Littlepip and Co. Save a Merc group/fight alicorns.

“Oooookie dokey lokey. SteelHooves, I’ll be floating you through and setting you down over there,” I said pointing at the far corner of the room near the doorway out. “This floor is not stable.”

Velvet Remedy stayed back. I focused on SteelHooves, wrapping him in a telekinetic blanket. Slowly, I lifted the heavy Steel Ranger up half a yard and brought him through the shower. I took a single step back, feeling the floor wobble alarmingly once again, and glided him past me towards a corner that I was fairly certain would be dry and stable.

SteelHooves made it halfway there when something he saw through the open doorway caused him to thrash, trying to find purchase on the floor.

Before I could put him down, before I could even ask what he saw, the alicorn stepped into the doorway.

My levitation magic imploded as I gasped in shock. SteelHooves dropped hard, turning to fire at the alicorn, and the floor gave way beneath him. SteelHooves dropped out of sight. I heard splashes beneath. The alicorn took a step forward, looking down at the hole, and rest of the floor collapsed. The alicorn tried to thrust out her wings to fly, but they struck the sides of the doorframe and she fell into the floor below with him.

I found myself standing on a wet, sagging plank jutting out over the floor below like a diving board. Which was appropriate since the floor below was a swimming pool.

My PipBuck started click-click-clicking with great enthusiasm.

Scrambling on the floating debris, the alicorn thrashed. Her horn began to glow. SteelHooves was nowhere in sight, having surely sunk to the bottom.

I wished for the bag of grenades. I had to act fast, but my mind wasn’t thinking fast enough! The alicorn would have her shield up before I had figured out what to do!

Ka-BLAM!!!

An explosion right next to my head blew out my eardrums. The world became a strained, high buzz. I immediately lost all sense of balance, tumbling from my position. I landed on a floating chunk of flooring that immediately began to capsize.

I grasped the chunk of floor telekinetically, letting out a scream I could feel but not hear. Focusing had become excruciating.

In front of me, I saw the alicorn floating in debris and blood. Velvet Remedy had blown a large chunk of the creature’s neck away with the combat shotgun. It wasn’t dead, but it was a race between blood loss and drowning as to which would finish her off first.

I watched in horror as it began to heal, the wound slowly closing.

They fucking regenerate?

That was not fair! That was not okay!

With a flash of anger, I started telekinetically grasping jagged, floating bits of floor and jabbing at the alicorn’s neck until I had crudely sawed it off. The creature began to sink beneath the reddened, radioactive water.

*** *** ***

Velvet Remedy crouched over me, her horn pointing at my left ear. She had already restored hearing to my right.

SteelHooved stood next to us on the edge of the swimming pool, dripping with water that was making my PipBuck clickity-click wildly. He was arguing with Velvet over how much RadAway he needed to drink. Velvet was leaning towards every last packet we had; SteelHooves was insisting he didn’t need any at all.

My left ear began to mend.

“We don’t have time for this,” SteelHooves stomped, cracking the tiles under his armored hoof. “Those creatures always travel in groups.”

“Then take the RadAway and stop being a baby,” my shotgun surgeon spat back, glowering. “Seriously, do all my patients have to be so difficult?”

I wanted to point out that I was laying there being very non-difficult, thank you.

SteelHooves bristled at that. Finally, I spoke up. “SteelHooves, tell her.”

Both of them turned to stare at me. Or, at least, I assumed SteelHooves was staring at me. His visor was pointed in my direction.

“Tell me what?” Velvet asked me slowly. Then, turning to SteelHooves, “Tell. Me. What?”

SteelHooves was silent.

I sighed. “Look, if I was able to figure it out, so will she. She’s smarter than I am.”

I could tell Velvet Remedy was forcing herself not to react to the compliment.

SteelHooves finally relented.

“I’m a ghoul.”

Velvet Remedy, to her credit, didn’t take a step back. Didn’t even gasp. She was just strangely quiet for a while. Long enough that I would have worried I had lost my hearing again if it wasn’t for the drip, drip, drip on the tiles underneath the Steel Ranger.

“Radiation is… regenerative for ghouls,” SteelHooves admitted. “I was more in danger of drowning.” In truth, there had been little danger of that with the rebreather in his magically powered armor.

Of course, I realized, feeling slow and stupid: the alicorn was regenerating because she was in the pool. Radiation must effect them the same way.

“Well then, I guess you won’t need the RadAway,” Velvet Remedy concluded casually, slipping the packs back into one of her open medical boxes.

*** *** ***

Knowing I was by far the most capable of stealth, I determined that I should scout ahead. I spotted the alicorn’s two sisters in a room on the next floor. Their tails were to me, oblivious to my presence as they seemed to be focusing on trying to magically rip the door of a safe off its hinges. Their coats were a deep purple, almost black. And that was not all I noticed.

