Chapter 88
It had taken a little bit of work, but we got it to re-activate itself, and it folded back up into its usual jewelry box shape afterwards. There were no bends or folds or anything at all in the main rod of the 'key', however, which could only mean that there was some seriously weird folding space thing going on with it. This didn't add up, however, as Twilight didn't detect any magic whatsoever coming from the box, and that sort of enchantment would apparently be very noticeable. That only meant one thing. It was folded space that wasn't using magic to create it. My parents' research...
I stared at the box still sitting on the table, a light frown across my features. It was a key, but I had no idea where the lock was. An awkward problem to have, admittedly. I felt Twilight nuzzle me in the cheek, however, standing to my right still. "Relax, Mender. Staring a hole into the side of it isn't going to solve the mystery any faster," she reminded, earning a nose twitch on my account. Maybe if I put a hole in it, I'd figure out how it worked and solve it, though! But no, I didn't want to break my parents’ jewelry box.
Everypony was still there, of course. It was starting to become evening, and the Crusaders should be back in a little bit as well, probably with a huge amount of loot from the fair. Twilight and Fluttershy had stuck surprisingly close to me, for reasons I didn't entirely grasp, but wasn't going to complain about. The yellow mare sat at the table to my left, sipping tea and chatting something about a migration or something with Rarity. Well, it was Fall, so creatures probably would be migrating soon. She was essentially Ponyville's resident 'Woodland Caretaker', I think they called the position. It seemed sort of like a forest Ranger to me, but they might not have had those.
Applejack and Rainbow were together, of course, snickering about something over by the fire. I really didn't want to know. I had no idea where Pinkie was, just assuming she was within earshot should I say her name out loud. That was probably how you summoned her, as far as those things worked. That left just my niece and her library guide.
Glancing to my right, I looked past Twilight and watched Spike show off another collection of books to Aura, who appeared enraptured by both them and the baby dragon himself. She acted like she'd never met a dragon before, which did kind of make sense, especially given her reaction to him earlier, when we first met. Still, he appeared to be enjoying the attention, showing her book collections she was interested in at Twilight's request. Rarity shot them glances occasionally, which was kind of creepy if I thought about it for too long. Of course, thinking of the mare as my niece was weird enough as it was, even after we decided to drop the tiring amount of 'Greats' before our titles.
"I know. I just really wish things could be simpler. Why can't this 'friend' just talk to me like normal?" I muttered, looking away from Aura and back towards Twilight instead.
She pondered that for a moment, then shrugged. "It's hard to say. They're probably the same pony, the one that left you that lead on the cafe also signing the letter as 'a friend'. There might be some sort of danger in them revealing themselves, not to you but from somepony else who might find the letters. Or maybe they want to gauge your reaction first?" she suggested, tilting her head to me. That last one would imply they were watching me, which honestly wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Still...
"Oooh, or they like games and are being all mysterious on purpose!" Pinkie chirped suddenly, hopping in from the kitchen while balancing another tray of tea on her head. Uh...
I watched her bounce, the tray of tea rocking back and forth and up and down precariously as she moved over to the table. My urge to dive for it as it wobbled around was almost overwhelming, and I saw Twilight smirk as she watched me. "Trust me, it's best to just not watch. I've never actually seen Pinkie spill anything before, if it makes you feel better," she pointed out, gesturing back towards the scene.
I almost had a heart attack as Pinkie flicked her head back, the tray launching itself violently into the air and actually flipping as it went over the table. Rarity moved her own cup back slightly, still talking with Fluttershy and not actually looking as the tray flipped once fully and landed flat on the table with a smack. The cups vibrated slightly, but all of the liquid in them 'landed' back inside without the slightest spill onto the tray. Witchcraft! Pinkie was somehow using magic! She had to be! No, just no!
Feeling my eye twitch, I stomped my forehooves twice, huffing repeatedly as Pinkie looked back and grinned at me. Rarity's horn glowed softly, and the pot of tea lifted off the tray and refilled her own cup, her still not breaking conversation. They... They all ignored it. Probably for their own sanity, I suddenly realized. They were the smart ones here... Ugh.
"Nope. I give up," I admitted, exhaling softly and just shaking my head. Twilight scrunched her muzzle up a moment later, then exhaled, her horn lighting up instead. I watched curiously as her saddlebag by the door glowed lightly, and two bits drifted out of it and over to Pinkie's bag instead. Eh?!
"You were right. He just accepted it without questioning," Twilight agreed, earning a giggle from Pinkie in amusement. Oh, they were betting on me. Of course.
Pinkie just smiled warmly after that, then shook her head. "I wasn't serious! But I did know that Mender would accept it. We've talked together before, and he's my super-duper best friend, just like you all are!" she chirped, somehow getting me to blush, even though it technically had nothing to do with me accepting it or not. Being her friend was entirely different from watching somepony break physics, attend its funeral, then reveal it was still alive by dancing the tango with it in front of the coffin. She broke my brain so hard that even my metaphors stopped making sense!
Twilight only smiled, however, looking happy at the results regardless. I nodded, then admitted, "Eh, with Pinkie, I stopped questioning most things. You're definitely one of a kind." I said it with a smile, and she picked up seamlessly that it was a compliment. At least, I assumed she did as she promptly started smiling herself and nodded to me. After a moment, I decided that one of these days, I should probably get to know the mare better. All of them, actually. I knew about them all fairly well, but I'd never really sat down one on one with practically half of them. Pinkie and Applejack especially, in regards to how little I'd spent with them individually. I was the most curious about Pinkie, but Applejack would probably benefit more from that sort of thing. We... We really should talk more about what happened as well, instead of just letting it hang over our heads like this. Just us, this time, with no peer pressure on either of us.
A light popping up in the corner of my vision snapped me out of my thoughts. A glance surprised me; a status readout in my right eye display showed that the decryption on my black box had just finished, and a file check was being run to confirm that there was nothing corrupted. That wouldn't take long at all, and I realized I'd get to look over it all tonight. That would give me some peace of mind, regardless. Mysteries inside me were even worse!
"The black box just finished decrypting," I informed, snapping Twilight back to attention again almost immediately.
"Oh! Excellent. Can I still be there to go over it all with you? I'd really like to know more about it, too," she requested, smiling hopefully towards me, and generally looking cute.
Chuckling, I nodded to her, and she did a tiny little hop, looking quite pleased. My heart felt like it flipped in my chest with her, and the urge to just pounce and snuggle her was almost overwhelming. "Excellent! I'll go get a new cup from the kitchen, then we can have tea while we peek!" she chirped, trotting energetically off into the kitchen instead. Her trot in particular caused quite a sway to her posterior, and I found myself staring before I even realized what I'd been looking at. Ah! No, that sort of thing could wait until later! Yikes. Seriously, body?
Turning, I instead saw a smirking Pinkie looking right at me. She wiggled her eyebrows, then winked at me before hopping back over to the table and leaving me with what felt like a small sun in each cheek. Crap. Busted. Wait, Twilight was with me like that, so did it even matter?! Wasn't it my right to stare and admire when I felt like it?! I pouted for a moment before rolling my eyes and deciding to help her with the tea, needing a new cup myself regardless. Both of ours, as well as Aura's and Rainbow's, had met with misfortune, having been sent flying in the mad dash to get away from the potential 'bomb' on the table earlier. Twilight was amazing with transmutation magic, putting them back together again from the fragments seamlessly. She still insisted they be washed, however. Never a dull moment...
A distortion flickered across my vision, and I sighed. Nope, spoke too soon. It had been far too long since my eye interfaces had screwed up. Was it her again? Looking about, I didn't notice anything unusual, and frowned. No chill going up my spine, or sensation of some horrible abomination smiling widely at me from behind, or even a shadow moving by itself in a corner. I was mildly disappointed, in truth. Another flicker hit a moment later, this time with me alert and waiting for it. My eyes locked on to an image of Purdue instead, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, Twilight sluggishly lifting up a cup in the background as things slowed down. The little filly was shouting something to me, but no sound came out. Her eyes opened midway through and I gave a start, seeing two inky pools of black darkness instead of eyes. She flickered, then vanished again a moment later. Huh. Okay, so that was the first time that had happened.
