"A-Are you crazy!?" a student stammered outside Starlight's field of view. She couldn't tell if he was talking to her or Gazelle.
"Go away," Gazelle hissed, tensing for a leap.
Starlight stared him down. If she really had some connection to Valey... some ability to wield her friend's cutie mark and be forewarned of danger... now was when she needed every advantage she could get. She gritted her teeth and hoped.
The sphinx sprang straight up, vanishing into the poorly-lit ceiling of the room. Starlight spun, tracking his movements through rustles of feathers and flashes of claws. He wasn't targeting her. He was after...
"Look out!" Starlight sprang to cover the students, surrounding them with a crystalline shield as Gazelle tackled a bookshelf from the opposite side, launching its contents at the ponies in a wave of hard, pointy artifacts. One of the hoarded treasures exploded when it hit Starlight's shield, feeling like an impact straight to her horn.
One of the student mares screamed. Two hugged each other. Gazelle hovered where the bookshelf had been, its structure splintered and laying in the aisle around Starlight's shield, his maw already charging for another shot of spike breath.
"Gazelle, stop!" Starlight flung herself between him and the students, hoping she could dissuade him from making the shot. "Please! I've been trying to help you, but this isn't how you get your sister back!"
"Kid, look out!" One of the students immediately shoved her out of the way.
Starlight hit the floor with a grunt, recovering faster than she could have thanks to her training with Valey but still not fast enough. "No, don't! You're not strong enough to fight-"
Gazelle's eyes tracked her, but his mouth didn't. A cloud of smoke that bristled with spikes and dark lightning lanced forth, catching the student's hooves as he realized the error of his ways and tried to dodge. The thorny breath ripped at him, lacerating his hooves and earning a scream of pain as his momentum carried him through the ethereal blades. He landed on the ground in a heap.
"Gazelle!" Starlight roared, lighting her horn again. "Stop!"
The sphinx ignored her entirely, facing the students again. They were trying to scatter, some to help their friend and others to run or hide. But even one loss wouldn't be acceptable.
Starlight couldn't fight this as a defensive battle. She was rusty and out of practice, but she had to go on the attack.
With a pulse of energy, she targeted the ground beneath her hooves, conjuring a pillar of crystal in a move she had copied from Puddles. The crystal grew, propelling her swiftly, and she launched herself off the end into a flying leap at Gazelle's face. Starlight drew back a hoof and smashed.
It was almost ineffective, her little body not having the mass required to do serious damage. But it did hit his jaw, and that was enough to draw his attention right before he fired.
"Rrraaaugh!" Gazelle hissed, whipping around and blasting her with covering fire. "Don't make me fight-!"
He missed. Starlight carried her momentum, sliding beneath him and under the beam. What was she supposed to do now? She could see Valey in this situation, slipping on her back beneath an enemy before kicking them upwards and juggling them into the air. That was her move... but she couldn't fly! How would she follow through on the combo?
She moved too fast to finish her plan, and her legs acted on instinct, bucking upward at Gazelle's underside as she slid past a swipe from a sheathed paw. But he was an adult and she was a filly, and her legs were short enough that she couldn't even hit him with enough force to wind him.
Gazelle was fast, too. He leapt, propelling himself off her with a midair side roll, and caught Starlight with an outstretched wing, flinging her hard toward a bookcase. As she impacted, he rushed forward, grabbing her neck and pinning her there with a heavy paw. His claws were still sheathed, force of will or something greater keeping them from ripping into her throat, but she could still feel them twitching, yearning to be free.
"I. Don't. Fight. Fillies." His eyes blazed into hers. "You could help me. Why won't you help me? I've tasted your pain. You've helped me before. Why choose these ponies above what truly matters!?"
Starlight stared, eyes wide, suppressing her urge to fight back. If he was talking, she was stalling... That was time Valey or Celestia could use to arrive. "Because I'm not the only thing that matters in the world!" she cried. "And neither are you! Your problems don't matter more just because they're yours! Sometimes you just have to lose, because winning is wrong!"
"I am a sphinx," Gazelle hissed back in her face. "And sphinxes are gods. Not just Garsheeva. All of us! So of course I matter! Garsheeva had an entire society built to feed her. She cultivated her pirates to use for food, instead of wiping them out like a leader with dignity. Because we weren't made to lead. We were made to rule. Why should I put anything above my sister!?"
"Think of what she'd say if she saw what you were doing for her!" Starlight screamed.
"Think of what she won't say if she doesn't have a life to say it with!"
Time was up. Starlight knew he was about to break his oath, so she flared her horn, encasing herself and the paw holding her and the shelf she was up against all at once in a solid fusion of crystal. Gazelle's claws flexed inside the prison, scratching harder at her neck, and his other forepaw raked at the gem, trying to break himself out.
So Gazelle wanted to be free? Then...
