeh, slicker than snot. Cheers!”

And though Discord did not appear, the Sicklefins all cheered, as their boss downed her drink while the members of Herd Bellerophon all held silent. Rainbow Dash was gritting her teeth. Hot, bitter tears squeezed out from under her clenched eyelids.

“Oi have PRINCESS CELESTIA’S PRECIOUS PET, teh ELEMENT O’ MAGIC, HERSELF wearing me horn wrap!” the unicorn went on, with a disdainful kick to the bars of Rarity’s birdcage. “Celestia can go lick me greasy, gaping SLIT!”

He’d meant to save Rarity’s life. Prevent her death. And now, she, Twilight Sparkle, and Rainbow Dash were the prisoners of this mare, who would hang them over the world like three Swords Of Damocles.

Honeydew snuggled into the hulking Sicklefin boss. “I can’t even imagine how proud you must be of yourself, Exit Wound.”

Exit Wound, huh? That was her name then? Incredibly fitting. It was enough to make Lero wonder why Honeydew’s mother had seen fit to bestow Honeydew with a name so deceptively charming. ‘Honey Badger’ would’ve been more appropriate. ‘Killer Shrew’ would’ve been even more on-the-nose.

“Fecking ROIGHT Oi’m proud!” retorted Exit Wound. “Oi’ve got teats o’ solid brass… no, TOITANIUM! Me clit’s a fecking DOIAMOND SHARD, so big that…!”

“Yes, indeed!” interrupted Honeydew, with an almost-imperceptible wince. “You’re great, you’re fantastic and…”

“Why’d yeh interrupt me there?” Exit Wound asked.

“I wasn’t interrupting!” said Honeydew. “I was agreeing with you!”

“No, no, no… you interrupted me, then,” said Exit Wound, and the overall mood just turned a little bit icier. “Do yeh fecking got something against mares with clits as gigantic as moine is?”

Honeydew’s wince was far more pronounced this time. “Oh, no, no, no!” she insisted. “I… the size of it is… truly impressive.”

“But…?” The suspicious way Exit Wound was eyeing Honeydew… it was almost as though she were half-expecting her cheerleader moll to whip out a badge and declare they were all under arrest because she’d been an undercover cop all along,

“But the only reason I’m uncomfortable is that, well… I remember reading in one of my books that female bonobos have huge clitorises. I think they’re estimated to be six times the size of gorillas’, and they’re, uh, ‘visible enough to waggle unmistakably as they walk,’ yes, that’s how the author put it. Bonobo females developed that way because they’re such disgustingly oversexual creatures.” She smiled at Exit. “So I just don’t want to hear you talking like you’re a bonobo, yourself, Exit. Neither of us want that, right?”

Predictably, talking about bonobos brought Honeydew’s mind back to Lero, himself. The sight of her eyes boring into his made his face throb, especially with Scrounger panting up a storm right behind him, waiting for…

...A horrific epiphany struck Lero at that moment.

Honeydew had bit his face. Bit him so hard that he’d bled.

Then Scrounger the Dog had licked his face. Lero had felt every verruca on that diseased dog’s tongue.

All it takes is a transfer of fluids, Lero’s tenth grade sex ed teacher echoed once again in his mind.

It was in his blood. All of it. Every disease Scrounger the Dog carried inside him, it was in his blood.

It didn’t even matter if that diddle-stick Scrounger was fiddling with even now snapped clean off in his paws like a burnt twig, (blackened, half-dead thing that it was,) Whatever else the Diamond Dog did to his body at this point would just be gilding the lily.

It was already in his bloodstream. Someone might as well shoot him in the head at this point. His life was as good as ended.

Honeydew watch these thoughts play across his face, and smiled as though inhaling the most exquisite cologne ever bottled.

“Speaking of which,” Honeydew turned back to Exit Wound. “Scrounger looks like he’s ready to pick up where he left off, what do you say we…?”

“Dewy,” Great anger simmered beneath the surface of Exit’s smile. It wouldn’t take much to bring it to a deadly boil. “This is me moment o’ glory. So do me a favor, after all Oi’ve done for yeh. Fer one day, just twenty-four hours, starting roight now, Oi don’t wanna hear yeh MENTION the word ‘bono…”

“YOU ANIMALS!”

All their heads snapped around. Rainbow Dash had lifted her head and bellowed in fury. Fear, like an ice-cold knife, scraped inside of Lero’s guts. The human wondered if this were Fluttershy’s infamous Stare he was looking at. It was possible Dash was doing it wrong. What Lero saw in the Swapped pegasus’ eyes didn’t make him want to freeze up. Rather, it made him want to run far away. And she was casting that glare at every Sicklefin gangster.

“You nasty, vicious pack of out-of-control animals!”

Twilight Sparkle and her megaphone had interrupted Exit Wound before she’d gotten a chance to properly pass sentence on Rainbow Dash. Without any prompting from their boss, two of Exit’s goons had taken the initiative of going over to Rainbow Dash’s side to loom over the pegasus threateningly while Exit was busy talking to Twilight.

Now, one of them kicked the Swapped pegasus in the stomach.

“Sounds like somepony needs a little attitude adjustment!”

When Dash answered, it was not just to the mare who’d kicked her, but the Sicklefins as a whole. What’s more, her voice came out slightly lower and gruffer than normal, as though she were imitating a strong and assertive minotaur bull.

“You cause my friends pain? Then you’ll get the same!”

Rainbow Dash’s whistle bounced off her chest when she thrust it out. She caught it in her teeth and gave a mighty blow.

TWEEEEEEEEEET!!!

* * *

Back in the bad old days when all of Rainbow Dash’s critters had been free to terrorize their caretaker and the human who loved her… the animals could pretty much be categorized into three danger levels.

First was the ‘mostly stationary’ animals. This included many of the older cats and dogs who slept all day, and the sloths. Stationary didn’t equal ‘harmless,’ though, any more than it did for cactuses. Nonetheless, the mostly stationary animals posed the smallest threat.

Next came the ‘vicious pets’. The rabbits, birds, mice, lizards, and younger dogs and cats. Bad individually, and worse when mobilized under Angel Bunny’s leadership.

And then there were the ‘misunderstood’ creatures, (as Rainbow Dash insistently called them.) The ones you’d never find for sale in any pet store. The ones that should never be brought out of the wild and into a house. The ones which big game hunters sought as trophies.

The ‘pets’ had been bad enough. But it had been nothing short of divine providence that a pair of inexperienced amateurs like him and Rainbow Dash had survived all the ‘misunderstoods’ that lived in Dash’s cottage.

Divine providence… and the fact that the animals had been more interested in tormenting him and Dash than murdering them.

Both of their hearts had been in their throats every time they had to feed any of the misunderstoods or clean up after them, or pass them in the hall. The cougars. The manticores. The boars. Mr. Braun and Mr. Schwarz. As well as all these legless reptiles now slithering up through the holes in the old floorboards.

“SNAKES!” shrieked a mare. “SNAKES ON THE FLOOR!”

As soon as the ponies caught sight of them, all the pegasi in the room flew up straight towards the ceiling… apart from Rainbow Dash, herself. Such was their initial shock, it was all the unicorns and earth ponies could do to freeze up or retreat into the adjacent room, or back away and scream. And with good reason.

For Lero knew all these snakes, both by name and breed. Hissy the Asp, Hoody the Forest Cobra, Shakes the Rattlesnake, Bandy the Many-Banded Krait, Midnight the Black-Necked Spitting Cobra, Ridgey the Saw-Scaled Viper, and quite a few others besides. All of them poisonous; none of Dash’s harmless snakes like Greenie the Gartersnake or Udders the Milk Snake seemed to have come along.

“C… call ‘em off!” Exit Wound demanded Rainbow Dash. “Feckin’ call ‘em off!”

As the nest of snakes made an undulating, sinuous beeline for their mistress, the animal trainer merely shot the skewbald unicorn a stony look. The two muscleheads at Dash’s left and right backed away from her very quickly.

In fact, practically all the ponies looked like they’d’ve liked nothing more than to do what domesticated horses from planet Earth would’ve done and stampeded away from the scary snakes. Lero rather hoped they’d listen to these primal instincts.

“Don’t just STAND there loike yer all halfwits waiting in loine ta feck a doorknob!” Exit Wound shouted at her minions, angrily charging up her own horn. “KILL TEH SCALY WORMS!”

Rediscovering some of their courage, the other Sicklefins began following their boss’ lead and went on the attack. The unicorns blasted piercing bolts of magic, while the Earth ponies tried to stomp the serpents underhoof.

Now, a pony’s hoof is a strong thing, especially when brought down with crushing force. But snakes were rather adept at dodging the legs of larger creatures. Plus, the unicorns were clearly not as used to firing on such quick, bendy, low-to-the-ground targets as they were with fellow ponies.

Still, Lero saw one gangster succeed in smashing her forehoof down powerfully on Bandy the many-banded krait’s midsection. But Bandy got this gangster to lift her leg back up by twisting around and sinking his venomous fangs into her ankle.

Lero could’ve told this mare that if she absolutely HAD to go kill such a poisonous snake as Bandy with her hoof, she should’ve tried aiming for his head, not his middle. But then, they weren’t exactly friends, now, were they?

The mare who tried to squash Bandy fell to the floor, shrieking bloody murder, and the rest of the gang went still with dread. All the snakes had made it to Rainbow Dash by this point, and they wound up all parts of her body.

Lero’s sweet Swapped love now made for a nightmarish sight. A death adder was coiled around Dash’s neck; his head poking out of her mane. More snakes hugged her barrel, her legs; their heads swaying back and forth in midair, hissing menacingly at all the enemy ponies surrounding them. It almost seemed as though Dash’s body was partially made of live snakes; especially since the glare in Dash’s own eyes was just as cold as her serpents’.

Lero watched Rainbow Dash quickly size up the large steel manacle keeping him chained to the gorilla statue, then the great birdcage holding Rarity prisoner.

“I’ll be back for you guys, I swear,” she promised them both, evaluating them as impossible for her to break.

She almost made it out the door without incident. But then came a piercing shot from Exit Wound’s horn that took off Hoody the cobra’s head; it fell next to Dash’s left hind leg, smoking at the neck. Rainbow Dash let out an agonized howl, as though her head had been clobbered with a wrench. Then she zipped out, fast as a Wonderbolt.

“Hoof!” cried one of the pegasi. “Hoof Sandwich, are you alright?!”

Hoof Sandwich — the mare Bandy had bit — let herself be helped up to a stand, but then faced her fellow gangsters with surprising pluck and confidence.

“I’m fine!” she told other Sicklefins. “Really sorry for scaring you all… just freaked out from being bit by that snake!”

“How do you feel?” asked the mare who’d helped her up.

“Fit as a fiddle, Blunt!” Hoof Sandwich proclaimed, with a firm stamp of her hoof and a lively intake of air. “A whole string quartet, in fact!”

“You aren’t…?”

“If I were dying, I’d tell you that, wouldn’t I, mates?” Hoof Sandwich said, extending her bitten leg for the others to see. “But the bite doesn’t even hurt, really, Just itches a bit, mostly numb, in fact!”

‘The snake with the most deadliest venom in the world is the black mamba.’ Lero remembered Dash warning him, way back before she’d gotten equilibrium. ‘Don’t worry; I don’t got any of THOSE. But Bandy’s what’s called a many-banded krait; his venom’s seventh-most-deadliest. No known antivenom. But unless your body’s allergic to snakes, usually it takes an hour for the symptoms to kick in. Unless it’s treated quickly, you could die in as little as thirty hours.’

“I feel like I could take on the world!” cried Hoof Sandwich.

“So… so we don’t even have to be AFRAID of being bitten by any of those snakes?” asked another of the Sicklefins.

