Accidental Publication of First Part of Chapter 11, "Battling" of _All The Way Back_. · 1:58pm Apr 27th, 2016
Last night I accidentally hit the "Publish" button on about 1000 words of Chapter 11, "Battling," of All The Way Back. I don't mind that people read this, but the chapter is actually going to be about 5000 words long when completed, and will probably contain the climax of the whole story. So, just that people know.
If anyone cares, here's the snippet. I can't claim it's perfectly edited yet.
Luna launched herself into the air, remembering at the last moment to leap to the left, away from the entrance to the crevice. As she jumped, wings spreading to grip spacetime, she projected a powerful shield forward, tilted slightly to the right. Given what the Dragon was likely about to do ... yes!
A huge blue claw, each individual talon the length of a pike, came out of the dust cloud at the end of an arm that stretched out like a living construction crane.
This shall be like unto a game of ball, thought Luna, as the claw struck and flared light from her shielding. She whuffed, as the fraction of the energy that penetrated drove the breath from her lungs. And I shall be the ball!
She was in midair, so naturally the claw -- driven by the tremendous inertia of the charging Dragon -- batted her back toward the tunnel wall. But, because she had angled the shield to her right, the collision drove her to her left, away from her friends.
Luna projected an elastic shield backward, tucked herself in, and bounded off the wall. She corkscrewed at the last moment, and a pair of jaws which could have engulfed a typical multi-roomed Pony house whole snapped shut on the space she would have otherwise occupied.
Luna put on a bust of speed, rose and lashed the Dragon with lightning. She knew that this would be entirely ineffective against the great lightning drake; the whole point of this exercise was to anny him, dra his attention away from the two other Ponies escaping into the crevice. As she did this she slowed, dropped and twisted unpredictably, the better to evade his expected counterstrike.
The Dragon whirled with surprising rapidity, squalling in indignation and swiping about reflexively with his right claw. The great talons whistled past Luna's right wing and flank, missing her by but a few hoof-lengths. The closeness of this call was no accident. Luna was intentionally flying at the very edge of danger, tracking the giant archosaur's motions and skipping out of his way at the last moment.
It was a dangerous game she played, for all her power. Luna, as the Alicorn Avatar of Gravity, disposed of more total energy than did the Lightning Drake, for all his great size. Such was the supernal skill of her Sister, Fusion, in crafting the Alicorn Pony form in the first place.
But even the skills of Celestia, even when she was on the Cosmic Level, were limited by the fundamental laws of biology and physics. Alicorns were magnificently-engineered, and they could tap the Cosmic powers of their Creators -- albiet but weakly and clumsily, compared with the awesme, star-smashing strength and aeons-honed abilities of the Cosmic Concepts.
However, Alicorns were small. Large enough, to be true, by the standards of Ponies; but no more but the bare minimum needed to generate, tap and control their Cosmic-spawned powers. They were most definitely not crafted for what the Cosmics would deem heavy fighting -- that was the job of the Cosmic Battleforms, those miles-wide living planetoids which wielded the reality-destroying Negation Bolts, the ultimate weapons of the Cosmic Concepts in this era.
The Battleforms were awesome, but they were poorly-made for action on an equine scale. The purpose of the Alicorn incarnations among the Ponies, like that of the Angel forms in the Human worldlines, was to bear messages to and interact with ordinary organic lfe forms. As Alicorns, the Concepts could become Ponies, living among and enjoying the delights of Love and Friendship with them -- while still retaining access to a small measure of their Cosmic might -- the better to protect their client races from harm.
The Alicorn form, therefore, was something of a compromise between Cosmic and Equine ends. And like all compromises, there were necessary trade-offs. Big, impressive, intelligent and powerful as she was, an Alicorn could only fit into Equine cultures at the highest social strata, which -- as the Royal Pony Sisters could attest -- was often more trouble than it was worth. An Alicorn, to a considerable extent, lived her millennia-long lifespan in a world increasingly too small for her body and spirit. Never dying naturally, and hard to kill, they often ended their lives by voluntary discorporation, owing to boredom and even madness, finally returning with relief to the larger spaces of the Cosmic Level.
Contrawise,the Alicorn Pony was by Cosmic standards a very small and weak being. An Alicorn Pony was agile, quick-thinking and precise in the application of her powers. She was very tough for her size, with both active and passive defenses against harm most importantly, unless her form was entirely destroyed, she was hard to slay permanently; even then, the destruction of the Alicorn Pony form only released the small portion of the Cosmic spirit with which she was imbued to return to her greater Cosmic Self, bearing knowledge from the mortal world.
But her force was inconsequential beyond her immediate vicinity: making her utmost effort, Luna Selena Nyx could only emit a couple dozen TNT-ton-equivalents of energy per second, barely enough to level a moderate-sized city in a whole minute or so of application. And she couldn't keep that up for more than a few minutes. This was greater than the maximum destructive output of the great Lightning Drake, but not by more than a single order of magnitude.
