“Attention citizens. Please evacuate the buildings and assemble in the main road in an orderly fashion.”
Nopony left any buildings. One mare closed the shutters on her window, tumbleweeds drifted across the dusty street and somewhere in the distance, a hawk let out a piercing cry.
There was no other sound. There hadn’t been any other sound ever since the dropships had landed, and it was for an extremely good reason: the Appleloosans had seen what had happened to the buffalo. Would any pony want to associate with such monsters after that?
No. They would not.
“Attention citizens. Use of live ammunition has been authorised. Please evacuate the buildings and assemble in the main road in an orderly fashion, or we will open fire.”
Still nopony left. Even for a one-horse town, this place was extraordinarily quiet. A single face – that of a yellow pegasus with a long, flowing pink mane and blue-green eyes – looked around a door, but she squeaked in terror when she saw the Overwatch standing in the middle of the street and closed the door again.
“This isn’t working,” said the commander. With a couple of motions of his hoof, groups of black-armoured stallions and mares trotted casually into each of the structures and started dragging out the protesting ponies.
“Where’s Rarity?” demanded one: a golden stallion with a two-toned mane, green eyes, a single apple as a cutie mark and most distinctively a large hat and a vest. “What in tarnation have y’all done with her?!”
The response to this demand was a whack across the face with the butt of a rifle.
“Hey!” yelled a Palomino mare in a Stetson. “You leave mah cousin alone!”
“Move it!” the Overwatch officers demanded, and it wasn’t long before the entire town was assembled outside in the heat of the baking sun.
“You all have a choice,” the commander declared. “You may join our ranks, become members of the Overwatch, and bring honour and glory to your family, or die at the hooves of our rifles.”
“Neither.”
The stallion who had spoken out now left the crowd and stood between them and the Overwatch.
“Oh no,” whimpered a dull pink mare with a deathly straight mane, “he’s going to die!”
“Yer not takin’ anypony today,” said Braeburn, “and yer not takin’ any Appleloosan any day! We are proud ponies, and we ain’t gon let ourselves fall! Y’all may’ve killed mah friends, but ya ain’t takin’ mah family!”
Rather than saying anything, the Overwatch commander simply nodded at the soldier who was nearest to the objective farmer, who seconds later was lying semi-conscious in the dust.
“Braeburn!” cried Applejack, and she ran forward and cradled her cousin’s head in her hooves.
“Did... Did it work?”
That was the last thing he said before he passed out. Applejack looked up when she heard the cocking of a rifle, and found herself staring straight down a metal barrel at unseeing, glowing orange eyes.
“Let this be an example to all those who resist the might of the Combine,” said the wielder of the gun.
Suddenly, from above, a single word pierced the tension of the atmosphere and cut through the heat like a hot knife through butter:
“SPITFIRE!!!”
And then, all hell broke loose.
Tell you what? You do this.
I’ve been talking for far too long. For a moment, put yourself in my armoured horseshoes. This is you, invading Nova Discord with a small army of antlions.
Here you go...
When you open the door to the inner Combine sanctum that is Nova Discord, you find your heart can’t decide whether to pound in your throat or sink into your hooves. The good thing is that it isn’t particularly evil or nasty looking: in fact, it looks just like any other prison, just a little older. Nopony’s there to shoot your brains out and that reassures you.
The bad thing is that it isn’t particularly evil or nasty looking: in fact, it looks just like any other prison, just a little older. If everything had been horrible – say, massive black metal things and ponies with guns all over the place – it would have felt like a challenge, a real boss fight. The fact that there isn’t anything there is cause for worry, because you know it means the worst is still to come.
You proceed through the door, feeling the antlion’s absence behind you. The missing sound of their claws rattling on the concrete floor reminds you that you’re alone in this endeavour, but that they’re on your side now and may turn up again. Although you consider that if too many die Fluttershy may never forgive you.
You’re in a cell block. The floors, as already stated, are concrete and the walls bear a coating of peeling turquoise paint, further driving home the knowledge that you have been missing from Equestria far longer than you would have preferred. These cells are empty now. You wonder what happened to the prisoners that were already here, and come to the conclusion that whatever it was, it couldn’t have been very nice.
Just for a joke, you wrap a toilet in your telekinesis and yank it off the wall. Who knows? It might come in rather handy.
Hoofy?
It’s just that they don’t have hands in Equestria and...
Whatever.
You descend to the lower floor, noticing a massive hole carved into the concrete floor, as if an antlion had tunnelled up from below. To the left, you see a cell with a light on and a massive hole in the wall leading through into some kind of office.
There’s a headcrab in the hole. You shoot the toilet at it, and it is one of the most hilarious things you’ve ever done.
Crawling through the hole deposits you into the office, but once you leave it you find yourself diving for cover as more bullets start whizzing past. A quick scan of the area reveals no troops in the immediate area, but there is a turret which is shooting at you like no tomorrow.