“Of course not!” cried Honeydew suddenly. “Rainbow Dash is one of the biggest cowards in Ponyville; I’ve seen her be terrified by her own shadow! In fact, I doubt she’d’ve even been an Element Bearer if she didn’t have her five friends to hide behind! I should’ve known that a mare like her would never go a hundred yards of a truly dangerous snake! This was all just to SCARE us! That’s the one thing Rainbow Dash CAN do, in lieu of real fighting: SCARE others!”

Hearing this filled the Sicklefins with fresh new confidence.

“Ey! Breaking!” Exit Wound pointed to another of her goons. “Oi want yeh and Entering ta go gather whoever yeh need, catch Koindness, and bring her back here! Break her legs if yeh must, but do NOT fecking kill her, however tempted yeh may be!”

“You got it, boss!” said a unicorn mare who was apparently named Breaking.

“But stay on guard at all toimes!” Exit warned. “Little Miss Zookeeper could have more animal amigos loiying in wait fer us! For that matter, we moight already have a snake infestation of teh four-legged, hooved varoiety, if yeh catch me drift!”

“We’ll keep our eyes peeled!” spoke a second unicorn mare who looked like Breaking’s sister.

“I’m coming with you!” said Hoof Sandwich, the mare who’d gotten bit, nearly running into a second group of gangsters , who were bringing in another familiar face.

“Boss! Here’s Twilight Sparkle!”

Fresh guilt clenched Lero’s heart to see Twilight, of all ponies, with a horn wrap on her, flanked on either side by Exit Wound’s goons. If only he hadn’t been so stupid and gullible with that mare at the train station! Time after time, he kept thinking he had every angle covered, and every time, it wouldn’t be just himself who suffered from his stupidity, but those nearest to him.

“Welcome ta teh fecking party, Miss Magic! Here’s where all teh big nobs hang out!”

As Exit Wound drank more black whiskey, Twilight just looks around the room, and at Rarity and Lero, as though taking careful consideration of her surroundings.

“Well? Whaddaya got ta say fer yerself?”

Twilight Sparkle looked straight at the Sicklefin boss, and said, “Shigeru Miyamoto!”

* * *

There were times when Lyra Heartstrings wished she’d been born with hands like Lero’s.

Twilight Sparkle had shrunken Lyra down to the size of an insect, and then levitated her into the depths of her mane. Since then, Lyra had been clinging steadfastly to a giant swatch of Twilight’s fur, with the help of her telekinesis.

Because she was now so very small and hung upside-down like a slumbering bat, it was impossible for anypony to see Lyra — especially the steady, miniscule glow of her horn — with the naked eye.

It hadn’t even really been that long, However, most ponies were not capable of clinging to what was functionally ropes via telekinesis for long. If not for her intense Still Way training, Lyra would never had possessed the endurance to pull this off.

But now her herd-sister had shouted the name of that human video game maker Lero had told them about. And Lyra felt herself rapidly returning to her true height.

The Still Way grandmaster waited, bending her legs and when the moment was right, she sprang off Twilight. The expansion of her form exaggerated her momentum, allowing her to land a perfect flying kick to the face to one of the mares flanking Twilight. Kicking off, she swept around in the air in a spinning kick, striking the other mare in the back of the head with incredible force, and she collapsed under the force.

Pony martial arts were unique from human ones in a specific way. While they, like human martial arts, sought to perfect a warrior’s innate physical capabilities, many pony martial arts sought to build on innate mystical capabilities. Pegasi flight and weather control, Earth Pony strength and connection to the earth, heck, there was even an obscure martial art that capitalized on their ability to grow plants.

For unicorns, it was magic. However, unicorn martial arts was nothing like Twilight Sparkle’s style of combative sorcery. It wasn’t about learning arcane formula, building vast reserves of magical power, or amassing a massive repertoire of spells, but rather refining spells that come naturally, instinctively, to such a degree they become effective in the split-second of physical combat.

Such as light.

Most unicorns are so used to producing illumination with their horns, most don’t even think of it as a spell, much less something one could improve and make useful outside of it’s obvious practicality, nor did many other ponies consider that possibility, either.

And after that entrance, all eyes were on here, except Twilight, who she told what to expect.

Perfect.

Even before she hit the ground, her horn ignited with light, and in a fraction of a second, brightened its illumination to an unbearable luminosity. All the goons were blinded, jerking back instinctively away from the brightness, giving Lyra the opening she needed.

While shrunken, Lyra had done her best to listen in on everything others had been saying to Twilight… but at such a puny height, it had been like listening to thunderclaps converse with each other during a lightning storm.

She needed a second to get her bearings. From the thick lavender forests of Twilight’s mane, smelling so strongly of Twilight’s sweat and Twilight’s shampoo, Lyra now found herself in a large, dusty room with several exits, where the main source of light seemed to be a set of theatrical spotlights on an upper catwalk. Dangerous enemies surrounded her, briefly disabled. But most importantly, she saw her herdmates. Both her unicorn herd-sisters were wearing horn wraps, and Rarity was in a cage. And Lero…

Lero…

When her hooves touched the ground, she launched herself at the skewbald unicorn mare, striking her simply and solidly on her snout with her hoof, as she summoned her telekinesis to life.

“W… which fecking Bearer are yeh, then?” the skewbald mare asked, even as she was stumbling backwards. “What’re yeh the Element of?”

Projecting a physical force or grabbing and levitating inanimate objects with telekinesis was simple. Living beings were less so. What was truly difficult and took incredible focus was something that would be simple with a physical object:

Creating an edge.

She pressed the edge against the skewbald mare’s throat, just enough to cause pain, but not enough to spill blood.

“Me? I’m the Element of Surprise,” said Lyra. “And if I see you make one move, if that horn of yours gives so much as a flicker of light, if ANY of your thugs tries anything funny, it’s over for you. Say ‘yes’ if you understand.” Her voice was a controlled, warning tone, but those familiar with her might note the undertone of controlled fury.

Dazzled and feeling the familiar pain of a blade to the throat, Exit Wound responded in the affirmative. “Y-yeah, Oi got ya.”

“You’re going to follow my orders, exactly.” When the gangster mare failed to respond, she pressed the blade more firmly, a faint line of crimson red forming. “Understand!?”

“Feck! Yes!” She practically growled.

“First, I want that horn wrap off Twilight Sparkle. Right now.”

“Yeh crazy bint, She’ll blow us... gah!” The red line became a trickle, convincing the gang boss this was not a productive area of discussion. “Yeh heard teh mare! Take teh fecking horn wrap off!”

An earth pony closest to Twilight hesitated, before moving over to Twilight, nervously unstrapping Twilight’s horn wrap, sliding it off.

A low, sadistic chuckle suddenly emerged from Rarity’s cage; “Oh-ho-ho! Are you all in for it now…!” she cackled, as Twilight’s horn flickered to life, channeling her magic back into it experimentally.

Lyra favored Rarity with a smirk, before turning her attention back to Exit Wound. “Now…”

Her next order, however, was interrupted by a primal scream, a light green blur slamming into her side, causing her telekinesis to fail with a pop, the blow knocking her back and over the railing of the balcony where they all stood, dropping her into the darkness of the floor below, the blur following after her.

* * *

Exit Wound staggered to her hooves, attempting to reorient herself on the Element of Magic, but she was too late. They all saw the flash of a spell going off.

The gorilla statue had originally been a huge hunk of stone drawn directly from the bedrock of this very quarry. Exit Wound had been its sculptor.

Very few ponies would’ve looked at a cutthroat like Exit and think she might have an artistic side to her, but it existed; Honeydew could testify to that. From formless rock, the Sicklefin underboss had blasted and blasted away with unicorn magic until it had attained its current shape. This had happened during the planning stages of Lero Michealides’ capture, when they both agreed such a thing would be superbly ironic to chain the human to. Then Exit had celebrated her artistic creation with ‘a bit of the slap and tickle,’ (as she put it.) Honeydew had come very close to dislocating her jaw. Five times.

When Twilight shot her magic beam at the gorilla statue, Exit figured it would explode like a bomb. What the statue did was move.

With limbs that were no longer stiff and obdurate, the stone gorilla grabbed the iron chain connecting it to the human and snapped it apart, as though it were dying ivy.

“Fecking rock golem…” Exit hissed under her breath.

At the same time, Twilight Sparkle shouted out, “Lero! It’s okay!” when the rock golem grabbed the human and set him on its back, much like an actual mother gorilla would do with her young. “Just hang on tight!”

No doubt it would’ve been easier for the human to ‘hang tight’ if his hands weren’t encased in obsidian hoofs, so he had to make do by encircling his arms around the golem’s neck as firmly as possible.

“Yeh grotty twat!” Shouting at Twilight Sparkle had been a mistake; for the Element of Magic needed one glance at the Exit Wound brightening horn for her to vanish. When she did, the gorilla golem froze up lifelessly again.

“All o’ yeh!” Exit snarled at her Sicklefins. “Stop scratchin’ yer holes ‘n’ yer pink bits and BRING THESE PUKE FELCHERS DOWN!”

Then the gorilla was on the move again; gritty powder flaking off its body like dandruff with every shift of its stony limbs. Grabbing the long chain it had broken off the floor, the magically animated statue rose into its back legs. Its free left arm punched and smashed aside every gangster that came within reach, while the chain in its right arm cracked across faces and bodies with bone-breaking force.

The unicorn gangsters followed their boss’ lead and opened fire on the gorilla, taking huge chunks out. Many of their shots would’ve mutilated or killed a flesh-and-blood gorilla; they aimed for the head, the chest. But even when its face was completely blown off, the rock golem paid no notice. Like it was a coat of dried mud falling off on its own.

Exit had sculpted it too well.

But rather than attempt to beat them all down ‘til there were none left standing, the gorilla was fighting his way to the wall, his primate digits finding fingerholds in the mortar. The human hugged the golem’s neck all the tighter as it began scaling the wall upward.

“Take out ets limbs!” Exit shouted to her unicorn underlings, already trying her best to do just that. “Let’s dismember et! Can’t fecking climb if et ain’t got ets paws attached!”

Even as they had begun firing, Gabby the griffin flapped her wings and cawed out, “She’s on the catwalk!” while pointing upward. “Twilight Sparkle’s up on the catwalk!”

They all looked up. Even squinting against the spotlights’ glare, they could all see that this was where the Bearer of Magic had teleported herself. The Sicklefins who’d been operating the spotlights lay sprawled upon the catwalk’s grating; knocked out by some spell of Twilight’s, evidently.

Several Sicklefin pegasi flew up to attack Twilight Sparkle, but ended up crashing painfully into the force field she cast over herself. Not a small, cramped force field, either: Honeydew reckoned one could fit a respectable-sized gazebo inside that purple sphere.

The pegasi tried bucking it with their legs, they tried slashing it with wingblades, while a number of the unicorns down below turned their blasts on it. But the force field held.

Still, though, upholding the force field and controlling the rock golem at the same time was clearing straining Twilight’s resources: the gorilla was climbing slower. Exit was certainly not the Sicklefin’s sole sharpshooter, and the gorilla’s arms and legs were looking like thoroughly chewed-up pencils. But it kept climbing up the wall, towards Twilight Sparkle…

* * *

This wasn’t Twilight’s first time facing overwhelming numbers. She’d faced what felt like a small army’s worth of changelings back when Shining and Cadence had their wedding. But the swarm had overwhelmed her and her friends, so that was a terrible memory for her to draw inner strength from.

While the Sicklefins were fewer in number than Queen Chrysalis’ swarm, they made up for it by being a tougher class of fighter, (for a race of equinoids with horns and wings, changelings were rather weak, individually.) It showed in the way the gangsters attacked her force field. Given enough time, they’d wear her down, but she only needed to hold out for a couple more seconds for her statue golem to reach the catwalk. Perhaps she could shrink her own force field down halfway and cast a second one over her golem; it was already so whittled down by now, that…

“How’s tricks, Miss Magic?”

Twilight almost lost her focus. In a bright flash, the Sicklefin boss appeared directly in front of her, just outside the brim of her force field. With a meaningful look over her shoulder, her pegasus subordinates backed away.

