Awoken 3: An Endless Nightmare

Chapter 17: When All is Said and Done

Last chapter. I hope I did okay.

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Running. Running. Running. It seems like all that we ever do. I'm so tired of fighting. I'm so tired of watching ponies die. I'm tired of everything. I want out. I want out of this mess. I want to go home.

That's not going to happen, I thought bluntly as we pushed our way down the corridor, our hooves thundering loudly on the tile floor. We're going to die here. Our last hope just blew himself up. What the hell do we do now?

Kill, said a voice at the back of my mind. You have to kill her. You have to kill her and shut the Prototypes down by force. She's not going to give in. There's no other choice. She's going to have to die.

Of course that's the case. I wanted to get off this time without needlessly killing anypony. The Prototypes were long gone. In their activated state, they were so far altered from a normal pony that they wouldn't be able to live their lives even if we could bring them back into consciousness. Killing them was almost a gift.

Tyra is different. Tyra still has her wits. She still has control over her actions. I thought that maybe she could be saved. I've killed too many ponies that should've been able to live.

I suppose she deserves it in a way. She's murdered thousands of ordinary Cloudsdale citizens. She needs to be stopped at all costs. In the end, we have no other choice. She has to die. She has to die.

"In here!" Glaze hissed, shoving me into a room to the side. He waited for Dash and Summer to stumble their way inside before slamming the door shut and using all of his might to push a large wooden shelf in front of the entrance way.

I breathed a side of relief as the hoofbeats outside stopped, confused. A few noises could be heard outside the room, but I don't think the Prototypes caught on to our escape. Even if they figure it out, they shouldn't be able to get through the door with that shelf in front of it.

Of course, it wasn't exactly a good escape route either. I finally caught my breath and let the sobbing Amber down on the ground, taking a chance to survey our surroundings. We had ended up in a storage room, filled with random boxes and shelves of labeled bottles. The only exit was the one we had come through. The one blocked by the Prototypes.

"Okay... Great... We're kind of trapped..." I turned, glaring at Glaze.

He shrugged. "Mystery, they would have caught up. Those things have twice the speed and endurance as us. We needed to lose them."

"So then what now?" Hissed Dash. "We're dead, aren't we?"

I shook my head, patting Amber comfortingly on the back. I feel bad that we're talking like nothing happened. Blueprint just exploded into a million pieces in front of our eyes, and we're ignoring it for the moment. I want to talk to her about it, I really do, but we have bigger problems on our hooves.

"We'll... Just wait for them to leave, I guess..." I suggested. "I mean... They've got to give up at some point."

"You think so?" Summer questioned. "I dunno, those things seem pretty persistent."

"If you know anything, Dash, now would be the time to speak up," warned Glaze. "You took part in Flare's experiment. Do you know anything about these Prototypes?"

She shook her head. "I helped with Spectral Flare, that much is true, but the Prototype 2.0 was Hide's project, and Hide's project alone. He didn't actually begin to design it until after the original Rainbow Factory was destroyed. I was in a coma for most of the time, feeding off his dumb homemade life support system. Apparently the organs that he replaced in me hadn't been working properly. That's why I was out for so long. If I had know what he was doing with those clones before he started making them, I would have stopped him. I was too late."