"Persistent little bitch, I'll give her that. Careful, though. She'll stab you in the back eventually, just like all females do," came from my right. Ah, and here I was hoping she'd crawled off somewhere and died.
Glancing to my right, I was surprised to find an almost pristine image of Twilight walking up and standing not facing me, but looking at the spot where Purdue was in the kitchen. There was no damage at all on her this time, even her horn restored to its original shape. It was off, however, her eyes the most vibrant blue I'd ever seen, instantly drawing my attention to them. Even weirder were the wings extending off her back, tucked lightly to her sides. What, did she have allusions of being a powerful Alicorn now?
Time was frozen again, which was normally Purdue's domain, but I anticipated something was different this time. "Long time no see. What do you want this time? Apart from reminding me that I should trust nopony, and that they'll all inevitably betray me," I inquired, turning to face her fully instead. She just smiled, however, a rather disarmingly happy one at that.
"Nah. Pretty sure you have the yellow one hooked on you by now. She'd probably side with you if you decided to take your rightful place. This time, though, I'm here in celebration, and to share my honest happiness with you," she chirped, turning to face me instead, that proud smile still on her face. Uh huh. New angle, undoubtedly same old tricks. Although she'd at least gotten me to automatically mistrust her. Still, she'd been getting more and more helpful with each visit, which if anything, was a cause for concern. I preferred my enemies in front of me.
She stared at me for a moment before smirking and snickering. "So distrustful. Here I am trying to be helpful even. Today, a celebration! A celebration of me finally being able to show you everything that you could have. Trust me, it was a bitch keeping this a secret from that traitor bitch you seem to like so much," she pointed out, gesturing to the right again, towards the doorframe. It didn't take a genius to figure out whom she was referring to.
"Being rude isn't going to earn you brownie points with me," I murmured, idly wondering what she'd been keeping secret from Purdue.
The Twilight doppelganger smirked. Fully and outright smirked. I was suddenly struck with unease as I frowned, another distorted image of the black eyed Purdue shouting from behind her. She glanced back over her shoulder with just her eyes, then giggled again and looked back to me. "She's a book. Her powers are extreme, but predictable. A mystery is just that, and maybe it was safe because of the allure of its mysterious nature, or maybe something about the black box itself hid from her powers of exposition. Regardless, with much stealth and a backdoor access point, through a whole lot of patience, I did manage to toss quite a few injectors into the thing, just waiting for you to open your present," she revealed.
My blood froze as I snapped to the output window for the copy, in time to note it frozen at eighty-nine percent, errors popping up and warnings about hostile code injection into the mainframe. Aww hell. My vision snapped back to her as I activated the firewall on the entire CPU Core. That left me with only two CPUs, with one now quarantined and the other malfunctioning. She grinned wider, and my eyes expanded in sudden realization.
Her grin was right there. I'd seen it so many times but I'd never paid any attention. Probably because I hadn't expected to see anything weird there. Now I did. She had two incisors, to each side of her smirk. They were barely enough to hang over her bottom lip, but now that I saw them, they were extremely obvious.
"You're not a female, are you?" I asked, looking back up into her eyes. She laughed at that, sounding outright mirthful. My mind searched for any male Keldarians I knew who might be responsible for this, but the only one I knew who could even vaguely pull this off would be Tym, and he honestly lacked the motivation.
"Yeah, I'm not. Sorry. Makes all that flirting awkward as hell, doesn't it? Trust me, I didn't like it either, but this image was convenient, no? Plus, keeping you interested in mares is all part of the plan," 'she' pointed out, suddenly making me want to throw up. That had been intentional, not just to get under my skin?!
My mind flicked into action and I dispelled her image, turning and focusing on blocking all incoming connections from the CPU while attempting to get my OS to initiate a lock down on it. I had no idea where the processes were for it, unfortunately, having not foreseen a need to terminate one of my own CPU cores before.
More flickering, as my targeting system engaged again and started freaking out, making a little smiled face with all the target locks. I ignored it, distortions so bad now that I couldn't see through all the pixel garbage in my eyes. "Oh come now, pay attention to me, Mender!" the fake Twilight's voice sounded out, immediately from my left. I ignored it and kept focusing on the flurry of command line instructions I executed.
"Would you, um, prefer me instead?" a Fluttershy voice asked softly. Bastard! I ignored her, too, frantically looking through the root access of the OS for command executables. It would be ugly, but if all else failed... I prepared a file list that was located on that core, and readied a batch wipe of the entire CPU Core. It would probably terminate my OS, but that might be able to be rebooted. I didn't know where 'he' was, though, which was the problem. Was the CPU just a distraction?!
More voices. Seductive whispers, heated groans, laughter. It was coming from all of them. Everypony I knew, including the Crusaders, and I felt sick. He knew them all, too, and had been watching. Damn it! I terminated all of the sound processes I could find, holding my hooves to my head. Damn him! More laughter, as he flickered in right in front of me, wearing Fluttershy's image. I glared, and shattered it away from me, the real Fluttershy not deserving the mockery. He just laughed more, in Pinkie's voice this time as he reappeared to my right. I spun, whipping my hoof out and shattering that image, too. A glance showed me that my root scan of all processes was at seventy percent. Almost! The hooks from the malicious code had obviously hijacked my vision and hearing input already.
More laughter, this time in Applejack's voice to my right. No, he didn't deserve to mimic her after what he did. My tail flicked out and shattered that image, too, as two more appeared to my left, of Apple Bloom and Scootaloo gently singing. It was distorted, and I could only make out something about roses and rings. I ignored them.
A glance around showed distortions around the library. Everypony was turned to me, laughing and frozen in time as their faces distorted and warped. Taking a moment to appreciate his assuming lack of sanity, I growled as I heard him giggle again, switching back to Twilight and behind me again. All I needed was the shutdown command for the CPU Core, and this would be over!
"Mmm, I suggest taking the orange one first. She'll get dependent on you fast, and has a nice sturdy body to make lots of foals," the 'Twilight' whispered from behind me. I shivered, and then snarled as I whipped around, shattering that illusion, too.
My eyes widened. No, I hadn't told them to... A display popped up on my right eye, showing 'Aggression Sensitivity' set to several thousand percent. No... My eyes looked up again, my tentacle having extended as I spun all of its own accord, forming one of those long scythe blades out of frosted metal, fresh out of subspace.
The image was so realistic, Twilight's eyes widening in an instant. Time was frozen, almost for the image too it looked like, a sharp splatter of blood going across her back from the half a meter of metal sticking out the back of her neck. Strands of her mane fluttered to the side, severed abruptly by my blade. My breath caught, her lavender eyes locking with mine, pain and confusion abruptly dancing through them as her body shivered lightly. Red flowed freely down her chest, staining her fur as her right leg gave a spasm.
Everything grew cold as she fell, her own weight enough to pull the blade out of her neck as she just dropped to the floor, eyes looking panicked as her legs continued twitching, a sharp gurgling noise coming from her mouth as blood flowed out of there as well. There was a sharp gasp behind me, and I realized everything was moving again, suddenly. Oh. No. No, no, no!
"Ooooh, oops! Well, what's one less mare for our harem?" the voice whispered in my ear. I didn't even hear it, taking a shaky step towards Twilight.
My body like ice, I ducked forward and held my hoof to the hole in her neck, eyes wide as she didn't focus on me anymore, mouth moving but no sound coming out except for the choking splatters and more blood. No, no, no, this wasn't... this couldn't...