“You know teleportation?!” It was a rare unicorn who could pull such a thing off. In fact, back when Twilight had first learned that Rarity now knew teleportation along with all her weather magic — that she ‘remembered’ Twilight training her in it — what a shock. Especially since Twilight had tried training Lyra in teleporting a few times before the Swap, but even Lyra could never quite wrap her mind around it, or summon sufficient magic to execute it.

“Oi’m a fecking exceptional caster o’ spells, Miss Magic,” the Sicklefin boss told her, suddenly directly behind her. “Didn’t yeh read me foile when yeh was with them fuzz?” she then asked, from a spot where the catwalk branched off to the side. “Oi’m Exit Wound.”

Twilight really hadn’t read any of the Sicklefins’ dossiers. Even if Cpl. Wolf Pack had brought them, she wouldn’t have been in any mood for reading.

“No word o’ a loie: Oi used ta be a student in Celestia’s School Fer Gifted Unicorns, but Oi didn’t get ta graduate,” she continued from the top of the force field’s dome, directly over Twilight’s head. “Expelled fer bad behaviour in me foinal year, by teh Princess herself! Bit o’ an overreaction, if’n yeh ask me,. What’s a few broken legs between classmates? Muckers should’ve known better than ta show me up.”

“You… You broke the other student’s legs….. because they did better than you!?” Twilight asked, aghast.

And with one final bright flash… the skewbald unicorn had teleported herself directly inside Twilight’s force field. Twilight has a second’s look at the the underside of the criminal’s hobnailed horseshoes, before she felt them connect with the side of her face, and then her head had smacked into the back of her own force field’s wall. Exit Wound gave a wicked smile.

“Heh, yah. Part o’ why Oi’m not one o’ Her Fecking Majesty’s biggest fans,” said the crime boss, brushing dust off her double-breasted jacket with telekinesis.

With her concentration completely broken, Twilight’s force field fizzled out. She had to blink a trickle of blood out of her eyes as her gorilla golem stiffened back into immobility and fell straight backward off the wall it’d been climbing. Lero screamed as he let go of its neck.

And the Sicklefin boss turned away from Twilight Sparkle to watch the human fall.

* * *

From down in her cage, Rarity felt her insides freeze as her prince plunged downward. Magic surged up into her horn as she instinctually tried to conjure a cloud platform to catch him and a cloudwalking spell to support him, but of course, her accursed horn wrap plugged off her every attempt.

Falling, falling … once again, Lero was falling, once again, she would not be able to save him, she was prevented from even chasing after him, only this time, she would watch from the ground instead of the sky. Rarity even found herself daring to hope that one of the Sicklefin pegasi would find it within themselves to at least catch Lero. None did.

At least this wasn’t a nine-thousand foot drop, this time… but that devastated gorilla statue was quite a huge cut of stone. How terribly would it crush her poor, persecuted Lero underneath once it landed on top of him? Please, just let him survive, at least let…

Her sweet, ingenious Sparkle-kitten teleported herself directly under Lero’s legs, so that he landed straddling her back, just as he did whenever one of them allowed Lero to ride her. Then, while still in freefall, Twilight’s horn flashed again, and she teleported over about five bodylengths to the right with Lero still on her back, magically slowing her plummet enough to land safely on her hooves. Five bodylengths to her left, what remained of the gorilla statue smashed into grey rubble on the floor.

“Oh, well done, Twilight!” Rarity cried, “Bravo!”

Rarity clapped her hooves and her adorable kitten had just started to turn her smile towards her when what could’ve easily been about ten enemy unicorn levitational fields latched onto her prince at once, and lifted him up off Twilight’s back. They weren’t exactly operating as a unified team, either. Levitational fields around his right leg, levitational fields around his left arm, levitational fields around his neck… effectively, it was as though a squabbling pack of three-year-olds were tug-of-warring for the same rag doll.

This was not doing Lero’s body any favors. Just as terribly, the Sicklefins were attacking Twilight like a swarm of hornets; Rarity outright lost count of how many times Twilight had needed to teleport to dodge unicorn blasts and the club of a particularly brutal earth pony, until the head Sicklefin, herself, the one Honeydew had called ‘Exit Wound,’ teleported right down from the catwalk next to her prince.

“Ease up!” Exit barked, and Rarity’s sweet stallion dropped like a stone at her hooves. “Don’t wanna fecking accidental...”

Zing! As the unexpecting Exit Wound flinched back, Twilight had appeared right by Lero’s side, and bit down on his arm, not hard enough to break the skin.

Zing! With bodily contact established, Twilight and Lero reappeared inside the very cargo elevator that Exit Wound, herself, had ridden up with Honeydew. Because cargo elevators had safety grates, as opposed to full-on doors, it made for a viable teleportation destination. Twilight’s hoof hit its button. Hot walls of protective fire shot up between the elevator and the Sicklefin gangsters, even before Twilight teleported herself in front of them.

The elevator rumbled downward with Lero on it. No doubt Lyra would be able to protect their stallion on that lower floor. After all, it was only Honeydew she’d be fighting.

Exit Wound sent a commanding look at the mare whom Rarity took to be her second-in-command. This mare shouted at some of the other Sicklefins to go follow her, and they all hastened through a side door. No doubt, they’d be taking the stairs down.

“Question fer yeh,” Exit Wound asked Twilight Sparkle, “Supposin’ Oi were ta blast that fecking horn off that pretty purple head o’ yers, would that disqualifoi yeh from being Element O’ Magic?”

Twilight’s forehoof scraped the ground challengingly as her horn charged up with power. “You and all your flunkies are welcome to try.”

* * *

The world blurred by Lyra as she tumbled through the air. Focus! she demanded of herself. Still. She managed to resummon her telekinesis quickly enough to cushion her fall, but the impact was great enough she still needed to tumble to avoid injury…

Which is when she heard the distinct whistle of a body plummeting through the air behind her. Reflexively, without thought, she leap clear — which was fortuitous, as Honeydew impacted behind her, the ground literally exploding beneath her hooves.

Lyra flinched away from the shrapnel, almost missing the blows that surged in behind it. She created telekinetic shields — not full bubble domes, the way Twilight made them. Bubble domes, while comprehensively protective, were huge power drains. Brief planes of force to deflect the blows away were far more efficient, albeit needing much faster reflexes.

Much to Lyra’s shock, the shrapnel followed the blows, swirling about her attacker’s hooves, striking secondary blows, wrapping past her shields, opening slashes on Lyra’s flank. Glaring, she shoved forward with her shields, smashing against her attacker’s face, focusing her power to follow up with a more decisive blow…

Only to find her foe retreating into the shadows with a clattering noise. A familiar clattering noise: that of the hooves moving rapidly using a certain martial arts technique... Lyra scanned the expansive floor they were on, the lowest one, the largest. On the side they were on, it was filled with rock, some cut cubes from the quarry, others cut into sheets and tiles, others ground to gravel and sand. They were stacked or collected into piles over a good chunk of the area, interspersed with processing machinery. She brightened her horn when she failed to spot her target.

Finally, Lyra’s opponent spoke, voice dripping with smugness. “You appear to be surprised, Heartstrings,” Honeydew taunted.

Lyra took a moment to check herself — light scratches, some blood, but nothing serious. “You’ve improved,” she told the earth pony mare icily.

The last time they had challenged one another’s skills was when Honeydew had flat-out attacked Lyra over a year ago; the melon vendor’s loathing of Herd Bellerophon overriding what little speck of common sense dwelt within her. For Honeydew, that fight had ended with her up a tree a block away with two black eyes and three busted ankles. For Lyra, it had ended with a lengthy outbreak of pungent sweat from exertion.

“Does it show?” Honeydew responded, with the exact same flattered, smiling coo as Lyra’s neighbor, Daisy, back when Lyra had looked Daisy over and asked if she’d lost weight. “Yes, I’ve put work into honing my Rolling Earth skills since our last little skirmish. With a particular focus on maximizing its effectiveness against the Still Way.”

“And I recognized a bit of Shattered Stone in there also.” Looking back, it now occurred to Lyra that Honeydew’s musculature had been growing steadily more defined, month after month. Now it suddenly made sense: she’d be preparing for this moment in every way she could; not just simply schmoozing up a mobster. It was actually a little impressive. But very, very disturbing.

“You noticed! I’m flattered. And a bit disappointed, to be honest. When I smash your bones to powder, I was hoping to make it a complete surprise.”

Lyra heard the grunt of exertion, the massive stone block across from her sliding at her at incredible speed, attempting to smash her against one of its brothers, she leapt towards it, lancing her telekinesis against it, using the momentum to launch herself up into the air, flipping atop the stone block... and spotting her rival on the other side.

“You have been a busy bee,” said Lyra.

“Leave Bee out of this, you sister-stealing slurper of a simian’s sweaty scrotum!” Honeydew shrieked, smashing her hooves into the ground, rocks and gravel launching into the air. With a blur of strikes, Lyra found herself dodging a hail of projectiles,.

Left. Block. Leap. Right. Duck. Lyra flowed through the assault. not thinking, merely acting, as the act of taking time to think would make it too late. Catch. Parry. Return. Strike, left leg, off balance, move to capitali-

She nearly missed it... while she stumbled from the strike, Honeydew rolled with it, tumbling over and flinging a rock at her in a single motion, but Lye instinctively noticed something off: a shine. Barely noticeable, but distinctly off to a sharp eye.

Lyra threw up a shield in front of her with all her might, attempting to reverse her movement, which suddenly became simple as the rock exploded with concussive force, flinging her away.

That’s an advanced Shattered Stone move. Lyra thought to herself. Just how much trouble am I in right now...?

She slammed against the stone block, but managed to find her hooves, telekinetically shoving herself aside, and tumbling any follow-up roll to evade any further attacks, which she heard clatter against the stone. She swiped her telekinesis through the air, blowing away the dust, looking for her opponent, only to find Honeydew gone, again.

...Lots.

She was far too used to Honeydew playing the inextinguishable hothead, pressing the attack event to her detriment, charging into mêlées to pound things into mush even against opponents who could take her out before she could reach them. Now, not only had Honeydew refined her skill to a dangerous level, she was retreating, attempting to reestablish surprise, evading being targeted, and attempting to strike at range.

Is she so hateful of Lero that she’s actually learned to fight well enough to win?

Lyra walked back to where she last saw her target... and spotted faint spatters on the ground. Blood? So she had hit her target. She followed the trail, stalking into the darkness, shadowy machinery looming above her as she went further into the processing section of the plant. Lyra dimmed her horn; in this environment, its glow would make her a target. She scanned the shadows with a sharp eye. There. She spotted a pony silhouette in the shadows. She launched herself at Honeydew, not wanting to give the flash of warning of a spellcast, smashing into it with her hooves…

...and experiencing déjà vu as a pony-shaped pile of rocks fell over. There was a sudden CLANG behind her as a huge bulk of ramshackle machinery swung around with a crash, cutting off the passage in which she’d just come.

A trap!? Lyra lashed out with a telekinetic strike, but only caught a glimpse of a blur moving to the left…!

Strike. Strike. Strike. All her telekinetic attacks were foiled by surrounding machinery, splashing uselessly against them as she tracked her target’s movement. Another loud CLANG as another piece of the machinery slammed into place, trapping her in a triangle formation.

Leap. She attempted to jump out of the trap, only to see a shard of rock flying upwards… Cutting free a heavy rock load suspended on a crane above her. Lyra redirected her shield upwards, cushioning the impact, but nothing stopped her from being slammed harshly back to the ground and stunned under the rubble.

CLANGCLANGCLANGCLANGCLANGCLANGCLANGCLANG. The sounds of blows striking against the metal and stone trap about her echoed in her head. With a flash of light she summoned, Lyra spotted Honeydew hammering the metal equipment about her into odd shapes. Was she trying to crush her? She lashed out with her telekinesis, knocking Honeydew away, into the darkness.