So, as with the toilet, you wrap your telekinesis around it and push it to the floor. You leave the corridor and head up a set of stairs with a chain link fence at the top, but just when you consider that this may have all been worthless, you notice that one of the corners is drastically bent in so that you can climb over it and onto the other side into another corridor, punting the turrets that try to shoot at you.
You follow the corridor until you come to an office (or maybe it’s a guard room) and take the opportunity to recharge your HEV suit at a handy charging station.
When you leave the office you follow the corridor to another stairway, and head upstairs to yet another hallway. In a dark room to the right, you find some more nanites and ammunition. Then you go to a nearby exit, and take out a couple more turrets before proceeding through the door, down a ladder and into a flooded basement.
You make your way across the basement to a stairway, taking out the barnacles clinging to the ceiling on the way, and find a small room where the roof has collapsed. So you climb through the hole and head towards a pair of double doors, but before you get there a skylight collapses and a pair of headcrabs fall out. Thankfully you can take them out before they can do any proper damage.
After the headcrabs are done and dusted, you proceed through the door and head down the cell block and then drop through a hole in the floor and almost land on a dead guard – nasty. In the next room, a couple of turrets have been stationed on the upper level walkway, so you quickly run to behind a pillar to get out of their line of sight. The turrets are easily dealt with thanks to a couple of grenades which you restock with some that you grab off the dead guard, and then head upstairs. After which, you yank some boards off a window to get onto the other side of the door, but all that’s there is a cave-in of rubble...
...oh, and some supplies, which you thankfully grab. You exit this little hole, and head upstairs to the next corridor.
You’re starting to feel like you’re walking through a maze – or more appropriately for the situation, a labyrinth. You haven’t encountered any major challenges yet, and start to wonder if you ever will. Like the Ancient Greek minotaur and that bloke who slew it. What was his name again?
Never mind. It’s not really important. What is important is that you’re in a fortified structure, formerly a prison, with a name which literally translates into “New Chaos”.
After a while you come to another office thing, and a headcrab tries to eat your face so you indulge in a little impromptu cricket and it smashes into the wall. You collect the ammunition somepony conveniently left there, and head onwards into a long and empty corridor, which is rather suspicious considering the circumstances.
You come to a railing which is overlooking what are quite obviously the prison showers, or were the prison showers about twenty years ago. It’s very empty and suspiciously quiet, and you consider high-tailing it out of there and searching for a different route, but wonder if you’d have time to do that anyway.
So you vault over the railing.
Almost instantly, a massive antlion thing comes charging around a corner. In a blind panic you levitate yourself off the ground and float back up to the railings, but by the time you do you’ve tired yourself out and hardly have the strength to pull yourself back up.
While catching your breath, you carefully weigh your options. It would be so easy to turn around and gallop back the way you came, and as stated before, find another way through Nova Discord, and it would probably be even easier to just leave this place altogether, forget about your mission and try to find a way to live with a dying planet and a conscience the size of the moon.
However, you notice that again, there’s several conveniently placed barrels of explosive liquids (nitro-glycerine, maybe?) which appear to be readily available to throw at this monster. Plus, you have a recently restocked supply of rockets just waiting to be fired.
It takes you five seconds to work out what to do. You take out your rocket launcher, take careful aim and fire.
The rocket slams into the monster’s side, sending it barrelling into a wall and stumbling out in a daze with a massive scorch mark on its side. After reloading the rocket launcher, you fire again and this time the thing starts bleeding profusely. The shower drains work harder than they ever have in all their existence.
You take aim for presumably the last time...
...but a Combine soldier shoots at you, hits you in the chest and knocks you off balance.
You take him out with a shot from the .357 Magnum, but you’ve now run out of rockets and are going to have to jump down into the belly of the beast – so to speak – to lob a barrel of explosive at the monster.
And you do exactly that, and end up with giant antlion gore all over your face.
Yuck.
You quickly raid the area for supplies and move on through a pair of double doors, which until that point had been barred with benches and planks and assorted rubble – including a couple of laundry carts for some weird reason. When you go through, the floor explodes and antlions erupt from beneath the concrete. It would have been better if they’d arrived a little sooner, but you’re thankful for their company and the help they’ll provide.
In the next hallway, you put the pheropods to good use and some grenades to take out the turrets which were otherwise mowing through your antlions like a hedge trimmer.
That’s when ponyhacks descend from the ceiling. You seize one and hold it still, and use it to chop the rest into pieces. It’s okay, little parasprites: the Combine can’t hurt you anymore. When that’s done, you press the final survivor against the wall and stomp on it. It breaks your heart, but the poor thing has suffered too much already.
Not long after this pseudo-nightmarish occurrence, you come across a room which could have been a dentist’s office from hell. An electrical shield bars the entrance to where a demon dog lies slumped and every so often getting zapped by a small bolt of lightning.
