Scarlet breathed anxiously but quietly, doing her best to steady her nerves before she entered the room. At her hooves lay four heavily armored Earthborn guards in various poses. For all their armor, they had been pathetically easy to kill.

She knocked on the ornate oaken door, singing sweetly, “Oh Cotton Tail, the fairy is he~ere! She’s eager to meet you, why don’t you unlock the door so we can have a lovely chat.” She waited patiently for several seconds, then several more, before singing to the room behind the door once again, “Oh Cotton Tail, be a dear and let the fairy in or she might get grumpy.”

Almost half a minute passed before Scarlet huffed in annoyance, taking hold of the door in her magic and ripping it off its hinges. “Now, why on earth would you make the fairy ang-”

Bang! Bang! Bang!

She ducked as several shots boomed directly in front of her, somehow none of them struck her. Glancing up, she saw why. Cotton Tail -in all his rotund glory- was fidgeting with the mechanism on an unusual pistol, which she promptly liberated from him with her telekinesis. “That wasn’t nice.” She hummed coolly, “You made the fairy grumpy. First you don’t open the door for her when she asks nicely, and then you shoot at her when she comes in, what will jolly old Yuletide think? Something tells me you’re going on the naughty list, because you’ve been very, very naughty.”

Admiring the pistol, she commented offhand, “Fascinating contraption, I do thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

Cotton Tail merely sat wide eyed, trying to squeeze his bulk as far away from Scarlet as possible. He didn’t say anything, but his mouth hung slightly agape at her entry and seizure of his weapon.

Placing the pistol delicately in her saddlebags -she could examine it later- Scarlet procured a scroll, unfurling it and reading in a clear enunciated voice, “The Supreme Lardbucket, Cotton Tail- He who hath grown rich and fat off of other’s misery, He who hath commited heinous acts, He who hides behind guards and lacketh the iota of courage required to face his death with anything above cowering in an expensive chair, He who must surely lack a pair and who hath tried to pass off murder, rape, enslavement, and so on as a replacement thusly. Is this you?” Before Cotton Tail could respond -she didn’t know if he would’ve at this point- “I mean, I think that sounds like you. You bag of slime. But don’t let it be said that I don’t see the inner worth in every being. You have something of value inside you, Cotton Tail, or at least you will once I’m done.” She sidled up to him, putting her faces centimeters from his as she finished her statement.

Cotton Tail finally found his voice, stuttering out a nervous, “Wh-wh-who a-are y-you?”

Scarlet beamed, “I’m the Death Fairy of course! Name’s Scarlet Ink, I’m here to make sure your death is as painful as possible. But first, tell me please, how’s your day been, anything your great leader Applejack is up to?”

Cotton Tail had somehow managed to squeeze himself into the corner of his chair, but he seemed to relax after she’d spoken. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” He sneered, his demeanor was surprisingly calm, especially considering that only moments before he’d been cowering for his life.

Raising an eyebrow, Scarlet set fire to his pricey looking rug. “Yes. I would.” She turned around, walking away a few steps before speaking again, “Make no mistake, Cotton Tail, I will kill you before I leave this room. Your personal slave saw to it that I can’t teleport you out, and I don’t fancy a fight with an entire city. But before I kill you, I will destroy everything you hold dear, because for such a shallow sack of slime as you, everything you hold dear is in this room. Like that chair, an antique isn’t it? Well over three hundred years old and originally made for a descendant of some ancient family line, am I correct?” She waited a few seconds for a response that didn’t come, so she continued, “It cost you hard earned tax money from the citizens of New Ponyville to buy that chair, by Faust you had to raise taxes ten percent to afford all your luxuries and to equip your little personal army.”

Like lightning she grabbed the chair in her magic, dumping the obese stallion off of it as she moved the chair closer to her as she raised her swords, “Funny really, Platinum Heart was a big supporter of equal rights and treatment, but she’s a unicorn so I guess her opinion doesn’t matter to you. Honestly I don’t care, I just think it’s fitting I’m using her swords to destroy this chair.”

With a mild effort Scarlet brought the magically sharp swords down on the chair as hard as she could, chopping straight through a leg each. She repeated her actions until she’d removed the legs entirely, smirking as Cotton Tail’s face grew more and more horrified -or enraged- until he finally burst, “That chair cost three hundred thousand…! You ju-”

Scarlet interrupted him by tearing the remains of the chair in half, and cutting those in half as they fell. With a casual movement of her head her horn glowed and shot a ball of fire at the pile of wood. “What a shame.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply. When she opened them, Cotton Tail’s terrified stare had somehow become even wider. “Y-you…”

Scarlet smirked, raising a now brilliant amber foreleg and smashing it straight into the stallion’s face.

“Fun fact, dehorning unicorns tends to make other unicorns angry.” She chirped, smiling sweetly once more. “Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can just search the rest of your office for anything I want, so I’ll just have my fun and be leaving.” With a bright flash, a large cylinder appeared floating beside her, “You see Cotton Tail, you thought to have your sex slave put wards up to keep you from being teleported out, but you never gave any thought to unicorn assassins teleporting things in. Remember what I said about you having something of worth inside you when I was done? Inside this crucible is molten silver, lots of it, and more than enough to fill your insides with it.”

If she thought she’d seen fear in his eyes before, she was wrong. His eyes didn’t just show fear, they showed absolute, sheer, overwhelming terror at the death she had arranged for him. He scrabbled to his hooves, running to a far wall and slamming his hoof repeatedly into what had previously appeared to be an oddly shaped stone in the hearth.

Scarlet looked around in apprehension as she felt a slight rumble, then jumped back in surprise as three walls of what looked like solid granite crashed down around the panicking stallion.

“A Faust damned panic room?!” She screeched, slamming a hoof into one of the walls. “You…” she paused, grumbling obscenities. “Fine, be that way.”

Securing a grip on the walls, she strained with all her magical might, pushing straight down as hard as she could in an effort to make the floor beneath the granite fail instead of the rock itself. She could probably bore through it if she really had to, but this was hardly the place to be expending all her energy.

With a resounding crash the floor underneath the smallest granite wall gave in, the huge stone block plummeted through and crashed through the floors below it.

If noone had been coming beforehand, they certainly were now.

“Hi!” She warbled as she stepped over the gap towards Cotton Tail, “This is going to be fun!”

Cotton Tail, for his part, seemed content to scream in abject terror that slowly morphed to one of excruciating agony as Scarlet used a trick she’d been taught by a professor at Celestia’s School, slowly replacing his entire circulatory system with molten silver that rapidly cooled even as it burned away the flesh surrounding it.

By the end, she was left with a perfect statue of Cotton Tail’s circulatory system, cast in silver and preserving every minute detail. She could even see his final facial expression to some extent.

“I think that counts as ‘visercal’.” She smirked. “Two captured alive, last one, well… I think he’ll be pleased regardless.”

Moving into action she discarded the crucible now filled with Cotton Tail’s blood and hurried to the desk, pulling any and allpaperwork, files, and general stuff from it she could. The other cabinets and drawers got the same treatment, and a few copies of various pricelessly rare books found their way into her bags. The sound of thundering hooves began to make itself known to her and she grabbed the casting of Cotton Tail and teleported for the location she’d burned into her memory by this point. One of the meeting points for Scalpel’s ponies.

She had a reward to collect, and things to do.

And maybe even a favor to ask.