“It’s just as well,” Honeydew taunted from the shadows. “I was done anyways!” Lyra attempted to use her telekinesis to shift the stone off herself… only to find it held in place by the metal hammered down on it. Likewise, the machinery was bent together.

She was trapped. Dammit! “Get back here!” She yelled, only to met with mocking laughter.

“What, and get back in shooting range? I don’t think so. Don’t worry, Heartstrings, I’ll make sure your monkey’s demise is loud and painful enough for you to hear it down here! Ta!” With another laugh, Honeydew fled.

Lyra swore to herself, starting the tedious process of finding weak points in all this metal to pry herself free...

* * *

The bodies of Sicklefins littered the floors. Twilight Sparkle and Exit Wound flung such fearsome spells at each other, that none of Exit’s accomplices dared fight alongside her, although a few of them fired arrows and magic blasts at Twilight from afar.

“Yeh don’t lack fer luck, Oi’ll give yeh that!” Exit shouted.

This had been her second heat-seeking shot she’d sent at the Element of Magic’s legs, and once again, Twilight Sparkle had intercepted it; this time by levitating a large old mahogany desk up to act as a shield.

“The way yeh zigged down ta catch yer ape when he fell… if yer toiming had been half-a-tick off, he’d have gone roight inta yer body when yeh teleported… in the PAINFUL way!”

Twilight Sparkle’s levitated desk caught completely on fire as though it’d been submerged in vodka this whole past week.

“Good thing I rely on my brains,” snapped the Element of Magic, tossing the desk at Exit, “instead of luck.”

A quick teleportation, though, and Exit had simply dodged it; the fiery desk went crashing through the door, its frame, and a good portion of the wall.

“Brains, yeh say?”

Exit shot again at Twilight’s legs as the Element Bearer walked toward her, but when the blast connected, Twilight’s body blurred, and then split into three! Shocked, Exit fired another blast, and soon enough, she had six Twilights glaring back at her!

“Not only did I graduate Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns with honors, Celestia herself became my personal mentor right when I got my cutie mark! I’ve solved practically every problem she’s thrown at me, from thaumatology quizzes to Discord… “

Exit winced at that mention of that name, even as she continued to fire at the Twilights, perhaps hoping that after enough doppelgängers built up, Twilight’s would’ve spread herself too thin, and the clones would fade away…

“Just like I’ll solve you!”

The section of flooring right underneath all four of Exit’s hooves formed themselves into unnervingly humanoid hands that seized tight onto the Sicklefin boss’ ankles.

“I don’t know where you get off taking pride in being a problem student!” The fifty-odd Twilight clones muttered as one.

“Teacher’s pet, are yeh?” Exit might’ve fallen over, but the firm grip on all four of her legs held her upright. “Fecking disgusting, especially at YER age.”

“I’d much rather be Celestia’s lapdog," the Twilights retorted, "than a cold-blooded shark like you, Miss Sickelfin!" Exit Wound swept her next attack across them all: a jet of fire that would’ve done a murderous teenage dragon proud.

* * *

Wood splintered. Metal rended. Stone shattered. Ponies and gryphons screamed and yelled and fought within the aged structure of the mill, the sounds reverberating off the hard and unforgiving walls until it was a cacophonous maelstrom that built upon itself, multiplying its intensity until it threatened to bring down the whole structure.

Or at least that is what it was like for Diamond Dog ears.

Scrounger tried to cover his poor ears with his large padded paws to drown out the assault of noises. He gritted his rotting teeth until they threatened to be pulverised in his own jaw.

“Graaaah!” he wailed, that high pitched voice sounding above the din of fighting. “Too much noises!!”

He couldn’t fiddle or diddle with all this around him. And he certainly couldn’t fiddle-diddle, no, not like this.

Scrounger swayed aimlessly, gripping his ears and whining loudly. Meandering like a drunken top, he came to the railing overlooking the processing pit below. He looked down and felt a malformed smile grow on his half-dead face.

Down below were mounds of stone and machines, all sitting idle, waiting for workers that would never return. Scattered amongst the remnants of industry were multiple large holes, dug upwards from the earth below.

Earth was good. Dirt was clean. It was quiet.

He could fiddle, diddle, fiddle-diddle all he wanted with the foxy human down below. And just off to the side was the distinct form of the human, crouching between a pair of large machines as if he thought he could hide from Scrounger.

Aside from financial difficulties, one of the reasons the Boulder & Daughters Quarry closed its doors was trouble from a growing community of Diamond Dogs. Normally, the mongrels were a nuisance, one that was typically passed off to the local guard garrison to have them run out of the area and given a light thrashing for good measure. If shown any kind of formidable aggression, Diamond Dogs often revealed their cowardly nature and were quick to retreat into their vast underground networks.

For the Boulder Quarry, however, it was not meant to be. The board of directors had long become quite dissatisfied with how the founder’s granddaughter had let the operation slide, with production at an all-time low and a very poor market for the materials to boot, and had deemed it not worth the hassle.

And so the quarry was closed down and the doors locked up. It was not even a major loss for the few remaining workers; they were all too aware of the poor management and were eager to find more prosperous jobs elsewhere.

Even the encroaching Diamond Dogs did not stay for long. There were no jewel deposits to be found there and they had no use for stone. They were also too primitive to make use of any of the machinery, aside from stripping what they could to reforge into their shabby armor. Eventually they too went on to find greener pastures.

But the tunnel system they had dug below remained. And it was large and dark and perfect for fiddle-diddle.

“Come here, foxy human!” yelled Scrounger as he leapt from the balcony. Scrounger easily grabbed a hanging chain and slid down until he landed in the dirt below. His joints popped loudly and more pus oozed from his many boils. His slacked face was curled once again in excitement and the necrotic member between his legs was already partially erect from the exertion. The terrified look on the human’s face was absolutely priceless.

“We go now,” said Scrounger. “Go below to have fun!”

Scrounger grabbed Lero by the ankles and began to drag him out of his hiding spot and towards one of the holes. The human, who had become completely panicked at this point, began to ineffectively fight back, using his encased fists to first pound at Scrounger’s paws. When that failed to produce any results, Lero desperately tried to crawl in the opposite direction. Once again the obsidian encasings proved no use aside from forming twin ditches in the bare earth behind him.

“Hey, where in Tartarus do you think you’re going?!” Scrounger turned and looked at the source of the loathsome noise. It was the bossy pony dressed as a cheerleader.

“You said Scrounger could fiddle with the foxy human,” he said. “Fiddle and diddle. So Scrounger is going to fiddle-diddle in quiet.”

“Not without me there to watch!” screeched Honeydew. “You’re staying right here until I finish with these bonobo-loving nags!”

“Graaagh! Bossy pony is too noisy! Ponies are too noisy! Scrounger can’t fiddle-diddle with all these noises! So Scrounger takes it under!”

Lero had seized the opportunity to try and fight again, this time landing a blow on the Diamond Dog’s knee. Scrounger yelped at the pain, then growled menacingly. He grabbed Lero’s head, wrapping the human’s face with a meaty, bleeding paw, and slammed it down into the ground. There was a resounding crack and Lero went limp.

Scrounger picked up the human by the ankles again and dragged him back to the hole.

“No! Get back here you canine freak of nature! You aren’t doing anything until I say so!” Her words did nothing to dissuade the walking collection of diseases, as Scrounger simply threw the unconscious human over his shoulder and hopped into one of the holes.

“DAMN YOU! GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW OR I’LL THROW INTO ONE OF THESE GRINDERS AND SPRAY YOU WORTHLESS MEAT ALL OVER THE QUARRY!!”

Honeydew’s fury had been stroked to a raging inferno. She couldn’t lose, not like this, not when she was so close to ridding the world of that demonic ape! She had to be there! She had to be there to watch him suffer, to have him know that that it was her, not Exit Wound, her that was the architect of his demise!

She couldn’t risk having him face his punishment without her to witness it or worse have him escape! What if he got away? What if he made it outside?! Then everything she had done, all the things she had sacrificed would have been for NOTHING!

It was then she spotted two Sicklefin goons out of the corner of her eye. “You two!” she screamed, causing the pair of stallions to come to a halt. “Get your worthless plots down there and bring that disgusting ape back up here NOW!”

The two gangsters looked first to freshly dug hole, then to each other. “Eh,” muttered one of them, “I don’t think…”

“Of course you don’t think, you half-brained special school rejects! You do what I say, or I’m going to have Exit Wound skin your useless hides and wear them as a cape! Now get down there and bring him back up here! Alive! I want to be there to witness his moment of ultimate shame! And I want those worthless, monkey-loving nags to watch it happen!”

Honeydew had the two lackeys at the mention of Exit Wound. They cantered to the rim of the hole and gave it a wary look before they all dived into the darkness.

* * *

“What’ve you got against Lero, anyway?!” Twilight snarled, tried her best to flatten the Sicklefin with a mallet she’d conjured entirely out of telekinetic magic. “This whole gang… are you all just some kind of anti-human extremist league, bent on the annihilation of mankind?”

The magical mallet was an immense thing, large enough to flatten a full-grown buffalo into a flapjack.

“Sure,” said Exit Wound, teleporting away just before Twilight’s mallet could land a blow. “Let’s go with that.”

Slowing her swing, Twilight gave Exit an odd look. “...Go with…?” she repeated,

“Oi mean, since he’s just teh one bloke, teh result’s gonna be teh same, so maybe we are. All things considered.”

“All things consid…?” It was such an unexpected thing to hear, that Twilight let her hammer vanish. “For an extremist, you’re being rather halfhearted about all this! Especially considering all you’ve already done!”

“Look, even in a human-killing extremist league, not everypony can be fecking Honeydew," said Exit, pulling her hat off, to examine how good it still looked.

In the space of nothing, Twilight’s mallet had not only come back, but now had serrated spikes on all sides of its hammering end; each crackling with electricity.

“You don’t even care, you don’t even really CARE…!” Twilight raged.

But in the same space of nothing, Exit Wound had charged up an extra-large sphere of magic upon upon her horn; one as big as a basketball.

Quite a few crossbows and longbows floated in, like flying ants drawn to a broken sugar bowl. A good couple dozen. And for every bow, there had to be about thirty arrows surrounding it, like griffin soldiers around their general. Twilight even saw some harpoons and spears as well.

“Oi care enough.” Exit told Twilight. “That ape o’ yers, he’s gonna be me legacy.”

* * *

This place was cool. It was dark. But most of all, it was quiet.

The chaos of the fighting had faded back into a din as Scrounger bounded down the abandoned tunnels. Even with his pustulant and cataractous eyes, the canine’s dark vision was as sharp as ever; Scrounger was able to navigate with little problem. He did not know where exactly these tunnels would lead, but he did not care.

The noisy pony had looked angry that he wanted to fiddle with the foxy human. But then why did they get him in the first place? She had even told him to fiddle and diddle before the noises started, so why was she angry now? Bah, these ponies were noisy and stupid.

Scrounger’s ear swiveled. There were hoofsteps coming from behind him along with the faint glow of some unicorn’s magical light. He grinned. Ponies were really stupid and noisy. Did they want to bring him back to the noisy place? Well, he wouldn’t go back. The bossy pony would still be stupid and angry and may make the large killy pony kill him before he could fiddle-diddle and spread his beauty to the human.

Of course, not going back might mean that Scrounger might not get to fiddle with the rainbow pony, the cage pony, or even the pretty purple pony too. But they could be found again later. Then Scrounger would fiddle and diddle them and make them beautiful like him too. Then they would spread the beauty to all of their friends. Then everyone, everywhere, would be as beautiful as him.

Scrounger took a side tunnel, then climbed upwards to an opening in the ceiling. He threw down the unconscious human onto the dirt floor and stayed quiet.

“Where’d he go?!” shouted one of the stupid ponies. It was a pegasus with some of those funny knife things on its wings. “I thought I saw him go this way!”