Starlight let her crystal shatter during a backswing, giving her half a second of time to react. But instead of allowing the individual pieces to disappear as well, she poured energy back into the spell, summoning a cloud of telekinesis to catch them with. Gazelle's paw shot forward, and Starlight ducked, his claws snagging her mane... and leaving him directly in the middle of a cloud of hovering, razor shards.
With a shower of sparks and a storm of tinkling, the shards collided with each other as Starlight spun them like a blender. It was brutal, lacerating surface damage, just like Gazelle's breath had done to the student colt: not enough to end a fight, but more than enough to hurt.
Gazelle roared, dropping back and flailing his wings like fanblades, swatting the crystal shards away. Starlight had the advantage, but her horn was reaching its limit. Still, limits were meant to be broken... and she had to protect the students.
"Run!" she yelled, calling upon more of her energy. "Run while he's not blocking the door!"
"You... think that's funny...?" Gazelle rasped, staggering and panting. He was covered in bleeding scratches, and the dark aura he had gained after devouring the Eylista meteor pulsed and flickered. "It's not... immortality if... you can just keel over and die..."
His aura flared, and the blood trickling from his wounds flowed upward instead, trailing away as the scratches slowly began knitting themselves together.
Starlight gritted her teeth. However many cutie marks he had gotten from that meteor, it was enough that he could heal himself? She needed a weapon to press her offense. He would overpower her if she kept shielding, so she would have to overpower him first...
But Gazelle leapt again, his focus once more switching to the students as several of them tried to make for the door.
Starlight ran, the part of her mind that was still in denial wondering who in their right mind would design this particular room with only one exit. With how much stuff was stored inside, wasn't that a major fire hazard?
She really shouldn't have asked.
Crackkkk! Gazelle's breath hammered down on the pile of debris in the doorway as he threw more on the pile, creating sparks and crackles of black lightning. It wasn't fire breath, but Starlight didn't have to think very hard about what he wanted to do.
She needed to act, and fast. Starlight scooped a cracked vase from the ground, the first thing within reach, and activated her pillar again, flinging herself upward to meet the prince. Gazelle barely gave her a second glance... and she swung the vase with two hooves, shattering it full-force over his head with everything she had.
Gazelle choked, his breath beam briefly cut off, though the pile of debris still sparked with dark thorns, infested with his magic. At least it wasn't burning... but Starlight had no time to worry about that. Grabbing a shard of vase in her teeth, she grappled one of Gazelle's wings, struggling onto his back much like she had done against Crystal. She raised her head, the shard in her mouth as a knife, and stabbed deeply at the top of his spine.
"Hressshhhhh!" The prince twisted, deflecting her attack and losing only a clump of fur and some of his skin. Rolling on his side, he immediately pumped his wings, soaring sideways and ramming his back with Starlight on it into a high section of shelving. Starlight immediately shielded herself, boards and artifacts grinding across her crystal and making her head spin, and another object exploded under the force of collision.
Forcing her senses back into focus, Starlight poured more power back into her crystal, increasing its size and encroaching on Gazelle. His feathers were caught, and his flight interrupted, and they plummeted to the ground. Starlight tried to slam him and crush him beneath the floor and the falling crystal, but the angle wasn't right, and she had to drop it to avoid taking the impact to her horn instead.
They had landed right next to a student mare who was cowering in the darkness. By the time Starlight got her dizzy head around the situation, Gazelle had already fired.
The mare screeched as Gazelle's breath tore into her like a smoky woodchipper. But the sound of her cry spurred Starlight into action, and before even half a second passed, her horn overloaded with energy. FLASH!
Gazelle was encased in crystal. Starlight reeled; the sphinx was fighting, and he was actually going to break free. Before he could, she lifted the cage in her telekinesis, swung it in a circle and fired it at a wall as hard as she could, dropping the prison just before impact.
He hit the wall with a crunch, and she immediately grabbed him again, pinning his wings with the bare minimum amount of crystal needed to interfere with his flight before ramming him backwards into another shelf. The shelf collapsed, dumping dozens upon dozens of artifacts on him in an unknown rain, and another exploded amid the chaos. How many bombs did Doctor Lost even keep in here?
Starlight had the momentum, and she couldn't stop. Black spots appeared in her vision, but she flared her aura one more time, dragging the entire framework that held up the shelf down on top of him and driving it into his prone figure.
"Shhhrraaaaaugh!" The pile exploded with a shower of black thorns, Gazelle rising like a dark angel with both wings outspread. His cinder eyes swept the room, and they didn't settle on Starlight. He started flapping away toward another area of the room.
"N-No... Come back..." Starlight struggled to her hooves, forcing herself to stay conscious and knowing she didn't have enough left. Where was her ace in the hole? Sitting in her bags at Generosity Two, because of course she'd have enough time to reclaim the artifice and re-bond with her sword when she really needed it... but she had trusted herself to do this without them. Whether Gazelle or some other catastrophe, she knew this was going to happen again. She had to keep fighting.