The numb, frozen chill consumed me, her body giving one more spasm before going limp. Her eyes stopped shivering finally, and she just lay there, a pool of her own blood expanding under her head. Hoofsteps to my left. Applejack stared in shock down at Twilight, eyes wide with horror as she took in the sight. No. No, this wasn't... I felt like throwing up, but I couldn't feel my chest, or anything for that matter. I just stared down at her unmoving eyes, unable to look away. My hoof was stained with her blood, and I lifted it, looking at the carved in rune as it pooled in the cracks. I had...
No. This wasn't happening. I shook her shoulder, trying to dispel whatever trick this was. She didn't respond, eyes still staring forward as a bit more blood oozed out of the wound in the middle of her neck. The smell of blood was everywhere now, and I choked back a spasm through me, my vision getting blurry. I shook her harder, trying to will her awake. There was nothing. It wasn't...
"Mender, w-what... What did you do?!" Rainbow asked, her voice sounding echoing and distant, flying in fast to my left. What did I do? What... No, this couldn’t be… I didn’t…
"Mender!" she shouted again, and I shivered. I'd heard her the first time. But...
"Mender!" It came again, this time right against my ear and in Purdue's voice. Crying out, I clutched at both sides of my head and screamed, the throb going through me as I felt like ice water filled the core of my body. My eyes opened as I clutched at my sides, the distorted image of Purdue fading from in front of me, in the doorway again. Twilight wasn't there. What? Twilight wasn't...
Rainbow shook my harder, and I shivered, snapping my attention to the left at her, looking more than a little concerned. Huh? "Mender, are you okay?!" she asked, worry in her voice. Was I okay?! No, she was supposed to be worried about...
My eyes shifted back to the right. There was no smell, and no blood. There was no Twilight. They widened as I looked up instead, seeing a very much moving and concerned looking Twilight coming in from the kitchen, two cups of tea dropped on the floor behind her as she ran up. Oh. Oh thank you. Thank you. No, she was... okay... She wasn't... She wasn’t not moving!
"Mender, what's going on?!" she asked, rushing up. They were all approaching, and I realized I really had screamed. But that meant... It was fake. It was a distraction. He had wanted me distracted, and knew the perfect way to do it.
My eyes looked back to the search progress. It showed completed, and highlighted the shutdown executable I'd been looking for. The user interface showed non-responsive, however. The process had crashed, and dumped the results. Damn it! Other windows had popped up of their own accord, showing a decrypting process running on my own encryption of the links to the Element Bearers. No. No!
"Twilight, I'm being hijacked. Get yourself and the Elements of Harmony as far away from me as possible. All the way to Canterlot if you can teleport that far. Hurry!" I hissed out, realizing I couldn't move anything below my neck. The cold was him shutting off my nervous system!
Her eyes widened, surprise meeting confusion as she asked, "Hijacked?! By what?!" No, no time for questions! I was still reeling from the image of her lying on the floor, but there was no time to even look up at her.
"There's no time! Run! Teleport as far as you can with the Elements of Harmony!" I hissed, feeling the paralysis creeping up my neck. I quarantined off the remaining two cores, hoping he hadn't gotten to them yet, and started using them to slow down his progress on the encryption, spamming his core with garbage data and slowing the connection speed down. He was attacking each link separately, and I tried to quickly bring up the individual statuses as more fake pop-ups displayed in my eyes.
"I c-can't!" Fluttershy whined, standing slightly behind me and to the right.
Damn it. "Fluttershy, leave me. You have to," I pleaded, trying to force my eyes as far to the right as I could, only managing to make out a yellow shape in my peripheral vision. Twilight gasped, however, and my blood chilled yet again.
"I can't... I can't move!" she repeated instead. A sunken feeling entered my chest as I forced all the windows closed except for the status panel. Fluttershy and Rarity were already reading red. Damn it!
Thinking quickly, I instead ordered, "Pinkie, Applejack! Grab Rarity and Fluttershy and carry them." Could Twilight teleport them all, and far enough away to get out of my control range?! I didn't know if I could control them at the limit of my broadcast range, but I was banking on not being able to.
I gave a start instead as my left eye flicked on, projector activating. The strange Alicorn Twilight appeared in my projector, smirking in amusement. I tried to turn him off, but my eye wasn't listening. A horrific realization later showed me that my tentacles were extending, too.
"Oh dear. It looks like I can remotely turn off her heart right now if I wanted to. Did you know he had such power over you all? I wouldn't be going anywhere, if you want your two friends to live for any great lengths of time," he pointed out, sitting down in the image. Fluttershy let out a soft whimper, and I heard Rarity give out a weak, choked groan somewhere behind me. Damn it. Damn it! I switched one CPU off interception, realizing it was already too late, and instead sent the other looking for the prior process list of the third CPU. Affecting my entire OS was impossible now, but I could halt his ability to give commands if I hijacked the only working CPU that he had. Them being completely independent data storage and processing was rather inconvenient for me, now.
Twilight snarled, eyes narrowing at the image before demanding, "What do you want from us? Don't you just want to kill us anyway?" That... That was a good point.
The fake Twilight laughed, spreading her wings out a little before shaking her head. "Of course not! That would be a horrible waste of genetic material. But I will be forced to kill whomever tries to run. But still, is being a slave to this particular stallion really that bad?" he inquired. Uh... What? My mind blanked, any and all motivation I'd given the fake Nirru prior flying out the window. I'd thought that whole flirting thing, and all the crap she was feeding Applejack, was all just to mess with us.
"S-Slave?!" Rainbow asked, flattening her ears back before gasping and squeaking. Her body went rigid, and I watched her link go red. Tch! It was too late. I switched both processors to directly attacking his processor instead. He saw me do it, but just laughed and focused on taking over the Elements instead. Damn him. Wait, no...
A memory flashed through me a moment later. It wasn't mine. It was my DNA donor's, and it surprised me. He had been special operations, that much I knew. He was the captain of his own special operations squad, for all the good it had done him. His training, however, was put to excellent use. These CPU cores were a new thing. Combining storage capacity with individual processors hadn't been done before. We'd only been using them for maybe a year prior to the bombardment. They were still experimental, though, and not in mass production! These were the default, prototype models, I guessed. His memories of them came back to me, and in my surprise, I realized he'd studied them for some reason. Weird. Regardless...
I now knew there was a factory override still built in, due to their 'beta' status. A diagnostics console could be very, very useful about now. Focusing on that memory, I typed in the command prompt and ran the main CPU executable with a few additional runtime flags instead. Sure enough, instead of trying to reboot the CPU, which I knew would fail, it opened up the command window again, but in diagnostic mode. Ha!
"Of course. It's all part of the plan. We were hunted by an obviously superior enemy, and without some sort of coherent plan, the only result would have been our extinction," he deduced. It sounded beyond disturbing hearing it in Twilight's voice.
The real Twilight hissed, her link going red, but her horn starting to glow fiercely, energy gathering around her throat instead. "You're the one responsible for the bioweapon going off! You intentionally wanted to kill all of those Keldarians, because you wanted their DNA!" she deduced, her voice echoing out into the air without her mouth moving. Her magic still worked?! It didn't matter, though, so long as he held the others hostage. Although... If she killed me, my control over them all would end. I swallowed uneasily, realizing I didn't exactly want to die. Last resort, then.
The fake Twilight giggled and nodded at that, and I inwardly groaned. Well, I had a target, as soon as I figured out who exactly he was. A stirring came from inside of me, and I felt my own anger starting to build. In front of me was more a monster than I ever estimated, and I couldn't do anything to him. Yet.
"Of course. We couldn't win. We were going to die regardless. But what if I could make those deaths mean something? What if instead of dying, I could give every one of those Keldarians a second chance? Isn't that for the greater good? That's why I so heavily modified this subject's reproductive systems, both to make pregnancy almost assured, and to make sure that he could switch out the DNA he was using for such. We might not be Keldarians anymore, but we'll have escaped to a place those monsters can never follow. You six will be the first mares to start producing the new Keldarians, of course," he explained. My mind blanked again. He was totally insane! They couldn't escape death, so he let them 'escape' by murdering them all himself, instead?! All to 'protect' his race?!