“He must have gone down one of the tunnels,” said the other, this one a unicorn with a glowing horn.

“Shut your traps, you stupid thugs,” said the bossy cheerleader, who smacked them in the back of the heads. “Just take your brother and go that way! I’ll go this way! And you’d better find that orangutan or don’t even bother coming back!” The bossy pony went down another tunnel, leaving the two stupid ponies to glare at her retreating form.

“Come on,” Scrounger heard the stupid unicorn say. “Just keep moving or else that cunt Honeydew is going to rat us to the boss.” They soon galloped down the tunnel, away from Scrounger and the human.

Scrounger smiled and began to stroke his rotting member, his phlegmy breath becoming more ragged as his excitement began to build. Soon he would finally get to fiddle, finally get to diddle! He turned, grey drool dripping from his mouth and he was ready to—

CRACK!!

Bone and tooth splintered under the impact of something slamming into his face like a runaway train. Scrounger felt his dripping and pustulant nasal cavities shatter, spilling their diseased contents in a waterfall of blood and snot. He flew backwards into the opposite wall of the tunnel and his head slammed into the wall, the impact made him see spots.

Scrounger peeled off the cave wall and fell flat onto the floor with a wet thud. Pain assaulted his senses, not the pleasant pain that came from his excitement or the beauty he carried in his body. This was real pain! He had almost forgotten what it felt like.

He looked up at what could have caused him such pain. And then felt felt his diseased blood go cold.

There, in the dark recesses of the tunnel above him, were two burning blue eyes staring down at him. And a cold, hard voice that made poor Scrounger’s heart seize in his chest.

“Tá tú lobhadh,” said the thing. Scrounger couldn’t understand the words, which made his ears hurt more than any of the noises above. They felt like something trying to claw away at whatever was left of his mind, trying to tear him brain apart from the inside. Scrounger then heard the clinking of glass and caught flashes of hundreds of shining somethings in the dark around the thing. They began to whirl around the thing like leaves in the wind.

One shot outwards. Scrounger yelped as he felt it cut his arm, now bleeding a deep red. The thing made him hurt! It made him feel hurt that wasn’t because of his beauty! Scrounger looked back up at the thing and whimpered as it spoke again in that horrible voice.

“Agus ní mór lobhadh a ghearradh amach.”

* * *

“Who let the dogs in?” asked Breaking’s sister, Entering.

They could hear them, up on the floor directly above them. Large-sounding dogs; wolfhounds and maybe bigger.

“Who do you think?” snarled Hoof Sandwich. A chair happened to be in Hoof’s path, and when she kicked it, three of its legs snapped off. “The little snake charmer! The beast witch!”

The three gangsters could hear some of their chums fighting the dogs on the upper floor, each of them easily recognizing the voices of Warm Needle, Horse Head, and Keen Edge.

“Sounds like Keen’s having a rough time of it,” noted Breaking.

“Gonna smash that whistle of hers into her eyeball!” growled Hoof Sandwich, then stopped short at a pair of magenta eyes staring at her from behind the next doorway.

“There she is!” shouted Hoof Sandwich.

Hoof Sandwich charged into the next room, but by then, the animal trainer had only left behind a few swirls of dust in the air.

“Bugger all!” exclaimed Entering, while entering the room. “She’s a fast one, even for a pegasus!”

“Bet ya she’s got experience running from ponies who want to beat her up!” guessed Breaking.

“D-don’t…” croaked a new voice.

The three gangsters looked down. This was another Sicklefin mate of theirs, by the name of Speak Easy. An earth pony with a beer keg for a cutie mark. She was huddled in a corner behind a bulky old quarry machine of some kind. Thick sweating dribbled from her plum-colored mane.

“She… she didn’t just bring snakes…” wheezed Speak Easy. Usually she didn’t have this much trouble breathing. Not like Coffin Nail.

“Speak!” cried Entering. “Did you got bit too, Speak?”

Nodding her head, Speak Easy uncurled one of the legs she was sitting on, showing two bloody puncture holes, almost like what they showed in vampire films.

“They’re on the loose, stealthy little buggers… Feels like I’m dying…”

“You’re NOT dying!” Hoof Sandwich all but roared at Speak Easy. “I got bit by one of them snakes, and I feel fine! You’ve just got a placebo effect on yourself, Easy!”

“Hoof, I’m pretty sure that the placebo effect means you tricked yourself into making yourself getting better, not worse,” said Breaking.

“Fine! You’ve reverse-placeboed yourself, then! Geez, you’re worse than my old grammar teacher…” With her head, Hoof Sandwich tried nudging Speak Easy back into a stand, but the contraband smuggler wouldn’t budge.

“I’m not… I don’t feel right…”

“Fine! Just STAY there, you lazy placebo-putz!” Then Hoof gave a disgusted kick to Speak Easy’s stomach, after which Speak vomited. Quite a lot of blood came up with the puke.

“That’s a mean thing to do to a friend. She needs a doctor, not kicking.”

Hoof Sandwich might’ve retorted that Speak Easy wasn’t her friend, as most everypony under Exit Wound already knew. But the one who’d spoken was the Kindness Bearer, glaring at them from the next room. Nickering angrily, Hoof Sandwich once again charged into the next room, followed by Breaking and Entering...

“RRREEEOOOOWWWWWKKKKZZZTT….”

Breaking had always been a fan of science fiction films. In fact, a lot of recently-released blockbusters owed their very existence to the human, including Herd Mulberry Goes To Earth, Equestrian Cyberspace, Back To The Future: Equestrian Edition and Terminator: Equestrian Edition. (reportedly, the human had insisted that the moviemakers add ‘Equestrian Edition’ to their titles, because he didn’t want to be guilty of plagiarism.) So Breaking had felt a touch of sadness when the Boss had announced they had to snuff him.

When Breaking heard that noise, her mind jumped to Alien: Equestrian Edition. It was just that bizarre of a sound. Like an android and a tiger had been spliced together. She and Entering and Hoof Sandwich all turned around and what was that thing leaping down from the rafters?! Most of its body looked like some kind of jungle cat, but it had tentacles rippling up from its back. Surely this was some horror from beyond the stars: there was no way it could belong to this world.

“Snake… snake…. SNAKE!” cried Entering, pointing a forehoof at the writhing appendages.

One of the tentacles lashed out and coiled around Entering’s neck. At least, it appeared so, it almost seemed to be a trick of the light, like solid nothing had grabbed Entering, lifting her up into the air as though she were made of marshmallow, while at the same moment, the beast grasped empty space. Part of her brain informed her Entering’s neck and the tentacle somehow bent through space where they interacted, but the part of her brain that kept her sane told her that wasn’t happening and she should ignore it, causing her to stare, hopelessly confused.

For all the rest of her life, Breaking would regret remaining dumbstruck, failing to react. The cat-monster’s tentacle wrapped around Entering’s neck and head and twisted around like Breaking would twist the lid on a stubborn glass jar.

Crack! went her baby sister’s bones. Entering twitched a little bit before going limp, and the monster octopus-cat flung it against the wall; a move as easy as batting an eyelid.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be REAL. Both Breaking and Hoof Sandwich lost their nerve and ran in separate directions. Hoof Sandwich ran through the door straight ahead. Breaking turned and fled into the room on her right.

The nightmare-cat chose to pursue Breaking, somehow keeping up with her while seeming to move off at odd angles at the same time.

Never had Breaking galloped so fast. Not for her first heist at Mrs. Agate’s jewelry shop. Not after she bumped off Stump Speech, and all those pegasus cops were swooping down at her. This thing wanted to EAT her!

The rooms blurred as Breaking tore through them, all she could see clearly was the doorway to the next room, then the next room, but the tentacled mecha-cat loped just a few paces behind. Breaking turned and fired a quick salvo of blasts over her shoulder… only for nothing to happen. Her shots passed through the jaguar-thing as though she’d shot them through a waterfall.

WHUMP!

What just happened?! To Breaking, it felt like she’d rammed herself into a wall… oh, wait, that’s exactly what had happened. Running with your head turned backwards: never smart in the long-term.

Ears cocked forward, tail swishing along with all its undulating appendages, the beast stalked up to Breaking with a low, tinny growl. Once again, Breaking shot her horn at the creepy tenta-cat, and once again, each blast phased through or warped around with no effect. Was this an illusion?

Yes. None of this could be real. Snakes through the floorboards? Her sister, Entering, dead? Tentacles on a jaguar? Clearly, this was just a dream… too much witch weed, last night. Heh, how silly… even now, it felt like her head were suddenly inside a large, wet, mouth. Breaking could smell horrible fetid breath, feel warm saliva soak into her facial fur, a raspy tongue, and long fangs puncture her throat and skull like an ice pick driven through a soup can… but clearly this pain was only imaginary, only part of the nightmare. Or perhaps a result of sleeping on the bed in a weird position. Wouldn’t be the first time!

Yes, it FELT exactly like her head was inside a large mouth, and her skull was being crushed between its jaw, but the monster-cat was standing a few feet away. She could see him, despite the odd warps of light about its mouth! How surreal was that?! Any moment now, Breaking would wake up to real reality, and she’d walk into the next room, and Entering would be on the couch, still sleeping. Any mom—

CRUNCH

* * *

“Buck!” shouted Quick Edge. “Where the buck did they go?!”

“Shit, we lost them,” Quick Draw cursed.

“They couldn’t have gone that far. Come on. If we backtrack, we might just-”

A blood-curdling screamed resonated down the tunnel, one that made even the hardened criminals shudder in fear. It sounded again and again, pure agony lacing every painful wail. Quick Draw felt his eyes go wide and his legs tremble. To think that there was something like that that could scare a veteran like him. After a small eternity, the howling screams abruptly cut off with sick squelch. The tunnel shuddered and dust fell from the ceiling.

Blessed silence returned.

“Wha…,” whispered Quick Edge fearfully, “what in Tartarus was that?”

Quick Draw aimed his magical light down the tunnel they had just come. “It came back from there.”

They two shared a look, then slowly made their way into the silence, weapons drawn, ready for anything they might find.

“Sweet Celestia…” breathed Quick Draw as he covered his muzzle at the stench.

What they did find was the crushed and dismembered body of Scrounger the Dog. The canine was lying in a cooling pool of his own rancid blood, his body nearly torn to pieces. His pustulent and diseased flesh was lacerated all over but what nearly made the criminals vomit was the impalement.

Several large spikes of midnight obsidian had pierced the body from above and below and even from behind. The end result was a horrific crucifiction that left the poor creature a twisted, broken, and shattered upon the black rocks. Hundreds of loose shards of the glassy rock covered the dirt floor, some still covered in blood.

“Argh, Luna’s teats,” gagged Quick Edge. “And I thought he smelled bad on the outside.”

“Cave must have collapsed on the bastard. Can’t say I feel sorry for him though.”

“Look!”

Quick Draw aimed his light upwards. His blood ran cold when he saw the limp form of the human half-hanging out of another tunnel above them. Quick Draw gingerly stepped around the dead Diamond Dog, wisely giving as wide a berth as possible. Quick Edge gave a few flaps of his wings, hovering just in front of the human, and gave Lero an experimental poke with his hoof.

The human stirred, moaning in his deep voice, and the unicorn below breathed a sigh of relief. “Come on, let’s get him out of here,” he said. Using his magic, Quick Draw was able to levitate the human out of the tunnel and over the dead body.

“Hey wait,” said Quick Edge. “Something’s not right. Why isn’t he dead too?”

“Who the buck cares?”

“But wait, how was that dog…?”

“Who CARES?! Just be thankful that this guy is still alive. That sick bitch Honeydew is going to flip that she isn’t going to get her jollies watching that walking quarantine rut the monkey, so just shut up and let me do the talking, okay? There was a cave-in, the dog’s dead, and there’s nothing we could have done. The human is still alive, so at least that means that the boss still gets to kill him for her schtick, and we may still get to keep our heads.” He then pressed his snout up against his brother’s with narrowed eyes. “But we won’t if you keep shooting off your mouth!”