They have no cutie marks!

I slipped out my sniper rifle and slid into the zen of S.A.T.S.

BLAM!!

The first alicorn when down hard, brain blasting out the front of her skull to paint the safe she had been so focused on. The second began to turn, her shield already starting to form. But I was faster. And these creatures were not that much tougher than the rest of us if caught unawares and without their protective spells cast.

BLAM!!

I slipped out of S.A.T.S. as the second alicorn’s body slumped to the floor. I looked at the safe, the splatter of blood, brains and bone reminding me that we never did go back and paint that note for Calamity.

Wait. Stop.

I’m looking at the gore from somepony… or at least something that I have just murdered… and I’m thinking that?

Am I really becoming that callous to the horrors and violence in the Equestrian Wasteland?

I wondered where this would fit on Monterey Jack’s slide of loss-of-self.

I also wondered what the hell the alicorns had been after. So I trotted up to pick the lock. The safe, however, refused to be unlocked. After examination and struggling, I realized that it wasn’t jammed or broken by the alicorns. I just wasn’t good enough.

Well, I knew how to fix that.

I found myself smiling as the Party-Time Mint-al washed me clean of all the stupidity and dullness that was holding me back. I took a deep breath of relief! Finally, I was the real me again. My smile faded as I turned to see Velvet Remedy watching me sadly.

*** *** ***

Three more alicorns stood on the other side of a gaping divide. At least five internal floors had collapsed, leaving a honeycomb of half-rooms ringing a massive pit. Motes of debris and ash floated in the void between us.

SteelHooves opened fire with his grenade machinegun, taking out one of them (and all the rooms around her) before she could fully erect her shield. The two others launched themselves into the air, spreading their wings as their shields bubbled around them.

I gave a prayer to Luna and floated out a memory orb, making sure it was the one of Pinkie Pie’s last party, and not the one I had retrieved from the safe seven floors below. I began levitating the orb towards closer of the two.

The alicorn let out a wicked, bitter and majestic laugh that echoed off the walls of the pit. Using telekinesis of her own, she knocked it free of my telekinetic sheath with a hurled chair. The orb containing the memory of Pinkie Pie’s last party plunged into the depths below, bounced, rolled and disappeared through a crack, lost forever.

The dark-purple coated alicorn’s voice rumbled with undeniable superiority. “Do you think We are fools? We remember how you killed Us before!”

Oh we were so fucked!

“Run!” I yelled, turning tail and racing towards the stairs.

Velvet Remedy and SteelHooves galloped after me, overtaking me as I charged up out of the stairwell and into a hallway.

Turning, I ordered SteelHooves to collapse the entrance behind us. His grenade machinegun was useless against a shielded alicorn, but more than a match for the crumbling structure we were in. Concrete and wood rained down in a thunderous cloud of dust.

“What happened?” SteelHooves demanded.

Panting, I explained. “There’s some sort of telepathy involved…” My fears had been proven true. “…not just between the ones that are together. All of them. Every time we kill one, they learn from it.” I wouldn’t be able to trick them the same way twice.

Our ploy bought us time, but not much. I could hear them on the other side, clearing a path to us.

With a flash of light, one of the alicorns appeared right between us.

“They can teleport too!?” Velvet Remedy blurted, finally reaching the same level of hateful disbelief I felt towards these creatures.

The alicorn herself seemed a little surprised. Apparently, teleporting into someplace you can’t see was tricky work even for these creatures. I don’t think she expected to be this close. Too bad she hadn’t appeared a yard to either side, stuck herself in a wall. But no, we couldn’t be that lucky.

Or could we? I realized something very peculiar. The alicorn’s sphere of shielding was up at full strength, but she had appeared literally in the center of us. Parts of each of us were inside the barrier. Including SteelHooves’s metal rear end.

The alicorn began casting a spell. I felt a vice tighten around my heart. My hooves began to tingle.

A heart attack spell? Feeling panic well up inside me as my heart struggled to beat, I suddenly knew how these creatures had killed the griffins through “natural causes”.

“Move!” I yelled as I telekinetically grasped the sack of grenades. SteelHooves dashed forward, leaving the grenades inside the sack. Without opening it to reveal the contents, I focused and tried to pull as many of the pins as I could. Unfortunately, moving objects I couldn’t directly see was as difficult for me as teleporting into an unknown space was for the alicorn. I only managed to pull the pins on three before I backed out of the shield.

The alicorn looked questioningly down at the sack as it fell to her feet. Her shield contained the explosion quite effectively. It was a gory and brilliant sight.