"Yer completely insane. Ah kinda knew that already, though," Applejack admitted, walking up next to me instead and glaring at the image. Her right foreleg was twitching, but she shook it off and ignored it instead. Her anger could be felt through her link without even needing my displays, and I could almost taste how badly she wanted to buck his face off.
The corners of the fake Twilight’s mouth turned up slowly at that. “Fighting off the paralysis order. I’m impressed!” he chirped, then followed it up with, “But out of every ‘pony’ here that has dark, hidden little fantasies and secrets, I don’t think you have room to talk about my goals.” Her ears flattened back as she glared at him, but I just wanted to tear him in half even more. He didn’t deserve to know her secrets in the first place.
Shaking my head slowly, as best I could, I instead asked, “What, you expect me to just agree with you and go along with turning them all into slaves or something? Seriously? You’ve been inside of my head for weeks now. You should know that’s about the exact opposite of what I’d do.” I felt them all still around me, all six links red now. He knew all I had to do was keep him talking, so he was on a time limit. What would he do, then? If his plan really was what he just said it was, he had to find a way to remove my ability to use my two CPU cores, which to my understanding, wasn’t possible now that the firewall was up. He couldn’t honestly be expecting me to actually agree to his plan. Just in case, I started a smaller scan on the two cores I controlled, just to make sure there weren’t any backdoor links to them. Uh, like the one I’d just used to secure and take them over.
His hoof lifted, and he brushed the digital mane away from his eyes before smiling again, that grin looking downright creepy on Twilight’s expression, especially because he forgot to change the teeth. Ponies with canines were disturbing. Actually, that meant that what I was seeing was a residual self-image. That’s the only way the tooth incident would have happened. Like the real Nirru before him, she didn’t ‘think’ to consciously change her eye color, and her illusion ‘defaulted’ to what her real colors were. But that meant that he had a consciousness behind him that could make that mistake. A psyche that was actually controlling his efforts. An AI couldn’t do that. But how did he transfer his actual psyche into some sort of digital form? Or did he…?
“Oh, come now. Surely the more… Mmm, base parts of you sees the benefit,” he pointed out, gesturing instead to Rainbow on the other side of me. Huh? I couldn’t exactly turn to look at her, and he blinked for a moment before coughing to himself. “Oh, right. Sorry,” he oddly apologized, then clapped his hooves together once. Rainbow let out a low whine, then stood up shakily, not of her own accord it would seem. She stumbled forwards a few steps, then almost fell on her face as her body started fighting against the movements again.
He only chuckled at that, however, and let her stumble, falling onto her chest with a dull thud and wince, her back legs going rigid. She looked rather silly until he smirked yet again and gestured to her. My head rotated by itself to look at her just as her tail flicked up and out of the way. AH!
Rainbow let out a sharp squeak, and thankfully I didn’t see much for very long before slamming my eyes shut, him not yet having control over that much. What the hell?! I heard him start to laugh instead, which probably seemed weird to everypony else as he disappeared completely, his projector getting covered suddenly. “Such the gentlecolt! See what I mean, though? Surely you can feel the stirring. The primal urges. The want to claim such a lovely mare as your own, like you have with two already? You could have all the mares you ever want. Nothing in this entire universe could stand up to you at your full potential! You could have it all, yet you deny it. For what? The passing favor of two mares only? If they feel like it?” he asked, obviously not getting it at all. Twilight snorted at that, however, slightly further to my right.
“You’d never understand. He’s not like you, and doesn’t need all of that! He’s a good pony,” she defended. Uh oh. I really did feel ‘stirrings’, and realized that he was triggering other things in me too. My body started attempting to shakily stand up, and I winced as I fought against my own muscles, the tentacles expanding from my back. No, no, I wasn’t going to let him do this to me.
The fake Twilight just chuckled darkly, however, as I stood up, wobbling then almost falling sideways from my own inner struggle, one of my tentacles managing to brace against the ground on that side. “We’ll see how much he likes this, first. I’m sure she will, too, of course,” he assured. I felt myself shakily step forward, reaching out and placing a hoof on something soft and furred. No! This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening!
“Yer ah monster! Let her go!” Applejack snarled, and I felt her tense to my left, fighting to leap forward and tackle Rainbow away from me. She wasn’t moving, so I could only assume she had lost her battle against the nanites already.
Growling, I pushed against the movements as much as I could, freezing in place for a moment as he chuckled again, voice deeper this time. Rainbow whimpered, and I felt my tentacles extending without my consent in a downwards direction. I felt them wrap around her waist, pulling her forward instead as I refused to move. Damn it! One of the lower tentacles slid forward as well, and I froze, mind going blank as it reached towards her with darker intents.
Then it stopped. Huh? I heard them first. Very light hoofsteps and the creaking of the front door knob starting to turn. But nopony should have been able to mo… Aura and Spike! “Hello! I forgot you two were here still!” the fake Twilight suddenly exclaimed, suddenly in a very unfamiliar male voice. Three of my tentacles whipped out sideways, and flicked over to the door in an instant! No!
I couldn’t pull them back, and instead I heard Aura scream as they caught and wrapped around her waist, then smacked into Spike an instant later, knocking him flying into the bookshelf to the right. I heard my niece start to cry as she got dragged back over to where I was by the tentacle, the second one staying to push the door shut again.
“Ah, never mind this bitch. Let’s have you mate with this mare instead!” he chirped. I froze, processing that slowly. No. He wasn’t going to do this. Even if he lost later and all I had to do was wait it out, he wasn’t going to get away with hurting them like this. He was using me, and using my… He was using the fact that I was a monster to make me even more of a monster.
It didn’t surprise me when I felt that raw anger and hatred inside of me. I was never going to be an ideal pony. I gave up. I hated him. Admitting it felt liberating, and I felt my eyes snap open again instead, my vision running red as I gritted my teeth. He almost looked surprised that I had opened my eyes again, his projection snapping back into place and rapidly looking over at me, smirk shifting to a questioning glance instead.
I didn’t care anymore. My muscles screamed, and I almost laughed as I literally forced myself backwards. I heard a snap from my left shoulder, but I kicked off the floor and flung myself away from both Aura and Rainbow in one fluid motion. The monster’s eyes widened, but I was already a bigger monster. It boiled up from inside me, and everything in my mind drenched with the color of blood as I snarled and lashed out directly at the psyche in front of my vision. He was an actual thinking entity, and something I could attack directly!
His scream of surprise was satisfying, and I just let them come. I realized it now. That other me was me, but it wasn’t at the same time. I felt them, and knew that deep down, it was also Malice. Focusing up every ounce of willpower I had, I screamed in rage and tore into him, gashing and ripping at every ounce of mental substance I could find with claws made of burning hatred in my mind. He switched to blind, instinctive panic in an instant, and I followed him. We kept attacking until he barely managed to get a mental barrier up, falling back several more steps. Clarity burned through my hatred, and I snapped back to attention as I again used that backdoor access I had found and pulled the control links for the various command prompts right out of his psyche. There was no time.
I felt his eyes widen as he lost control, but it was already too late. I ran a lockdown command through all six links and on myself. I felt my entire throbbing body go rigid, the tentacles freezing in their blind flailing as I crashed into the table and broke it in half. The Element Bearers froze up, too, and I felt him struggle to try to get control back. No. I ran a new re-encryption on all seven command prompts, locking them down completely, and then turned to face him in my mind again. The formless image of him started to recover, but I was already moving.
No, I could finally do something, and I was going to take him with me. Leaping at him yet again, I focused, then pulled us both deep into my own mind, shutting off my consciousness as we fell into the dark.