In the hole Gazelle had blown to escape from her wreckage, cinders were smoldering. Maybe his breath couldn't start fires, but those exploding artifacts certainly could.
Out of sight behind the shelves that were still standing, the crackling of breath sounded, and a mare screamed. A stallion screamed too. "Meadowglade! No! Stop it, you... Aaaugh!"
Starlight was at her limit, but she gritted her teeth and roared, staggering upwards across the fields of wreckage. Her magic might have been shot, but she could still fight. She just had to make it in time...
A second passed. She wasn't going to make it.
Two seconds passed. Meadowglade's scream weakened.
Three seconds-
A line of blistering teal seared across the room, a concentrated laser that pierced straight through shelves as it swung like a knife. Gazelle cried out in pain, and an entire sundered shelf wall collapsed with a pile of dust and another explosion, clearing the way for Starlight to see him with a deep line burned angrily into his side. It pulsed with darkness, beginning to heal...
"Thought you had me down?" Starlight heard her own voice say. "Think again."
It was her perfect lookalike, standing on the rubble near the crackling entrance. Glimmer stared Gazelle down with a little grin on her lips, something hidden behind her far side.
"Stop!" Gazelle shrieked, shielding his injured side from her as it healed. "I don't fight fillies!"
"You've been doing a pretty good job of it so far," Glimmer countered, her voice hard and her horn smoking from the laser. "But you've gone far enough."
She pulled out the object she had been concealing... and Starlight instantly recognized what it was. It was the twisted, tipless remains of the moon glass sword she had used against Chrysalis. It was also a sword containing the entire sum of Garsheeva's cutie mark stockpile, plus the brands of every living sarosian in Mistvale.
"No! Be careful!" Starlight cried, struggling further up and into view. "He can-!"
Gazelle turned, blinking at the realization there were two Starlights. That blink cost him all the time Glimmer needed.
She lunged sword-first, embedding it so far into him that the edge protruded out the other side. Starlight felt the hit as if she had driven it in herself, and instantly realized why Glimmer had chosen that sword to bring.
It was her moon glass, made for her purpose, to protect the ponies she cared about from fiends that tried to take them for themselves. Was she a fiend too, taking them back? It didn't matter. She wasn't going to use them for food. Her intentions were better than his were.
Starlight wasn't gray, but she could still feel the sword humming in her hooves from all the way across the room. Take those cutie marks. Save them. Stop Gazelle.
She had been inside it herself. She knew what fate she was sending them to, but Starlight pulled regardless, and her moon glass pulled too.
Gazelle howled and flashed, and the sword flew out of him with a burst of color, faint glyphs hanging in the air as the marks it was stealing back followed it in a trail of fading light, swirling on their journey into the blade. The sphinx crumpled. The sword flew across the room, landing somewhere behind Starlight. When she looked again, Glimmer was gone...
And the sparks from one of the detonations were beginning to spread.
"Everyone, get out of here!" Starlight cried, staggering to her hooves. "Run!"
Her hooves felt heavy as she tried to move. First, she had to retrieve that sword. She couldn't leave it here with Gazelle. Not if there was any chance he could get up again and-
"Graaaarrrr!"
Gazelle plunged into her like a manticore, sending her tumbling, his talons reaching for her throat. Starlight kicked at his paw, managing to push it away... and noticing in the process that he had no wound from the sword whatsoever. He couldn't have healed that fast, could he? Not without his cutie marks!
But he was drained, and when he opened his mouth to fire, nothing but a shred of black fog dribbled forth. Starlight rolled to her hooves, sensing that he was almost as done as she was. She just needed one good hit... and he just needed to find that sword before she did. But she already knew where it was, and he hadn't been watching.
"Guh...!" Starlight positioned herself between Gazelle and the growing flames, knowing it would be lights-out if she used her magic even one more time. Whether or not he knew that too, he raked at her with his claws, and she was forced to use a foreleg to defend herself.
Deep gashes opened on Starlight's leg where the sphinx struck her. This wasn't the kind of pain that only brought dizziness and headaches. This was her body being rent, and no amount of willpower or strength of mind could stave it off for long.
"Gazelle!" Starlight cried, backing away. "Stop! Don't fight me! I was trying to help you!"
"DIIIIEEEEEEE!"
"Enough!"
There was an explosion of light as the room rippled with heat, and Princess Celestia appeared in a spiral of teleportation. Horn ablaze, she conjured a fiery whip, lashing forward like a snake and curling around Gazelle's legs and barrel with the smell of scorched fur.
Starlight panted as the room chilled and her vision flickered with exhaustion, Celestia's horn doing double-time and absorbing the spreading flames like a vacuum before they could consume anything further. She was far past her limits, and no longer needed to protect the other ponies. Abruptly, she passed out.