The pegasus nodded his head uneasily and pushed his thoughts back down. A cave-in. That’s right. Tunnels are old, it was bound to happen. Better Scrounger than them.

Quick Edge didn’t worry about how or why Scrounger had been cut up so badly. Or why it looked like he had been pierced from below. Or why the human’s obsidian hooves were chipped and grooved to look more like a pair of fists now…

...Clearly that, too, had been a result of the cave-in.

* * *

“C’mon, then!” the voice of Exit Wound called after Twilight Sparkle. “Thought yeh’d be ‘porting me straight inside a hydra’s gullet by now, Miss Magic! Thought yeh’d turn me inta a big fecking poile of pencil shavings then blow me out the window!”

Rounding a corner into the next room, Exit Wound checked all around. No snakes, no cat, no cops, no Sicklefins, no Twilight Sparkle.

“Don’t let me little arsenal put yeh off!” Exit chuckled, glancing up at all the sharp pointy projectiles over her head. “Yeh won’t doie. Oi’ve enchanted all these ta aim at yer LEGS, yeh understand. Dun want ta break me prize too much!”

Exit began stalking towards the door at her left.

“Seriously, though, much as Oi love playing cat-and-mouse loike this, Oi’m shocked yer letting ME play teh fecking kitty. Oi’d’ve thought yer ovaries were made o’ stronger stuff than whipped cream and rooster shite, but Oi guess…!”

As she proceeded through the doorway into the next room, the floor under Exit’s hooves glowed bright and hot, then a geyser of fire shot up, catching her in the back legs. The skewbald unicorn screamed, all her arrows, harpoons, knives, and spears clattering to the ground, and then Twilight Sparkle was galloping towards her, horn glowing.

Clever. Ambush, inflict enough pain to disrupt a spellcasting aura, then attack a helpless target. Worthy of herself. But it wasn’t for nothing that Exit Wound had attained her standing in the Sicklefins. A flash of her own horn, and she was able to reactivate ten of her arrows, all of which sailed straight and true into the Element Of Magic’s forelegs.

“AAAAAAGGGGHH!!” Twilight yelled, falling forward, skidding inches from Exit, herself.

Casting a rushed, sloppy healing spell on herself, just enough to regain her mobility, Exit shakily rose back up to a full stand, and set her hobnailed shoe atop the Element of Magic’s head, right over her horn, letting Twilight know she could crack it off like a candy cane. Perhaps that’d even be best…

“Boss!”

Exit turned, seeing Quick Edge and Quick Draw… and who should Draw be floating over, but Dewy’s favorite bonobo!

“No…” whispered Twilight Sparkle, and Exit stamped down hard on her horn and skull.

“Hey,” panted Quick Draw, “We got good news and bad news. Good news is we got the human.”

And Draw gave an indicative shake to Lero’s prone form.

“What do you want us to do with him?” asked Quick Edge.

“Give him here, lads,” said Exit, accepting the human from the Quick brothers, and placing him atop a tall piece of machinery behind her back. “Now, teh bad news?”

Quick Edge pawed the floor with a forehoof. “Scrounger The Dog’s… well, he’s…”

Just then, the Element of Kindness flew in through the doorway Exit had come through. “Sic ‘em, Sassy,” she said, pointing a hoof at the Sicklefins.

When the great tentacled puma-thing came bounding into the room, it phased through the wall next to the door, like some kind of ghost. Quick Draw did what every good Sicklefin ought to; he turned and opened fire on the threat.

It wasn’t that Quick Draw was a courageous gangster. He wasn’t. But when it came to the ‘fight or flight’ panic response, Draw was instinctively drawn to ‘fight,’ four times out of every five. He was true to his name.

When all Quick Draw’s well-aimed shots impacted against the wall instead of the cat, Exit stomped down on Twilight Sparkle again, taking this to be some sort of illusion the Element of Magic had cast. But then the cat whipped a tentacle downward and Quick Draw’s head snapped down as it was struck in a strange flicker, the tentacle seeming to completely miss, but somehow still be in the right position to strike at the last second. The cat lowered its head, charged the air like a hornless bull, which bowled Draw over, looking like a comical mime routine. It followed up by leaping in entirely the wrong direction, somehow landing upon the poor pony with its claws extended.

It was all wrong. Visually, the entire confrontation was very wrong. Alien. Exit Wound wondered if all the fighting had ruined her glasses in some way.

For Quick Draw was having his face and neck raked to tatters, but the actual cat seemed to sometimes be atop him, other times elsewhere in the room, away from the stallion being savaged, despite never moving. Such a bizarre sight, and between the cat’s roaring, Edge’s screams and Draw’s gurgles, it was hard even to think!

Nonetheless, when a spurt of blood from Quick Draw’s trachea arced began to arc upward, it suddenly stopped. It looked splattered. Hanging in midair, but the way the blood looked, it was if it were coating or staining something. A second later, the blood distorted and vanished, as though sucked in by some camouflage.

The Bearer of Kindness had to duck for cover behind a large broken-down contraption as Exit Wound started firing in a spray at at the downed stallion in a continuous, rapid-fire fusillade. But Exit’s blasts were hampered by being unable to target as precisely as she was normally capable, due to the fact that this cat and her image were two completely different things. However, several blasts still managed to strike home, the creature letting out an ear-splitting howl, and it turned to flee, rapidly limping for an escape as spatters for blood dripped from its hide at confusing angles.

One second, the tentacle-cat’s image was three feet to the left of where it’d been a moment ago. The next second, the image was four feet to the left, then nine and a half feet to the right. Reflexively, Exit kept targeting the image which ended up passing straight through the wall as phantasmically as it had appeared.

Exit bet the real cat had just gone through the open door.

Regrettably, Quick Draw had absorbed quite a few of his boss’ shots in the crossfire. What the cat had started, Exit had unintentionally finished.

Quick Edge went and checked his brother’s pulse.

“Why?!” Edge screamed right afterwards at Exit, with great hate.

“Et had ta be done, Edge,” Exit stated. “Oi had ta kill teh fecking cat.”

“The cat ain’t even dead, though!”

Then, just like that, Edge’s screams of fury broke down to heart-wracked sobs of grief. “Draw, just… just stay with me, brother!” Even from her pinned position, Twilight could tell that the stallion was clearly dead. Quick Edge tried to put pressure on a gaping wound to no avail. The wound had stopped pumping blood and had since merely, lifelessly oozed crimson.

Quick Edge didn’t seem to notice. Or, more likely, he did but his mind refused to accept it.

“Just stay with me, Draw, we’re leaving.” Quick Edge began to awkwardly drag his brother’s body towards the nearest exit while trying to keep pressure on the wound. He didn’t care if the guards outside would arrest him. He just needed to make sure that his brother would get a doctor. “Just stay with me, please just stay with me…” The mantra was repeated until he passed through the door.

Quick Edge never saw the tentacle wrap around his head. Nor did he feel anything when it constricted and burst his head like an overripe melon.

* * *

Surely Rarity’s eyes were deceiving her. Amidst all this torment and violence, surely her overtaxed emotions had concocted this fluffy white bunny poking his head out from one of the holes in the floor and hippity-hopping his way over to her cage. Why, if she didn’t know better, Rarity would swear that it was none other than…

“Angel?” she whispered, and the little bunny nodded his long-eared head, as he hopped closer.

Even though Rarity was now believing her eyes, she still couldn’t believe this situation. Why would Rainbow have brought a bunny to a battlefield? The snakes and such she could understand, but a vulnerable little fluffball like Angel…?

"That’s it, that’s it,” she encouraged, as the little rabbit slipped easily through the gaps in the bars. “Come over to Mama Rarity…”

She went down on her haunches as soon as Angel Bunny was in the cage with her, leaning down to nuzzle the rabbit’s soft face, who nuzzled her back with his tiny whiskered nose.

“I… I’m so glad you’re here… I’m so g-glad you’re part of my family now, Angel.” Tears of tenderness and misery seeped into her facial fur. “Don’t you worry, you can stay with me. Mama Rarity will protect you from the monster-ponies. She can at least do that much, still… w-what are you doing, Angel?”

Rarity was feeling Angel’s buck teeth scraping rapidly against her cheek, but not actually catching purchase on her skin. It was a disquieting sensation and she nearly shook the rabbit off her face, until it occurred to her what he was actually up to.

Her horn wrap… Angel Bunny was chewing through the straps!

“Keep going!” she whispered. “Mama’s so proud of you!”

Angel Bunny paused just long enough to give her a cocky grin. The intelligence in his eyes was almost equine. Then he returned to his gnawing.

Rarity cast a look around. No Sicklefins were in this room with her right now, but that could change at any moment. Rarity tried to face the back wall and did her best to bend her body as to offer Angel maximum camouflage value against the white of her own coat. But it really boiled down to how fast Angel could chew.

The straps were made of a thick, durable leather-like material, and Angel was gnawing at the one on Rarity’s right cheek like it was the juiciest, crispest carrot ever grown, even if his face told a different story. Assuming no Sicklefin walked in and caught him at it, Rarity would simply teleport out of this cage, like her Sparkle-kitten had taught her. It took a miniature eternity, but Rarity felt the first strap snap off, flicking her lightly in the face, a tiny trickle of power returning to her control.

Now then… vengeance.

* * *

Her serpent friends hadn’t just backed Exit Wound into a corner, Rainbow Dash had gotten them to disperse themselves throughout this room and a few of the adjacent rooms as well, in case the Sicklefin boss tried any of her teleportation.

“I don’t want to have to hurt you,” Rainbow Dash told Exit Wound.

“Sure," the Sicklefin retorted, kicking some grit on the floor at Shakes the Rattlesnake. "Not when yeh brung the whole fecking reptoile exhibit ta do yer hurtin’ for yeh, huh?!”

“Call off all your snakes and I’ll gladly call off mine,” Rainbow promised, while Shakes shook his tail at Exit, whose ears flattened at the sinister, maraca-like rattle.

The large skewbald Sicklefin seemed to consider this option before she yelled, “Go shite a hedgehog!” And she fired a shot at Shakes.

Agony ruptured in Rainbow Dash’s head; it felt like a tiny, tiny explosive no bigger than a pea had detonated in her mind, and she fell to all four of her knees.

All her snakes flinched at their caretaker’s outcry, while Exit Wound perked with inquisitiveness.

“Yeh… yeh did that before...” noted the Sicklefin boss, looking at the spent firecracker that used to be Shakes’ head. “...back when o’ killed yer other snake…”

And then the horrible unicorn with her bloodstain of a cutie mark discharged another murderous blast at Hissy the Asp that span at her like a razor-sharp boomerang, and this time, Rainbow Dash gurgled, pawing at her throat as she felt the sharp cut of some phantasmal blade slicing clean through her neck.

“Yer an empath,”said Exit Wound, as Hissy’s decapitated head fell by her forehoof.

“What’d you call me?!” Rainbow Dash snapped, so insulted that she could even ignore the sting in her throat.

The lead gangster guffawed. “Oi wasn’t even dissing yeh this toime, Koindness!”

Then Exit Wound levitated up Ridgey the Saw-Scaled Viper, while at the same time, conjuring a floating fireball the size of a watermelon directly to Ridgey’s right.

“Being an empath means yeh’ve got a ‘sixth sense.’ Koinda plucked off teh same bush as them clairvoyants or moind readers…” Exit explained, in the tone of a coarser, less-educated Twilight Sparkle. “Except that instead o’ eavesdropping on thoughts, empaths feel others’ emotions. Loike pain.”

The fireball blazed blue and Exit levitated Rainbow’s saw-scaled viper friend right inside it. No matter how much Ridgey thrashed or Rainbow screamed at the unicorn to stop, the levitated snake remained inside the flame to writhe in agony… but it wasn’t until Ridgey went limp and lifeless that Dash screamed in real physical anguish.

“Oi see,” said Exit.