* * * * *
The landing was abrupt. He hit in his back, glowing armor making a dull crashing noise as the air left him, the rocks breaking as we hit. I landed on him with all my weight, cracking his now humanoid chest plate before rolling and sliding along the dirt and rock under us. Rock? The sky was inverted while I was upside down, but was golden orange in color, filled with turmoil and clouds, flares of fire escaping between them. The ground under me as I came up to my hooves was broken and barren, cracks running through the stone and dirt that looked bleached with age. The sky ended where the ground began some two hundred meters from in front of me, and I guessed we were on some sort of rocky plateau. Wait, energy armor...? Abjuration?!
Fights between two Abjuration users were typically over in the first three seconds, given our usual attack methods of extending planes of force through our targets at brutal speed. I came out of my roll into a spin, whipping an energy blade up from my left forehoof and parrying the stabbing spear attack up and away from my chest. This wasn't going to be one of those fights...
He stood now, having rolled backwards and to his feet just as fast. He'd not fully caught his breath yet, panting bringing attention to the glowing silver, broken-to-hell chest shield as it fell away, then snapped back to reformed an instant later. He also pulled up a few arm and leg plates, and a groin shield, given he was naked apart from those. He was a male Keldarian, looking just shy of a hundred centimeters and covered in moderate amounts of blue fur. I probably outweighed him by a factor of two, but the speed of his attack put me on guard. He was no amateur. The spear yanked back into his left hand as his right whipped down instead a second later, a follow up attack incoming.
My tentacle had already shot out when I rolled. It tugging against my left shoulder, I yanked myself sideways as the ground where I was shattered upwards from the force of the massive hammer impact, made entirely from barrier energy, and actually launched me into the air. Acting fast, my right shoulder's tentacle whipped around the hammer an instant later as he pulled it back, too. Using the momentum, I released my still pulling left tentacle, firing myself in an arc like a slingshot, using his own weapon.
His eyes widened as he saw the tentacle on his hammer, and he barely twisted to the side as my blade smashed into the hilt of his hammer grip instead, the edge sliding through the pummel like butter and cutting an inch into his shoulder plate before he rolled away. His right arm flicked back as he came out of the roll, and I kicked the pole of the hammer back up and into his cut, simultaneously rolling back out and under the slash as sparks of magic fell around me. He cried out, his other hand holding his head from the feedback of cutting through his own handle, where he'd been controlling the hammer from.
Rolling twice more, but leaving my tentacle hooked into the ground, I shot myself at him yet again. This time he realized what I could do and dove sideways, a few strands of his ear fur drifting up and catching fire as he barely managed to bring a leg up into my chest. I went over backwards as he kicked me into the air with his plating re-enforced leg, then spun around with the force, bringing his left hand up with another blade, trying to cut me in half.
Doing something I forgot I could do, my left back hoof generated a blade as well, smashing into his in midair as I kicked off it, whipping a tentacle right at his face, gleam of the metal blade reflecting his widening eyes. He dodged it a fraction of a second later, then rolled as I embedded the energy blade into the ground right where he'd been, throwing myself downwards again using the tentacle. I instinctively whipped my left forehoof blade up, driving the tip of it into the very point of his newly formed spear that had been heading right at my face. My other hoof swung around at the same time, but he snapped the shaft of the spear in half, swinging his other hand up to parry the second blade, gritting his teeth as my Earth Pony strength brought it within an inch of his neck. He wasn't an amateur at all!
"Tch, it would seem we're evenly matched," he admitted, before tacking on, "Which I expected, from a creature who's using my memories." My eyes widened, and in my instant of hesitation, he spun away from my left blade attack, using my stabbing momentum to pull me off balance and lash backwards with the other end of the broken off piece of spear. The point whipped into my face, and I violently bit down at the same time.
Everything halted for a moment, him raising an eyebrow to me, and me grinning, now sharp teeth glowing with barrier energy as I held the point of his spear between them. It was him. It was him all along. He killed all of those Keldarians in some messed up Knight's Templar attempt at 'saving' them. Was he that broken by what he went through and the imagined slights he'd gotten from Keela? Did I even care? That anger boiled in me, and my jaw tensed, cracks going down the tip of his barrier spear as I slowly started to crush it.
"I told you, you're me. It's ironic that it's come down to this," he muttered, smirking again as he pulled his spear away and backed up.
"You're not me. You're not even you anymore. You used to actually want to save them all," I returned, landing on all four hooves again now that the spear wasn't propping me up. To hell with it. He didn't deserve my pity, just because I suddenly knew who he was. I didn't know how he'd gotten here, but it was really his mind, and I was going to kill him, even if it killed me to do it. If he died here, in our minds, he died in real life, too. So did I, but like hell I was going to go down without hauling him to hell with me.
"I am saving them!" he screamed out, snarling before spinning and lashing out with his spear in a long sweep. The tentacle I'd snuck along the ground while he was talking went taut, and I fell backwards, passing under his sweep before yanking myself into a slide and twisting. My right flank raised as I crashed into his legs, directly into his knees as hard as I could.
He cried out in agony as I felt them snap against my weight, me taking him off his feet in an instant with my sheer mass. I grappled another tentacle out to my right side as I came out of the slide into a roll. He hit and rolled to the side as I swung around on my tentacle, building up more momentum as I slingshot around.
The air left me as we brutally collided, and I winced as I felt the blade bite into my left cheek. It only stung, however, just the base of his blade remaining as the majority of it spun away to my right, cut clean through. My blade fractured instead, shattering along my hoof in long, bleeding smears as both my back knees went into his gut, right between the two plates of armor. My weight carried us backwards, and everything jarred as we smashed into the broken, raised section of rock, made by his earlier hammer attack. My teeth gritted as the blade formed out of my mouth and cut into his left cheek, mirroring my own wound as he barely moved his head out of the way in time. My own blade dug into the solid rock behind him and stuck, of course. Tch.
He let go of the blade in his right hand, whipping it up into a palm strike towards my head instead. My bleeding left hoof knocked his hand up and out of the way as I kneed him again in the gut. He winced, then his face suddenly got a lot closer to me! The smash in my teeth was jarring, but I still had the barrier up over them, and he came back with a bleeding forehead, before his other, good leg kicked my hip downwards. Instinctively, I brought my left foreleg down as I fell, belting him in the side of the head and hauling him down next to me.
I knew what he was trying, and blocked his right hand's bashing motion with my left foreleg, which was still hooked over his shoulder. I felt it twist, and winced as he tried to wrap around it to grab at my face, but it was too late as I braced my thigh against the ground. His eyes widened. He hadn't noticed that as we fell, my left shoulder's tentacle had latched onto the rock we'd been up against. He tried to bring his left hand up, manifesting a blade to slice my tentacle, but I'd already torn myself backwards, spinning with the force of my own pull, and whipped him sideways with all my strength...
Sadly, the force of my own throw unbalanced me drastically. Landing, I winced and rolled as I hit hard, moving backwards until I flipped to my hooves again, magic churning from overuse alongside the throb in my skull. He hit almost ten meters from me, landing hard on his side but rolling out of it and stumbling up to his feet just the same. I spat out blood from his head butt, and he wiped some away from his left eye as he glared at me. The energy had tightened up around his shattered left knee, forming a makeshift brace as he stood fully. I felt warmth coming down my cheek as I steadied myself, my left leg still hurting from that throw. We were fairly evenly matched, but from the looks of it, I was coming out slightly ahead. Maybe I'd win this and be able to return victorious?
Spitting blood out of his mouth, he chuckled as he formed another spear of force in his left hand, his right rapidly bruising from my throw. "Looks like your pure, monstrous ferocity gives you an edge on me, Mender. I'll definitely give you that mu-" he started to admit. My eyes widened, and so did his, as the massive ball of radiating purple and red energy crashed into his back. He was taken completely off his feet, the ball wobbling and pulsating for a moment against his armor before exploding, chunks of rock shattering out around the blast as he was flung like a rag doll through the air. Holy hell!