In terms of brute physical strength, however, the Alicorn was much weaker. Perhaps more imortantly, the Alicorn was far more fragile. Their defenses all drained thaumic energy, and though they could regenerate with fair rapidity, they were made of near-ordinary flesh and bone clothed in horsehide and hair coats -- nothing like the magnificent metal and silicate polymer composite-armored sandwich that was Dragonscale and Dragonhide, and which, as grown by a full-grown Dragon, could shed all but the most precisely-crafted and targeted artillery. Even a dazed Dragon was hard to harm; by contrast, once the thaum-thirsty defenses of the Alicorn were knocked down, the Alicorn Pony became terribly vulnerable.
An Alicorn was potentially more powerful than any Dragon ever hatched. But to win against an ancient Dragon like the one Luna was fighting, and to do so without bringing the mountain down on top of the very Ponies she meant to protect, Luna had to fight with finesse, rather than merely raw force.
Thus, Luna's strategy was essentially to draw the Dragon's attention away from her escaping friends, preoccupying the great Lightning Drake while those Ponies escaped to the caverns far beneath. She must be careful how she wielded her gravity lances, her most powerful form of energy-projection, lest she do major damage to the mountain. However, she must also be careful to avoid letting the Dragon score a serious hit on her, lest she be stunned and lose the fight.
It was a nice tactical problem.
Luna was very, very good at tactics.
Hope ye all did delght in that snippet.
For future reference, given how Fimfiction's notification system works, you're either going to need to delete and recreate this chapter or post an announcement blog when you publish it. As is, it's going to be invisible in people's libraries.
In any case, this makes for a fantastic preview. Quite the happy accident.
3900296 Hmmm, I wonder if that explains some of the other times stories have added new chapters and I didn't get notified?
I knew it. If Luna was going for a straight kill with no regard, the battle would be over much sooner. But with allies and a strong target to subdue but not kill, wo-boy it's going to an intense one. Still for his cheek mister lighting drake needs a least some scaring.
3900296
Backed up, deleted and reposted without publishing. Definitely thank you for the heads-up on that!
3901424
Yes ... if Luna did that she could probably take the Lightning Drake down dead within a minute or less (and it would only take that long because a full-sized adult Dragon is essentially a dai-kaiju, capable of taking atom-bomb levels of force as direct hits without immediately succumbing). The problem is that this wouldn't give Summer Lightning and Trixie time to get clear of the fight, and she would stand a good chance of collapsing the mountain peak onto the Dragon's lair and the lair onto the missile base beneath it, killing Summer Lightning and Trixie in the pocess. Luna would also tire herself out in the process, but that would be the most minor problem with her actions.
I'm talking about Luna unleashing levels of power of less than an order of magnitude less than Twilight and Tirek will unleash in their climactic battle at the end of Season Four, basically. Luna is roughly one-fifth or so as powerful than Twilight was at that point (in which Twilight had the power of all four Alicorns within her -- including, of course, Luna herself. Tirek had Discord plus lots and lots of non-Alicorn Ponies. At that scale, even a Dragon's defenses would be only slightly effective -- even Dragonscale and Dragonhide would be penetrated, and the only reason the Dragon wouldn't die instantly is that ancient Dragons have massively-redundant organ systems.
3902237 Hmmm so how much trouble would An ancient Dragon lord like Torch give to an Alicorn? I would think Luna would be the best Dragon slayer out of the four Alicorns just due to the fact it would be hard to armor against Gravity. I would then think Cadence of all ponies would be the second if only if she uses her love/psychic style magic to full effect.
3904006
Torch, if I have the scale right, is even bigger and stronger than this Lightning Drake -- he may be slightly shorter but is built more massively, which means he would be very hard to kill. Luna could probably defeat him, but it would be a relatively long fight, and if she made a mistake his breath weapon might be able to stun her -- if he followed up on it Torch could win. I'm guessing Torch is a Fire Drake, given his name and chosen environment.
Yes, Luna's gravity lances are armor-piercing, as shown by their effect at the Battle of the Two Royal Pony Sisters, they were slicing through fortified masonry as if it was cardboard. Celestia's fusion beams can do more total damage on a wider area, but Luna's weapon is more precise. Celestia can also affect a very wide area with her fusion fireballs. They can combine their attacks to make a gravity-pumped fusion explosion even more powerful than the fireballs, essentially a magical H-bomb.
Cadance's energy bolts are weaker than either of them, but as you said she is a powerful pyschic and hence can attack a foe's mind and willpower. She can also use this to win without killing, by calming a foe down or making him less hostile.
Twilight has fairly powerful energy bolts, around as strong as Cadance's, but lacks precision and practice in their use (which is why Starlight could fight her to a stalemate even though Starlight is a weaker mage in raw power). Twilight's advantage is Magic, which means she can often think of unusual spells to defeat an enemy.
Flurry Heart's adult abilities are a great unknown here. As a baby, she has pretty awesome powers though. I think that she generates some sort of sonic disruptor or disintegrator field -- it was going right through the superstrong crystal of the Crystal Palace, anyway. And as we saw she has an area resonant effect -- that's how she broke the Crystal Heart.