Rainbow Dash’s fur and feathers weren’t withering up into sooty clumps of ash. Her skin wasn’t blackening and bubbling up with second-degree blisters. In spite of all her body’s array of nerve endings screamed to the contrary.

“Yer empath-ness is too dim and unfocused ta sense pain… but et CAN sense others’ DEATHS,” Exit went on, as Rainbow Dash stopped, dropped, and rolled to put out flames that weren’t actually there.

‘So teh critter keeper’s got an empathic link ta her critters… their deaths cause her pain…”

Dropping Ridgey’s charred corpse on top of Rainbow Dash’s face, Exit Wound grinned at all the snakes in the room, like the world’s most artistic chef would grin at piles of fresh fruits and vegetables.

“Oi’m seeing POSSIBILITIES, here!”

One time, Rainbow Dash had been with Lero in the marketplace when the human decided he’d buy some string cheese from Dairy Delights’ stall. After removing the plastic wrap, Dash had watched Lero stick his clever fingernails directly in the top-center of one piece of string cheese and ripped the wobbly cylinder of mozzarella completely in half, straight down the middle.

When Exit Wound grabbed Heady the Copperhead in her telekinesis, she did something horrifically similar to what her human stallion had done to that piece of string cheese. But instead of starting at the top, Exit began at Heady’s tail end, peeling her guts out in two wet, dripping once-living strips, with a horrible, wet ripping noise.

Moments ago, Exit Wound had called Rainbow Dash an ‘empath.’ A ‘dim’ and ‘unfocused’ one. If so, Dash had NO desire to develop this particular breed of ‘empathy’ any further, Bearer of Kindness though she was! Here was one knife she’d happily keep dull and unsharpened!

The agony of Heady’s demise... ‘excruciating’ didn’t even scratch the surface! She felt like she’d been sawed in two by a diabolical carpenter. Collapsing onto the floor, her scream nearly broke her throat. She would’ve passed out from the shock, except that a tiny part of her mind devoted to self-preservation prevented this. After all, falling unconscious before a monster like Exit Wound would’ve been suicide.

“Say,” said Exit Wound, holding up the gory snake halves and looking back at Lero, “If we were ta fry these on a pan fer an hour, d’ya think yer ape would eat ‘em?”

But even as she asked this, Exit was looking gleefully at all her other snakes. Somehow, Rainbow Dash’s trembling lips found their way around the mouth of her whistle.

TWEEEEET! TWEEEEEET! TWEET!

This was the signal to flee, and Rainbow Dash blew loud enough for all the quarry mill to hear.

“No! Wait! Don’t! Come back!” cried Exit, as all the snakes quickly slithered back under the floorboards. Above them, on the next floor up, they could also hear the dogs turning tail and racing back downstairs towards the hole that Lee had tunneled for all of them.

Rainbow really wished that she didn’t have to make her animals retreat. But she couldn’t take it. She just could not endure experiencing another death like that. These weird empath powers... where had they come from?! But there was no time for that kind of ponderation, because the hulking Sicklefin boss managed to grab onto poor Windy the Sidewinder, intent on one last act of sadistic butchery...

“FECK ME UNCLE!”

A pulsating ring of magical energy struck Exit in the shoulder, courtesy of Twilight Sparkle. During the distraction Rainbow Dash had provided, Twilight had been quietly pulling the arrows out of her legs and casting healing spells on herself, right under the skewbald unicorn’s enormous nose.

“Exit! Exit!” cried a most unwelcome Honeydew, stepping in through the door. “Are you okay?! Do you need my help?!”

Exit ignored Honeydew, laughing as Twilight got to her to her hooves. “Oh, yer TOUGH, Miss Magic! Fair fecks to yeh!”

But the Sicklefin’s tone was a lot less jovial when Rainbow Dash decided to take this opportunity to fly out, grab her poor stallion off the machine he’d been placed upon, and rocket out the door with him on her back.

“Don’t worry, Dash!” Twilight called, horn glowing as she faced the gangster boss. “I’ve got you covered!”

Behind her, Exit’s yells were an incoherent stream of filth in between the magic blasts she exchanged with Twilight. But Honeydew shrieked out a very distinct and piercing “NO!!!”

And in no time flat, Rainbow could hear Honeydew’s hoofbeats as the madmare raced after her.

* * *

Honeydew sprinted after the cap-wearing, rainbow-maned zoophile for all her legs and lungs were worth.

“C’mon, big guy,” Rainbow Dash begged her biped, flapping her wings as fast as she could. “Say something to me! Wake up!”

Yet there was an inescapable fact Honeydew had to face. Even with her Shattered Stone Step, Rainbow Dash was an impossibly swifter pony. Even with over one-hundred-fifty pounds of primate on her back. Even with every drop of Honeydew’s adrenaline surging through her blood.

“D-don’t you worry, Lero!” With so many circuitous hallways and doors between Honeydew and her targets, she couldn’t actually see the pegasus, though she could follow her voice well enough. “If you can’t get up just yet, that’s cool! Whatever they did to you… there are friendly ponies just outside, they’ll take you to the doctors, and everything will be alright!”

Things were really starting to spin out of control. She’d dragged out the monkey’s comeuppance too long!

“Doggone it! A dead end!”

But it seemed Lady Luck had just thrown Honeydew a lifeline! Light might still triumph over Darkness.

With a burst of new speed, the earth pony mare followed the clang of a metal door into a locker room.

This place must’ve been where the old quarry workers had locked up their belongings. It must’ve been a large workforce, once, for the room was spacious with lockers lining almost all the walls, just like in a gym. But the only door in or out was the one Honeydew was standing in front of.

And in the middle of the room stood the animal caretaker.

Honeydew kicked the door behind her. “Why not make this easy on yourself, you little frog fondler, and tell me which locker he’s in?”

Each locker was big enough to contain the human at a crouch. Honeydew bucked the nearest one and it caved right in like it was made of tinfoil. All those protein supplements she’d been taking this past year were so worth it!

“Why do you want to kill Lero anyway?!” the pegasus asked in a voice braver than Honeydew would’ve expected.

“Because this whole world’s been placed under a disgusting spell and only one thing’s ever going to break it: ME.”

The blue mare blinked. “So you think Lero’s some kind of evil, all-powerful warlock? That you’re the hero in some sort of epic conflict?” Her eyes narrowed. ”You’re nuts, lady.”

“Look who’s talking!” sniggered Honeydew. “What’re you doing still hanging around the battlefield, General Pet-O-Phile? You sent your army home! What good are you without any of your fanged fighters to hide behind?”

Then Honeydew stepped slightly to the right, sweeping a hoof toward the door, like a valet at a rich hotel.

“In fact, why not fly after them?” she offered, generously. “Go on. You know you want to. At home, you’ve got so many gophers to grope, so many ferrets to fellate, so many moles to molest… surely you won’t REALLY miss one measly monkey? It’s for the good of the whole pony race, you know!”

Honeydew swore she saw the blue mare’s hackles raise. Had she actually made the animal-loving pacifist angry? “After everything my stallion’s done for me… I’d rather die than let you touch him ever again!” she practically hissed.

Honeydew stretched and limbered up properly, assuming a Rolling Earth practitioner’s fighting pose. Hmmm. No, I won’t kill you... Can’t have Discord running around free… Just a light crippling.

Of course, she didn’t need to know that. “If you insist.” Honeydew let out a war-cry and charged the little vulture violator!

Only to find herself flying through the air as a clean throw sent her rolling over Dash’s shoulder and slamming into the lockers behind her.

If I didn't know better, I'd say that looked like a standard Rolling Earth counter... Honeydew boggled, but as she regained her hooves, she dismissed it as beginner’s luck, as the pegasus seemed as surprised about it as she was.

She shook her head. “Alright… Let’s try that again.”

Maybe she’s not as helpless as she looks… she supposedly drove off a dragon, once… Less of a reason to hold back! Rearing up with an epic shout, Honeydew channeled her might into a single hoof, smashing it into the ground, tearing up the concrete as a shockwave raced towards her target...

...who took flight to avoid it with a startled ‘eep!’

“Oh, come on!” She leapt repeatedly in the air, lashing out bone-breaking blows at the fallen hero, who weaved expertly out of the way, even as she cringed, pivoting impossibly on her wings, as if her body was weightless, staying just out of reach.

Honeydew was baffled. How is this possible? Are those… Feather Leaf dodges? No, that’s impossible. She must just have innate talents, like an Element of Harmony probably should. But it won’t save her! Honeydew raced under the rabbit ravager, who peered after in confusion, only to get a snoutful of hoof, as Honeydew leapt off the wall to gain the height on her.

“AAAAYOOW!” the squirrel screwer screamed in pain, lurching back. Perfect, Honeydew thought, her momentum moving her to grab the pegasus, and in a perfectly executed throw, flung her to the earth below, while canceling out her own momentum; putting her into the perfect position for a meteor strike. Honeydew channeled the power of the stone into her hooves, plummeting down upon the helpless pegasus, hoping to smash her as she almost had Lyra…

Only for the zoophile’s eyes to widen, and with a rapid flap of her wings, she skidded across the ground, allowing her to escape the impact. “Damn you!” Honeydew growled. “Stay still and fight!”

But the raccoon ravisher continued flapping until she slammed into the wall. “Ow!”

Perfect! Honeydew thought, charging at the fallen hero, aiming for her head as she sat up. Only to miss as the pegasus spotted her and slipped back down on her back, evading the attack, causing Honeydew’s blow to smash through the wall, revealing the overcast night outside.

Buck! Honeydew managed to think before hooves impacted her stomach, launching her into the air, immediately followed by a literally flying uppercut, Honeydew found herself literally stuck in the air, as her aerial opponent looped in the air for additional blows, fast enough to knock her higher each strike, more than counteracting the effects of gravity. There was a loud SMASH as Rainbow Dash smashed into a light bulb. And to her literal shock and horror, Honeydew saw the electricity flow out of the bulb into Rainbow Dash’s hooves, who, in a blinding flash, struck her with a blow that flung her across the room, burying her partway into the stone in a crater.

Her hair frazzled, standing on end, Honeydew swore she saw some of it smoking, faintly.

How is this possible? I swear that was a Lightning Strike finisher…! Honeydew wondered, before seeing her blue rival charge at her, apparently intent on following up on her massive blow. Narrowing her eyes, Honeydew focused herself, feeling the strength of the stone about her, pulling it into her, just long enough to-

KLONK!

“OW!” The pegasus jerked back, cradling her hoof, having struck skin that was suddenly, inexplicably, as strong as stone. Honeydew capitalized on this, smashing her over the head, and against her wing, knocking her out of the air, leaping down for a pin, but Rainbow Dash once again proved damnably agile as she squirmed away, trying to find her feet. Honeydew didn’t relent, her strikes drawing closer and closer…

KLANG!

Honeydew’s eyes watered as she punched the locker door Rainbow Dash had jerked open in desperation to block. Shattered Stone could let a pony punch straight through many things, but metal was not one of them.

“Ha!” she snorted, pointing at the hurt mare. “You-”

“SHUT UP!”

Honeydew shoulder-slammed the door, taking advantage of the pegasus’ unguarded moment, slamming her head in the door frame repeatedly.

* * *

A distant, repeated clanging, seeming to get steadily louder in Lero’s ears… and someone saying his name…

“Lero-”

SLAM

“Lero-”

SLAM

“Lero-”

SLAM

Lero’s eyes snapped open. He was inside a cramped locker, Rainbow Dash was looking in at him, held awkwardly in place by a light green hoof, rivulets of blood running down her face.

"Lero-" She hissed again, before being briefly interrupted by the slam of the door. "please-"

SLAM

"RUN!"

SLAM!!!

Every primitive part of him screamed at him to protect Dash, to strike out at her attacker, but he knew it’d be as pointless as attacking a brick wall mixed with an elephant. And worse, he knew that joining this fight would just make Dash try to defend him harder, putting her more at risk.