*** *** ***

“Well, that would explain how griffins can get trapped on a roof,” I said flatly.

We had to fight through four more of the creatures before we made it to the roof. The combination of my stealth and SteelHooves’ massive firepower kept us alive, but it was getting harder. They were all alert for us now, and seemed to be coordinating their defenses. We had to run any time they got their spells up, and we were not fast enough to take out more than two before the others were able to cast their shields.

On the roof were four more alicorns. They were sitting, frozen, at the four corners of the building, their attentions focused inward. Instead of surrounding themselves with a sphere of protective magic, they were cooperatively maintaining a hemisphere of magical force that was keeping the three griffin mercs caged.

“New one on me,” SteelHooves muttered from beside me.

“Oh thank the Great Egg,” one of them blurted out, seeing us through the glowing shell of force that trapped her and the other two surviving griffins. She stopped. “Where are the rest of you?”

I looked around. Velvet Remedy and SteelHooves were flanking me. The Goddesses only knew where Calamity was. I suspected he was circling the Celestia line, hoping to spot us. I winced at the thought and hoped he wasn’t too worried. I could see the faintest suggestion of approaching dawn on the skyline.

A chill wind blew at my mane, bringing the salty smell of the harbor. It was almost a shame that we’d reached the roof in the dark of night. The view in the daytime must be amazing.

Then again, the view could also paralyze me with vertigo. So probably better we were here now after all. Turning back to the three griffins, “This is it. Just us.”

“Well, this isn’t much of a rescue,” one of the griffins said bitterly.

“Gratitude. Look it up.”

I turned away and looked over the alicorns. They were statuesque in their concentration. I wasn’t even sure they realized we were on the roof with them. And they were outside the shield they were creating. We could take three of them down with a coordinated attack. Surely the griffins could take out the last one. “What kind of firepower do you guys still have?

I could hear SteelHooves whistle as the griffin in the back stepped forward. She was wearing what looked like magically powered armor of her own, a griffin design -- nowhere near as complicated or encompassing as SteelHooves, leaving her talons, legs and wings bare, as well as most of her face -- with a huge, tri-barreled, biggest battle saddle I had ever seen.

“Dismounted AA cannon,” SteelHooves said appreciatively. I had no idea what that meant, but this looked like the non-magical-energy version of the plasma cannon that Calamity had used against the dragon.

Well, we definitely had the firepower.

“Only five shots left,” the griffin said glumly. Still, five shots from that thing should be more than…

“And there are four wings of these horny bastards on their way,” the first griffin announced. From her voice, I finally identified her as Blackwing. I noted mentally that I would not have chosen the word “horny” to describe the alicorns. Unless Blackwing knew something I did not.

“Four wings?” I asked. “You mean two more?”

“No,” SteelHooves interjected. “She means twelve.”

“Oh. Well… moonrocks.” Made sense. A “wing” then must be a group of three. Explains why there were three of them hunting SteelHooves outside Fetlock.

“These four have just been keeping us pinned here while their reinforcements arrive,” Blackwing informed us.

Wait…

I perked up. “We’re okay, then. I’m pretty sure we took them out on the way up!” I mentally counted. One in the pool. Two at the safe. Three in the pit. One of those had lived, and joined up with three more. So we’d killed…

…nine. There were still three left. Somehow, we’d managed to go right past a whole wing of alicorns without either party realizing it.

And they would probably be bursting onto the roof any minute. We had to work fast!

*** *** ***

I quickly laid out the plan and everyone started taking their positions. As they did so, I couldn’t help but voice my suspicions to Blackwing: “What is it that you mercenaries were after in this place that these creatures want so badly?”

“Codes to crack a safe in the Ministry of Image on Ministry Walk,” Blackwing said, surprisingly forthcoming. “Safe contains an artifact that our employer would really like to take possession of. Turns out, the ‘goddess’ these monsters serve wants it too.”

“What kind of artifact?” I asked, as I levitated out Little Macintosh and checked the load. I was going to use a magic bullet for this, just to be sure.

“The Black Book. Well, the Black Book of something-or-other. A tome of some of the foulest zebra magics. Stuff that can tear a pony’s soul apart, they say. Or raise spirits from the grave.”

Necromancy.

The very thought that such spells and powers actually existed gave me nightmarish chills. To my knowledge, no pony had ever used such dark arts; it was horrifying to imagine that the zebras actually could. Necromancy wasn’t even supposed to be real -- just a horror story to scare young fillies at slumber parties.

If this was the sort of foulness the Ministry of Image was casting their nets to catch, the purging of books took on a whole new and terrifying light. I began to wonder if the purpose behind the confiscation of “ideologically incompatible” books wasn’t, at least in part, a smokescreen for this. Because by the Goddesses, you couldn’t tell the public that the zebras had necromancy, much less that books on the stuff were slipping into Equestria!