Bits of his armor and shattered spear drifted around him, mixing with prismatic energy that had come out of nowhere. My eyes couldn't track it as the cyan mare flickered in out of nowhere, look of absolute rage on her face. The pink blur she was carrying was casually tossed into his falling form like one might deliver a bomb at point blank range. Of course, that description wasn't that far from the truth as the mare flipped once, pile driving him into the ground hard enough to break the stone before giggling and hooking his armor with her hooves, kicking off him in a roll and knocking him into the air again. What was left of his armor shattered completely as an orange blur shot past her, spinning and driving two back hooves into his chest, 'serving' him like a high speed volleyball off to my left. Rainbow appeared behind him again less than a heartbeat later, her wings blazing with rainbow light as she drove all four hooves into his back. I watched the spray of blood come out his mouth almost in slow motion as she whipped him upwards and right towards me, completing their 'pass' between each other. They'd followed me here...
I didn't have time to consider that, however. My body felt cold as I took two bounds, then whipped the elongated blade downwards from my mouth. He managed to rotate in the air, but not enough. He hit hard behind me, a sharp and wet crack sounding out, screaming and thrashing as his armor failed him across the remainder of his body and his right leg went limp at the knee. His left arm, shoulder down, landed at my hooves, and I smirked, that hatred twisting inside me at the fitting bit of ironic revenge. Malice was still with me, even here.
He writhed, screaming again before clutching the stump of his left shoulder, no real shoulder there at all anymore. I looked up and saw all of them there, Twilight looking utterly pissed with her horn radiating with light. Fluttershy looked horrified over at him for a brief moment before it melted into a look of worry instead, her snapping to me. She started in my direction, but Rarity held her left leg up and stopped her, shaking her head. Right. First things first...
Turning, I extended my mouth blade again as I walked in his direction. Flickering barriers held his leg together as he stumbled to his feet, another tight barrier going over what was left of his shoulder to hold those important bodily fluids in. I embraced the cold hatred, and stopped caring how he'd managed to get here. I didn't care what his plan was or if he really thought he was 'helping' those Keldarians. I didn't even care about what Keela would think of me after this point. He'd hurt my friends. He tried to hurt me. He tried to make me hurt my friends. He threatened to kill Fluttershy. He did kill billions of Keldarians, and probably Doctor Kyliona. I was going to end him, and I doubted I'd lose a wink of sleep over it. Applejack and Pinkie caught up fast as I walked towards him, flanking on the left and right, respectively. My 'other' link with Rainbow warned me ahead of time before she even landed, off to Applejack's left, looking equally pissed. I wasn't sure if any of them had the intent to actually kill him, but that wasn't going to save him from me, unfortunately.
"Heh. You're all monsters. I try to do the right thing... I was the only one trying to save our race. She wanted to sacrifice us all, just so a furry rat could live. And I'm the crazy one?!" he asked, his right arm forming a shorter, flickering blade as he struggled to keep his footing. It was an act, of course, and I prepared my full defenses as I took another bound forward and full out sprinted at him.
He smirked, recognition of me calling his bluff flashing through his eyes. My own widened as he whipped his arm upwards, and I prepared to roll to the side. The blade wasn't in his hand when it completed its arc, however. I spun, turning to the left as the blade rotated in the air past me, shooting off in slow motion. It had made it three meters before I completed my spin, Applejack's eyes widening as she swerved to avoid me. It was six meters by the time I came to a complete stop, tentacles anchoring me into the ground. Fluttershy's eyes widened as she looked back up, the point of the blade a meter from her head.
Images of head whipping back, blood spraying upwards with the energy blade sticking out of it echoed all around me. It felt like my soul screamed out. A hundred tentacles descended, tearing through chests and flinging broken bodies through walls. A Keldarian's head was torn free as another tentacle ate his body into a smear of gore. Some attacked, their spells and weapons shattering or reflecting away from the horrible darkness before it consumed them. A thousand souls screamed out in pain, all at once, mirroring my own as the blade closed a few centimeters with her face, me in mid-sprint. Everything fell apart, the world seemingly collapsing around me as my vision focused only on the blade and making my legs move faster.
My left foreleg extended, a massive claw of pure darkness grabbing the shard of energy out of the air, stopping it a centimeter from her left eye. Both eyes widened and she looked at the blade, then up at me, look of shock evident in her expression. Rarity gasped next to her, also looking up at me. My vision was hazy and red tinted as I slowly turned and looked back at the monster who'd thrown the blade. It was so hard to think, a thousand voices a second screaming out in my mind, baying for his blood. He was staring at me, eyes wide, just like my three friends were a half a dozen yards in front of him. I didn't know how I'd gotten over here to catch the blade, but I didn't care as I crushed it in my 'claw'. Part of me knew something was wrong, but the rest of me was only focused on making him suffer. I knew what this was...
Malice. They were pissed off, and through all of this, they'd thought I was the one who'd killed them. They saw through my eyes, however, and he'd completely admitted to being the one who turned me into a weapon against my will. I felt their hatred, and for the first time, it wasn't directed at me. They felt my pain in that instant Fluttershy was attacked, and for this moment, they agreed with me completely. He needed to die. We'd work together towards that goal.
A hundred eyes slowly opened on my left foreleg, the inky, pitch black darkness surrounding it completely. They all locked on to him, the form starting to leak away from my leg as a few mouths with bared fangs, and arms with claws extended, 'melted' out of my form. I felt powerful, and much bigger than I was before. I felt strong enough to shatter the stone with a flick of my claw. Most of all, I really wanted to kill him. Maybe even take a few bites out of his chest as he lay there screaming in his own blood. Slow bites. Had to savor the taste of his failure, of course. So did he, I decided.
He leapt forward, only remaining arm extending to grab at Rainbow's back as she looked at me in shock. A hostage? This only worsened the anger in my mind. I felt myself flow like blood, and in between my blinks, I was next to him, his body sprawled out in midair. His eyes widened, sensing my presence just slightly before I whipped my right foreleg to the side, bitch slapping his body away from Rainbow. He hit against the same rock as before, almost thirty meters to my right now, his newly reformed full body barrier shattering on impact as he silently screamed, blood coming from his mouth. Momentarily surprised, I realized his hand was missing on his only remaining arm now, then looked downwards in time to see a fanged mouth biting into it and swallowing the mangled limb. It burned away into black flames as it absorbed into my body, and I added its mass to my own.
Five or six more of my eyes opened, and I smiled at him as I turned, suddenly finding myself over in front of him while he tried to stand up. "Well? You're obviously superior to me, the monstrous furred rat. Heal yourself. Stand up, recoup, and fight. Oh wait, you never learned any healing magic," I reminded, not really surprised when my voice came out in about sixteen different tones. The same reason I was 'standing' on my back legs for now.
"G-Go to hell, you monster..." he coughed out, rolling over to look up at me. I smirked and lifted my huge, left arm up, the eyes on it all narrowing as additional clawed hands, and one clawed foot, extended out around my main claw. Foot? Eh, whatever. I felt nothing at all as I brought it down into his chest.
It smashed through and into rock that was under him. I raised an eyebrow, noting no gore at all as he suddenly wasn't there anymore. That was interesting. Teleportation? A new technique? No, he would have used teleportation to save his arm had he had that all along. Standing up fully again, I crushed the bits of rock my claw took with it. Looking about, I saw him at the far end of the stone plateau we were on, now floating in the air and locked in what looked like some sort of crystal with raw lines of data running through it. Aww, hell.
A spike of anger had me in front of the crystal, my eyes staying open this time to note the distorted warping that hauled me over to him. My large claw sunk into the surface of it and passed completely through the other side in an instant, unfortunately. He smirked as it kept going, me hitting nothing but air as I stood fully upright again. Illusion? No, it felt like he was there, by his psyche, but he wasn't there at the same time. Clearing my head trying to think, I winced and felt the darkness fall away from me, landing on all four hooves again. They were powerful, but how any of them could think at all with that thick, heady rage they felt constantly was beyond me. But I knew their pain. I died once, too.