Not that there wasn’t a moment to take advantage of.

He braced himself against the back of the locker, and the next time it slammed, he kicked the door as hard as he could, making it bounce back in Honeydew’s face, which caused her to let out an angry squawk and go reeling. Lero sprinted out of the locker, heading towards the door as fast as he could orient himself.

“You can’t get away!” he heard Honeydew scream. She started sprinting after him, only to be tackled to the floor by Dash.

“I’ll get help!” he called back to Rainbow Dash as he ran out of the room.

* * *

No No No No No I can’t let her touch him! Rainbow didn’t even think, she just acted. She didn’t really notice when the spiraling winds from her charge executed a perfect throw on Honeydew and flung her away in a spiralling vortex of wind, just that her foe was suddenly across the room, looking dizzy.

Nor was she paying proper attention when the gusts of winds style hedging her foe in, just that she seemed unable to dodge properly.

She did, however, notice when the wind formed into a coherent, wind-blade of shearing force at the tip of her hoofstrike and sliced open Honeydew’s blocking hoof, causing crimson blood to spill out before her eyes.

A part of Rainbow Dash's mind screamed, causing her to come to an utter halt. She had to defend her stallion, yes, but... she’d hurt someone really badly, she had to stop...

Honeydew panted, holding her bleeding hoof tight, attempting to staunch the bleeding, staring at Rainbow Dash as if she were from another world, too, just like Lero.

“Rolling Earth… Feather Leaf… Lightning Strike… Vortex and Windblade, too!” panted Honeydew.

It brought Rainbow up short. Those words meant nothing to her. “Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? Are you speaking in code or something?”

“Those… Those attacks of yours… you used moves from five different schools of martial arts!” insisted the mare in the cheerleader outfit.

“I… I did?” Dash felt thunderstruck — how much blood had she lost — how many blows to the head? That couldn’t be right!

However, the conviction in Honeydew’s voice was unmistakable, and rock-solid. “In fact, some of those moves… I know I’m not mistaken: they were master-level techniques!”

The mental image of the wind forming a blade and slicing Honeydew replayed in Rainbow Dash’s head over and over and over again, like a horror show.

However, Honeydew did not relent. “But… YOU…. you of ALL ponies, Rainbow Dash… you’re the meekest pacifist I know! All your life, you’ve been a hoofmat, all your life, you’ve been a flimsy little pussywillow of a pony... always preaching at me about how I should sympathize with the rabbits that infest my melon patches, every chance you get! Heck, the worst thing you’ve been known to do is STARE at others in an upsetting way! And all this time YOU know five different martial arts?! When did THAT happen?!

She could almost hear the audible snap of something breaking in her mind. With a cry, she fled the room almost faster than Honeydew could track her.

* * *

In their course of their fighting, both Twilight Sparkle and the Sicklefin boss had fallen back to what Lero had once jokingly referred to as ‘teleport overdrive.’

ZING! She was in the next room.

ZING! She was in the middle of some stairs.

ZING! She was behind an opened door.

ZING! She was atop a toilet in a restroom stall.

ZING! ZING! ZING! ZING!

The fog had come at some point between all that. Greyish-white, like coffee cream poured into murky mushroom soup, and so deeply thick that she couldn’t see more than three paces in front of her. At first, she thought the Sicklefin boss had created it.

“If you think this fog is going to confuse me, Miss Wound, you’ve got another thing coming!” shouted Twilight.

But then, from somewhere else in the mill, she heard the head gangster calling back. “Yer fecking blaming ME fer this?!” Twilight grimaced: all of Exit Wound gratuitous profanity was getting really annoying to listen to. “Come on out o’ hiding, yeh fecking aul wan teacher’s pet! Teacher’s FILTHY, THIRSTY SLIT-LICKER! Oi’ll break yer face so et looks loike a bucket o’ smashed crabs!”

Twilight Sparkle considered actually giving Exit Wound her wish; finding her again and finishing their fight, but instead decided she wouldn’t. Reuniting with all her family was far more important than combat. Especially since things were taking a turn for the crazy.

So Twilight Sparkle turned and went in in the opposite direction of all Exit’s bellowing. Above her, on the upper floor, Twilight could hear screams and spells being cast, and felt a shiver of unease… helped along by the chill of the fog surrounding her.

Was that Lyra doing all that upstairs?

“Hey! Twilight!”

Twilight stopped short to find her grandmaster herd-sister trapped in a vaguely triangular formation of what looked to be mechanical debris, right in front of her.

Lyra was working to bend a thick metal beam out of the way with her magic. It was one of several.

“Mind giving me a hand?” she asked.

Both herd-sisters smiled faintly at each other at these words. You couldn’t live with a human in your family and not pick up a few sayings.

Eventually, Lyra could’ve freed herself on her own, of that Twilight had no doubt. But the difference between Lyra’s magic and Twilight’s was the difference between picking the lock and breaking the door down with an axe… or a battering ram.

Lyra’s impromptu prison bent like wet issue under Twilight’s will.

“And everypony thinks I’M ‘the muscle’ of our herd…” said Lyra, as she stepped out.

She and Twilight shared a quick, reassuring kiss. “You alright?”

“Yeah.”

“Who did this to you?”

Lyra set her teeth together. “Admitting this is painful, but... it was Honeydew.”

“Honeydew?!” Twilight remembered Honeydew had been the one who’d bowled into Lyra, sent her toppling down over that railing, then jumped down after her… but she shot a quick glance at the floor, surprised not to see Honeydew’s battered body lying there.

“Honeydew got the drop on you, Lyra?”

Lyra cast a look all around the both of them, at the gangsters’ lair they were in. “I’d say Honeydew got the drop on all of us, didn’t she?”

Lyra was right. It all made Twilight recall a little wisdom both Earth and Equestria shared: ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ A wisdom she and all the rest of Herd Bellerophon had disregarded: they’d grown a little TOO distant from their hate-filled, xenophobic neighbor. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ that was another proverb their two worlds had in common.

And Honeydew had not been idle while their backs had been turned on her.

“Well, I’ll be sure to fight her seriously the next time I see her!” Twilight promised.

“And you won’t be alone!” Lyra told her, flexing a muscle. “Now where’s Lero?”

“Last time I saw him, he was on Rainbow’s back, and she was trying to fly him out of the building,” Twilight answered.

“Well, seeing how she’s still a speedster, I think we can count our stallion safe and sound. So that just leaves Rari…”

A heavyset mule charged out of the fog. Twilight pivoted in time to avoid getting struck in the head, but still suffered a hard buck to the shoulder.

“He’s already here, inn’t he?” the large wild-eyed mule babbled. There were lots of bleeding dog bites on his legs. “He’s already here, huh?! Snakes, dogs, walking gorilla statues, cats with tentacles, this damn fog, he’s already here! It’s the next Day of Chaos!!!”

The mule would’ve kicked Twilight again, but Lyra Heartstring’s legs were quicker, and the panicking john found himself hurled straight though several of the jagged metal beams that had, until just recently, helped imprison the Still Way grandmaster.

The mule’s hooves now didn’t reach the ground; the five beams that impaled him held him aloft.

“When you see Discord,” the mule gurgled, “Tell him that Horse Head asks to be reincarnated as a horse. He’ll understand.”

Those were Horse Head the Sicklefin’s final words before dying.

“There they are!” shouted a new voice.

“Right there!”

Though neither of these voices were Exit Wound’s arrows and magic blasts came flying at the unicorn herd-sisters all the same. Unable to see their attackers through the fog, they ended up retreating through a door.

“Twilight, can you do anything about this fog?!” Lyra shouted, both of them hugging the walls next to the door, pinned down by enemy fire.

Twilight tried a spell. For just a moment, all the mist around them evaporated, and they could even make out the features of their attackers shooting at them from the next room. But then it returned with a vengeance; twice as thick and twice as cold.

Twilight started to shiver where she stood. “No good!” she said. “This mist means business!”

“Heeeey, Twiiiiilight…”

Thinking that an enemy had snuck up behind them, Lyra and Twilight both gave a start. But they turned to see it was Rainbow Dash who had flown up behind them.

“Oh, good!” said Lyra, relaxing a little, even while turning back to return fire at the ponies who were shooting at them. “Is Lero safe?”

“Safe? I… I don’t know,” answered Rainbow.

“What do you mean, ‘You don’t know?’” asked Twilight in disbelief. She wouldn’t have thought Rainbow would’ve bothered rejoining the fight unless Lero was completely out of danger.

”I was fighting Honeydew,” said Rainbow Dash. Her voice and expression were very strained.

“Honeydew?” Lyra sacrificed a moment to glance Rainbow over more closely. “How badly did she hurt you?!”

“She… she… I hurt HER way worse than she hurt me. Used five different martial arts styles on her.”

“Did you? Way to go, Rainbow!”

More Sicklefins were coming up behind Rainbow Dash; Twilight and Lyra shot at them over the pegasus’ shoulders. One fell, and dragged herself behind cover; the other just fell.

“But how did I learn those martial arts in the first place?!” Rainbow’s voice was suddenly high-pitched and needy, like an overstressed kindergartener. “I mean, after that whole thing with the glufferflork, I started seeing things in a new light… but that was way less than a year ago, and before that, I didn’t even really believe in attacking others. I remember always believing in being nice and being gentle all the time, no matter what! And I remember I gathered a lot of animal friends to live with me in my home at a very early age, and taking care of so many animals takes many hours out of the day, and I kept letting more and more of them live with me as time went on, so even if I wanted to learn five different martial arts, when would I have found the time?! It makes no sense! If I was able to punch with lightning, dodge like the wind, or cut with the air itself, why would I have let Angel Bunny and all his friends do all those horrible things to me for so long?! No matter which way I look at it, I couldn’t have learned those martial arts, and yet, I beat Honeydew up with them, you can see I still have some of her blood on my arms and legs, and when she went and attacked me, it all came so naturally…”

A small segment of wall was blasted off, nearly taking Twilight Sparkle in the gut.

“Rainbow,” Twilight said, reaching over to put a comforting hoof on her, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but this isn’t the right time to worry about all that…”

But the moment Twilight touched Rainbow, she was flipped effortlessly over the pegasus’ shoulder, slammed hard into the ground before she could even blink. Rainbow had performed this counter on her herdsister reflexively, without a moment’s thought.

“Rainbow, no!” Lyra screamed.

“Help me, Twilight…” Rainbow Dash begged, “It’s all wrong, and none of it makes sense, it has to make sense, I need it to make sense, but it doesn’t, it refuses to, no matter how I look at it, it’s really wrong, the pieces aren’t fitting together right, and it’s all unravelling in my mind, Twilight, all the threads are coming undone, it’s so wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and I feel like I’m going to scream and break things if it gets any wronger, Twilight…!!!”

It’s wrong. Twilight’s blood ran cold at hearing the familiar mad refrain of the Alicorn sisters. It had found its way into Dash’s voice. In the Swapped pony’s eyes, Twilight Sparkle now finally perceived the spark of the same murderous madness which she’d seen overtake Princess Celestia and Luna shortly after Starswirl the Bearded had made them try to recreate a total solar eclipse.

A spark poised to flare into an inferno.

Author's Note

A spreagadh go láidir gach lucht leanúna fíor ar an scéal seo, a sheiceáil amach an scéal seo compánach do Roinnte Dhathach: Isteach An Chois Claí, cheadaigh láidir ag mise le Fíor.

Ahem. Special thanks and kudos to all the fan-contributed Sicklefins:

Hoof Sandwich: Flink.
Warm Needle: Aether
Horse Head: Zer0prototype
Keen Edge: Flink
Speak Easy: Zer0prototype

It's not too late, folks! Go ahead and suggest your own Sickelfins while you still can!

Big thanks to everyone on my writing team, especially Rikmach and Bad Wolf. Rik; you really came through for me. I owe you a big one, buddy. Bad Wolf: that was just a cool thing you wrote.