The notion of zebra necromancy breathed an uncomfortable new dimension into how being on the fringe of a megaspell event turned ponies in to ghoul-ponies and zombie-ponies.

While I was talking to Blackwing and pondering the implications of the Black Book, SteelHooves and Velvet Remedy were discussing our foes. I caught the end of the conversation.

“…don’t all have the same spells. Only the deep purple-coated ones like the wings below can teleport,” SteelHooves explained to her. “The midnight blue coats…”

“Invisibility,” Velvet Remedy interjected. “Oh yes. I remember.”

“The dark green ones? I haven’t seen them do anything the others can’t do.” SteelHooves walked up close to one of the statue-like alicorns and took a close look at its coat, a forest green so deep it was nearly black. “Until now.”

Butcher, the griffin with the heavy gun stood at the ready in front of the farthest alicorn. SteelHooves had locked onto the one on my left. Velvet Remedy had her (formerly my) combat shotgun hovering an inch from the temple of the one on my right. I floated Little Macintosh between the eyes of the one in front of me.

“On the count of three. One… Two…”

In a thunderous crash of gunshot and explosions, three alicorns went down. So went the shield. The last alicorn immediately sprang to life, alert and…

…the griffin’s supergun let out a boom that could be heard on the moon. The fourth alicorn was simply no more.

Blackwing swooped forward and took me in his talons as the other lightly encumbered griffin scooped up Velvet, taking off into the air. I threw a telekinetic sheath around SteelHooves, carrying him with us. The last griffin took off, circling to cover our tail.

We were a few blocks away when the last three alicorns burst onto the roof. Part of me wanted to laugh tauntingly. Then they reminded us that they could fly too. And, unencumbered, they were much faster and more maneuverable.

Wrapping themselves in magical shields, they swooped to close the distance.

I closed my eyes, trying to force my PTM-enhanced brain to think of something. For the first time, Party-Time Mint-als were failing me.

“Well now, y’all look like ya c’n use some help!”

Only once before had I ever been so happy to hear Calamity’s voice and that was when I was facing a dragon. I opened my eyes, staring to him thankfully. “I hope you have a plan. Cuz I’ve got nothing.”

“Y’all just follow me!” Calamity smiled and shot out ahead of us, dropping altitude.

Turns out, the one direction that heavily-laden griffins could fly even faster than alicorns was down. They gave chase, but we were pulling ahead.

“Unless we’re diving for a mattress factory,” Blackwing squawked, “This’ll be a really short trip!”

I glanced back. There was good distance between us and the three creatures, now only visible as glowing bubbles of sickly green energy that zipped through the sky towards us.

“Start pulling up now!” Calamity called back.

“Does he have any idea…” the griffin carrying Velvet Remedy grunted, “how hard it is… to pull up… at this speed… carrying this much weight?”

I could see the street coming up fast as we began to level. I smiled, thinking of just how much junk Calamity had a habit of scavenging. I had no doubt that the answer was yes.

The three griffins finally pulled straight with only yards to spare, skimming over the tops of the taller wagons. I felt a hoof drag along the top of a passenger wagon. The alicorns were beginning to close the gap. Lightning ripped from one of their horns, shooting past us.

Up ahead, the street ended in a massive parking lot. Rows upon rows of delivery wagons were lined up before a long building. With the exceptional visual clarity provided by Party-Time Mint-als, I was able to make out a logo on the roof of the building as we approached it: a filled-in black omega symbol with a white earth pony seeming to levitate a package on her back.

I suddenly realized the plan. An eye-blink before Calamity started shooting.

I turned on my Eyes-Forwards Sparkle, making a quick scan for life down there. I only had a moment, but at least I had Party-Time Mint-als boosting my keenness and judgement. All I was seeing were red blips scurrying about, below. Probably radroaches. I could hear a series of pops as we shot past the delivery wagons and over the rooftop.

The alicorns were just reaching the parking lot, moving too fast to stop, when the first delivery wagons exploded like megaspell bombs in extreme miniature. The first explosions instantly set off the rest, and three city blocks erupted in a vibrant cascade of insanely-colored light.

Their shields couldn’t protect them against that. The blast of radiation couldn’t heal them from a force that ripped them apart beneath a cellular level. They could not even mentally scream. There was no time. The three alicorns were simply gone.

The building shielded us just enough to save us before it was vaporized. My PipBuck screamed as we were hit by a wash of heat and radiation. My E.F.S. flashed a red warning that I was suffering radiation poisoning before it collapsed altogether, my PipBuck crashing.

A moment later, we crashed too.