Twilight flashed in next to me in a teleport an instant later, with the others running up almost as fast. Rainbow, of course, beat them all there, followed very shortly by Pinkie and Applejack. The captain, whose name I'd never learned, smirked down at me, looking like he'd been put through a blender. "You're right. Your friends are dangerous enough, but you're a complete monster. There's no way I could win against all of you in a straight fight,” he admitted, relaxing in the strange, red crystal, the data access pointers looking almost like an exotic set of runes as they drifted over the surface of it. What was this?
As if hearing my question, he nodded to me, then continued with, "This was the only card I had left to play, if I couldn't just kill you and take your body. Instead, I'll ignore you and take your body. You might have re-encrypted all of the access points but I'll have access to them again in, uh... Four and a half hours? Damn, I forgot how long that took," he muttered a moment later, checking his side screen. Wow. I’m so glad I re-encrypted everything. So he was just going to sit in whatever this was until he finished hacking back into me? Well, admittedly it was probably the smart course of action. We couldn't mock him on his lack of bravery if he won and we were all dead.
"You coward! You just don't want to fight us because you were losing!" Rainbow shouted, fur raising up with the newly revealed information. Well, I guess we could try to mock him. Just a little. It was rather therapeutic.
He stared at her for a moment before shrugging. "Yeah, that's about it. Why should I get myself killed fighting you and your monster coltfriend when I can win just by waiting in here for the time to run out?" he pointed out. I was a bit surprised when Rainbow bothered blushing at his comment, still glaring at him regardless.
"What exactly is 'here'?" Twilight asked, looking more annoyed as her horn lit up, a small beam of energy passing cleanly through the crystal, and his neck in the same instant. I kind of wondered what she would have done if that had worked and she'd taken his head off...
He averted his eyes until her light show was done, then shook his head. "I'm kind of glad now that Mender never repaired the fourth core. If he did, it might have been reattached at this point and you'd be able to get to me. As it stands, I just have to wait it out in here for the third core to slowly break the encryptions. Again," he answered, smirking down at Twilight once more. Fourth core? But it was broken! In its current state, it wouldn't be able to store an AI on it, much less an actual... Psyche...
My eyes widened, and the captain smirked knowingly at me through the red tint. I looked up at him in surprise. "You're not in the core... you are the core! You're... You turned yourself into an Aegis Artifact?!" I asked, eyes widening. How?! Wait, no, when?! Twilight perked up next to me, then looked back up to him in equal surprise.
He chuckled in amusement before nodding. "You caught me. Not actually entirely sure what I am at this point, or even how much of me got transferred in that instant. It was either this or let you leave me, stranded and dying on that hellhole of a planet. I mean, damn. What would you have done? So I used the shards of what was left of my Aegis Barrier, and lashed out with my soul link as you started to power up the FTL jump, aiming for whatever part I could reach. Pity that bitch that was helping you realized it and turned the shielding off to my core..." he revealed. My head spun, and I frowned, trying to remember what he was talking about. Everything was a haze, and it was suddenly hard for me to remember what memories were my own. Something seemed so... It was distant, like it was far off and in a fog. Bitch? Who was he talking about?
The tiny cat face came to mind, and I took an educated guess that it belonged to Doctor Kyliona. Had she included some sort of Aegis detection code in that final upload to me? I didn't even think that was possible, so maybe I was wrong about whom he was referring to. It didn't matter, though, as I had to figure out a way to access my fourth core in the next four hours or so, despite it not being physically plugged into my systems. Him being able to cheat and connect using just a soul connection was completely unfair. Wait...
"Why did all of you follow me?" I asked, looking over to Twilight an instant later. She snapped back to attention, previously being deep in thought by the looks of it, and glanced over at me. Her eyes softened, and she shook her head sadly after a moment's hesitation.
"You were acting weird, then talking about being hijacked before this monster pops out and gives us death threats. Why would we make you face him alone after we felt you haul him inside yourself?" she asked, sounding like she thought the very notion was completely crazy. I frowned, not understanding her question fully.
Rainbow huffed, however, stomping her right forehoof against the rocks while glaring at me. "You have to stop trying to do things by yourself! We can handle ourselves and help you. You're our friend, too, Mender, and we're not going to let you face things alone," she declared, chest puffing up after she said it.
But now all six of them were stuck in here with me. We were all comatose now, instead of them simply being 'slaves' if I'd lost to the captain. I couldn't decide if their fate was better or worse, actually, all things considered. Either way, Equestria was denied the use of the Elements of Harmony at the same time.
Exhaling softly, I nodded slowly to Rainbow, looking back up at her as she momentarily looked surprised I didn't try to disagree, then softened in her stance and smiled at me, nodding as well. Yeah, they were my friends, and there wasn't really a point for them not following me this time, I admitted.
"You all are so disgustingly sappy. Seriously? Females always want something, so why don't you just do him the favor of telling him outright instead of trying to make him buy all of this love and friendship crap. That's what I hated most about females," the captain spat out, glaring at Rainbow in particular. I couldn't honestly tell if he was just trying to get under our skin, or honestly believed his own garbage. I also didn't care, and frowned, looking up at the gem again. Could I use the same soul link technique to 'connect' to his core, or was it just an Aegis Artifact trick? I kind of wished that Purdue was here to give me some advice on it, but we hadn't gotten around to introducing her into my dreams yet, so I doubted she knew how to follow me anyway. Damn it!
"We ain't tryin' ta use him, despite how much ya think otherwise. Ya must o' had some real bad experiences with mares if yer sayin' stuff like that," Applejack murmured, sounding more sad than angry over his comment. He just glared at her, of course.
"I don't need your pity, bitch. You're not fooling me, and I know precisely what you want from him! So take your self-righteousness and go screw yourself," he spat out, actually spitting at her a moment later. It passed through the crystal and faded long before it got to us, making me realize that the intangible effect went both ways. The orange mare still instinctively stepped back to avoid its original trajectory, though.
Dash bristled again, glaring at him before pointedly gesturing to her fillyfriend. "Applejack isn't a dog, so stop calling her that!" she ‘corrected’, making me blink once. This is why I had avoided all swearing! That way I didn’t have to explain those sorts of words. Twilight coughed lightly at that, probably understanding it a bit better.
"Uh, based on the context, it’s probably derogatory in nature. 'Bitch' appears to represent an individual whom he dislikes, potentially a female only, whom he feels is being dishonest or similar, from what I gather." she started to deduce, switching into her scientific mode and making me cringe outright.
Bristling, I finally exclaimed, "Stop saying that! It sounds horrible coming from your mouths. Please stop." Twilight blinked at me, then snickered in sudden realization.
"Oh, you know what it means, then! Um..." she stated, then paused, looking more fully at me in an almost expectant way. Sighing, I rolled my eyes before giving in.
"Bitch is still a female dog, but it's also derogatory for either a female who's cruel or traitorous, mostly, or a male who's particularly 'wimpy' or a pushover," I explained, sighing. How had it come to me having to explain swear words to them?!
"Can we just get back ta figurin’ this out?" the orange mare pleaded, gesturing back to the captain. Yup, this conversation had gone completely downhill, and off on a huge tangent away from, I don't know, actually stopping him from taking over my body and screwing us all over?!
Twilight wasn't paying attention anymore, however, and frowned instead, looking back up at the gem. Eh? "I kind of wish we had the Elements of Harmony here. I bet they'd work against the crystal," she wistfully murmured. I'm sure she knew the crystal was just a graphical representation of the fact that he'd retreated behind a physical separation from us, so I assumed she was actually referring to the CPU core he resided in. Would the Elements affect electronics like that, though? I somehow doubted the concept of bit wiping or electromagnetic disruption existed here. They didn't appear to have electricity, instead using something called 'Ether Energy'. Huh.
Fluttershy suddenly gasped, however, giving me a start. I turned sharply to look at her, only for her to push up against me instead, lifting my left leg up for examination. Oh. “You’re hurt!” she squeaked, carefully brushing the fur over the now bruising area. It would probably cause mild sympathetic damage to my real body, but unlike here, that one had nanites and cybernetics to repair itself.