You can see the plug which is fuelling this monstrous machine, so you wrap your telekinesis around it and wrench it from its socket. The demon dog falls limp, its long-lifeless body no longer supported by constant shots of electricity. You don’t spend more time than necessary in that room – the stench of burning flesh fills the air and comes close to emptying your stomach. So you head through the next door, but upon entering the next office thingy you see that a gate up ahead is closed.
Luckily there is a switch on the wall, and when you throw it the gate bleeps and opens for you. Before you leave you grab some handy ammo that some considerate pony had left on the table and clear the junk away from the exit. You find your way upstairs to another office thingy, this one protected by lasers, so you let the antlions clear it out for you and take out the guards with your freshly reloaded Magnum.
As you leave and enter another walkway, your mind starts to wander again, this time coming to a rest on Soarin’. The last time you’d seen him was well over seventeen years ago (although it feels like seventeen hours ago) on the day before all of this began. The day before you activated your GLaDOS and inadvertently allowed the alien monstrosity to waltz in and almost immediately take complete control over Equestria.
He and Dash were visiting Twilight to see how she was recovering following her terrible ordeal under the mountain, and they had brought Lightning Strike with them. That’s one of your most heart-wrenching memories: seeing a one-month-old baby pegasus do more to comfort the broken unicorn than you feel you ever could. That kid had just leapt up onto the bed and given her a hug. How many ponies could have done that? And he was one month old. Surely there was no way he could have empathised with her!
When you first encountered him, you’d believed that Soarin’ was an arrogant jerk. You’d seen him on Twilight’s windowsill after all, and it wouldn’t have been the first time you’d found some weirdo perving on one of your female friends. It definitely wouldn’t have been the first time you’d found some weirdo perving on a female friend you fancied like crazy.
Finding out who he was and the reason he was in Ponyville came close to confirming your suspicions – after all, what kind of stallion would just up and abandon a young mare the morning after declaring his love for her? Plus, you know these kinds of celebrities – these sports stars are all the same – stuck up, egotistical smegheads who don’t care a bit about the general public and definitely not about the mares they knock up.
But then, when Dash introduced him properly, you found out that the ponies he’d come to love tended to die in some rather unfair fashion, and he had left Dash in an attempt to spare her from the fate he feared was meant for her. It seemed understandable when you really thought about it.
Plus chances are he still blamed himself for the death of his father, and probably the death of his mother as well. And what’re the odds that his Wonderbolt friends survived the Combine invasion? Very, very low.
You know all about comfort eating, and you know that Soarin’ likes pie – a lot – but it would take a massive smegload of pie to even slightly ease the pain and after that he probably wouldn’t even be able to get off the ground, even if there was no suppression field.
Again, you find yourself wondering why the smeg you haven’t seen any unicorns outside of the Resistance. What happened; were they all rounded up and slaughtered, or were they just hunted down like common sewer rats? If that’s the case, then you feel like you might be sick.
And you hope you’re not, because you’ve only encountered one toilet so far, and you threw it at a headcrab.
You’re starting to wonder if you’ll ever find where you want to go. From the outside, it looked like your best bet might be to head for the middle. It appeared to be a standard ridiculously high security prison, but you could see something tall, blue and glass-like in the middle: a huge rectangular structure not unlike the Citadel back in City 17, only a lot smaller and less intimidating.
With this as our goal, you continue to fight your way through Nova Discord, using the help of the antlions any way you can. Somewhere along the line, a stray bullet smashed right into your PFM, but you don’t really mind because that thing was a bore. You’re only glad the charging unit wasn’t damaged.
Eventually you come to a rubble-filled area which appears to be right outside the blue building you saw earlier. And up close you can tell that it isn’t glass, it’s just steel, almost exactly like the Citadel in City 17. It stands mere metres from the wall of the prison, creating a narrow alley with concrete on one side and metal on the other. And you don’t like the look of that steel: it looks as though it could close and crush you in the blink of an eye.
Still, at least you’re outside, which means you’re not breathing in the stench of rotting parasprite and antlion entrails. There’s a zombie down below, but you take it out with a single shotgun round.
You see a hole in the prison wall up ahead, and decide that it’ll be your next point of entry, but you spot some supply crates at the far end of the alley-thing. The question is, should you run across and empty the contents of the crates or just jump into the hole?
In this kind of situation, you need everything you can lay your hooves on, so you decide to make a run for it. You gallop across the broken concrete, dodging fires and for some reason a table, and smash open the crates with a well-placed blast of telekinesis.
HEV batteries and shotgun rounds. Yes!
At that moment, per your fears, the metal wall starts advancing on you. Your rational thoughts give way to adrenaline and you charge full speed towards the hole in the concrete. It takes a few tries but you get inside just before you’re crushed, and drop down to the rubble below.