Chapter Text
The blast was a record-breaker, all right. If only someone had been left to record it.
It went just as she’d planned. The time bomb, the Springfield power plant, the ensuing wave of intense heat and radiation that no creature could survive, especially the army of Glitch-infected people who’d chased her one last time. And if this wasn’t actually wiping out the Glitch as she hoped, well…At least she was dying on her own terms. She would die knowing the Glitch never infected her. She was coming, Twilight. As such, she was the only one dying today with any sense of peace.
The panicked thrashes of the ground, the collapsing of trees, the feeling that the Sun had melted and dripped upon you, that was all anyone had time to process as the Glitch screeched and oozed its last, melting and releasing everyone from its hold, just in time for the blast to steal them for itself. Toon after toon was swallowed by fire and disintegrated faster than sugar in water.
As the first blast finally petered out, it simply triggered more fires and explosions with its heat, asking the oil refineries, explosives, and volcanoes of the world to finish the job. It was a domino effect like no other, boom after boom determined to erase the Glitch’s chances of ever returning. A chain reaction heralded with screaming. A two-second vocal warning before you met the same fate as the person you heard.
Children had only an eye-blink to locate their parents.
Though she tried valiantly to herd her fellow pegasi to safety, Rainbow Dash was scooped from the air, and burned away for all to see.
The RainWings groaned and howled in agony, as their magnificent wings shriveled and their scales peeled away like tree bark.
If you were safe from the blast in Zootopia, you wouldn’t be as lucky when the mighty skyscrapers toppled over.
The PAW Patrol huddled together and clasped their paws to each other’s eyes, bracing for the end.
Ultimate students trampled each other for the safety of Hope’s Peak, only to burn away before the mighty academy’s entrance.
Confusion. Pain. Terror. And, finally…
Silence.
Not for Bun Bun, though. His ears were ringing before he even regained consciousness. His fur was all stained in a palette of sickly colors. His eyes were all stuck together with that yellow goo that comes out when a fleck of dirt gets in them. And he considered letting them stay stuck together, and never being forced to see what the world looked like now. He could already tell from his ringing ears and tingling skin that there would be nothing positive in his field of vision. Alas, his eyelids pulled themselves free anyway.
Everything was burned out, twisted out, knocked out, and blown out. The first blast lived on as a thick cloud of radiation that swallowed the Sun, just as it had the living creatures below. The ground was littered in charred and scattered bones. Buildings reduced to shapes without form, landmarks reduced to marks without significance. All on the backdrop of a nausea-colored sky.
His lips curled back as far as they could go. His fur bristled. His ears went stiff with rage. A shout bubbled up from his belly to his throat.
“ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?” he screamed out. “IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?”
When he kicked a rock, it went flying into the gaping jaw where a window used to be. The edge of that rock left a bleeding gash in his toe, which he only looked at for a second, too angry to care.
“YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO DO THIS! YOU NEVER HAD TO DO THIS!”
No one was there to receive his rant, let alone scold him for his bad behavior. He let the vision of Pibby's disappointed face enter his mind, and his ears drooped. Everyone gets mad, but temper tantrums are never okay.
“Ten…nine…eight…” his voice fell into an angry whisper. “...three…two…one. No, I’m still mad. Ten…nine…eight…”
He repeated the count until the shock of what happened truly settled in.