“I’ll be fine,” I murmured to her, only getting half of the last word out before she kissed me gently. I leaned into it, and she shivered, smiling against my muzzle before releasing me. She’d been surprised by my form earlier when I caught the blade, I realized, but it felt like she was refusing to let it get to her this time. I felt warm inside at that, before Twilight frowned in my background vision, past Fluttershy’s head.
Fluttershy saw me glancing past her, and turned to look back at Twilight, who was feeling her chest with her own hoof. Oh no. What now? It didn’t look like a pained expression, though, so I relaxed a little. Fluttershy gasped a moment later, and reached down, touching the same spot on her chest as well. Eh?!
“I… I feel it! Why can I feel the Element on my chest?” she asked quietly, touching the spot where the jewel should normally hang. I lifted my eyebrow up, then looked as the others each did the same.
Rarity shook her head absently, then deduced, “That shouldn’t be possible, should it? We weren’t wearing the Elements when we fell in here. Did somepony put them on us?” They couldn’t use the Elements unless the jewels themselves were on them? For empathic weaponry, that was sort of a weird limitation, admittedly. Twilight nodded to her, regardless.
“Spike and Aura were fine before we followed Mender in here. I used my magic and the bits of the table to scratch them a message to get help and send a letter to Princess Celestia. Maybe they put them on us?” she suggested, a very sound idea at that. Well, if they knew where the key to the cabinet was. It was admittedly the only thing I’d seen locked in a while. Not that it mattered, with the big display made out of glass, of course. I tried not to twitch as I considered Equestria’s security measures.
Fluttershy closed her eyes a moment later, drawing my attention back to her as a soft, pink glow started emanating from her chest. She surprised me by questioning, “Do we need the necklaces to use the Elements of Harmony?” Oh? A gemstone butterfly, made out of a similar shade as her hair, faded in on her chest, radiating a soft pink light. My eyes widened as no necklace appeared with it, and she smiled, turning to look at Twilight with the glowing jewel just resting against her chest and utterly ignoring gravity. Eh, it wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d seen in my time so far in Equus.
Twilight’s eyes widened, and she focused next, an equally soft, rosy hue appearing on her chest as well, in the shape of a starburst. One by one, they each closed their eyes, radiance expanding into the ambiance of the area with six different, vibrant colors now. This finally snapped the captain out of his code work, turning to frown as they all stood around me, covering the area in a soft glow. With all six gems there, they all magnified, and Twilight suddenly smiled.
“We can feel them! It doesn’t matter where they are. The only thing that matters is that this is working! We can use the Elements of Harmony here!” she squeaked, trotting happily back and forth on her legs. My mind wavered, and I tried really hard not to suddenly picture that image of her lying on the floor of the kitchen. I suddenly didn’t feel so good…
“Uh, hate ta ruin anythin’, but where exactly is ‘ere? If we’re inside Mender’s mind, what happens if we fire off tha Elements ‘ere?” Applejack asked, snapping me out of my thoughts, thankfully. Oh. Oh, right. Would I be targeted by the Elements, too, due to pure proximity?
Everypony froze at that, Pinkie blinking twice before reasoning, “But Mender’s not a bad pony. The Elements would ignore him, right?” If only I could be so idealistic to that theory.
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t have any other options to use at the moment. I suggest using the Elements of Harmony regardless,” I pointed out, taking a few steps back and away from the crystal, suddenly realizing I had no idea on the radius of those gems. Wait, did the radius even matter? He was technically embedded inside my chest in real life. You couldn’t get much ‘closer’ in proximity there. Twilight looked just as unsure as I did, either worried about the proximity as well, or wondering how ‘picky’ the Elements really were. Princess Luna was a good pony, too, but because she was ‘infected’ with the evil that was Nightmare Moon, the Elements banished her completely the first time for a thousand years! If I had to sit for a thousand years on the moon, I wouldn’t be a happy individual either.
They all looked doubtful still, and I stomped my hoof down onto the rocks, immediately regretting picking my left one for the task. I recovered my ‘stern’ look after the wince fairly quickly, then proceeded to append, “We don’t have a choice! It’s either use the Elements or just sit here and wait to lose. You six are too important regardless. You have to use them!”
The captain snorted at that, however. “And what, pray tell, are these ‘Elements of Harmony’? What, are you going to love and friendship me to death?” he inquired, not looking impressed by the gems in the slightest. Twilight didn’t pay attention to him, instead turning to the rest of the girls.
“He’s right. We don’t have any other options other than just waiting to lose. If that happens, it’s not only a problem for us, but we’ll be leaving all of Equus in danger!” she exclaimed, looking back and forth between them all, searching expressions hopefully.
It was a long and painful five seconds before Applejack slowly nodded and stood up again, her orange and green apple gem starting to pulse with light. Rainbow didn’t look pleased, but she sighed and made hers start pulsing as well. “This better not hurt Mender, or I’m going to be really upset,” she warned. Well, I’d probably be ‘upset’, too. Big footnote there, depending on what state it left me in, of course. It was hard to be upset when I was dead, I imagine. Or maybe not, ‘ghosts’ being a thing in Equus.
Soon, all six gems were pulsing with their individual colors as the girls backed up and away from the captain, who was looking a little concerned now as the area started to fill with the ambient energy coming off them. I’d be concerned for how much this was irradiating my soul or something, but we didn’t have a whole lot of options.
“Guess you’re about to find out what the Elements of Harmony are. This is the first time I’ve seen them fired as well, so I guess we’ll both see something new,” I admitted, finally addressing the captain as I sat down a few meters away from him.
“Fired?” he immediately asked, ‘standing up’ again in his gem as he looked at the six mares some distance behind me. I didn’t need to turn around to note the glow had picked up tremendously, sympathetic ambiance and energy drifting past me now on the air, like flakes of stardust. Well, if I did die, at least this was possibly the prettiest way I could imagine.
Rarity coughed lightly, then added, “You may wish to back up a little, Mender. I know you don’t think it matters, but it might.” I blinked at that, then sighed. Okay, yeah, she was right. It might matter. Standing again, I trotted back a ways to stand off to the side of the six mares instead, watching all of them focus on the huge, radiating glows coming from their chests. The light was soft, and warm, and I found it hard to be scared of it, though. A part of me wondered what it would feel like to be hit with it, but the rest of me realized how crazy that sounded an instant later. Maybe I was more suicidal than I realized?
The calming effect was apparently lost on the captain, however, who looked more ‘horrified’ than anything. “Wait, that level of energy… It shouldn’t be possible to bring that much energy into a mindscape! You’re going to kill both of us!” he warned. Fluttershy paused first, but I just snorted.
“He’s bluffing. He’ll say anything to save himself,” I assured. Maybe I was the one bluffing instead? Regardless, it had the desired effect, and they all focused again, the radiance burning around them now as the air almost lit on colored fire. It was rather pretty, the swirls of light and energy around them. Then they started drifting into the air, and I realized things were probably going to get weird.
Reality itself, for what it was worth in here, started to twist and warp away from them as the energy focused into a single point, being ‘aimed’ towards the captain by Twilight. I realized a moment later that I’d never asked him what his name was. Eh, it didn’t matter, really. The ball of rainbow colored whirling energy expanded slowly, until it was larger than they were and I couldn’t see their forms anymore through the massive glow of the energy. Well, my choice was made. I was glad I didn’t mention my plan to try to copy what he did and make an empathy link in order to connect to the CPU Core. It probably wouldn’t have worked and just gotten us all stuck here anyway.
Wait, he was able to bring up interfaces here… It took a few tries, but I finally got it to respond to my will. Bringing up my command prompt using that back door again, I noted that the defenses were still in place, and logged into my own systems from where I was. Everything was on lockdown, tied to the operation of my OS, like I requested. I queued a lockdown removal for the paralysis effects on each of the girls, scheduled to be appended to their nanites in about three hundred seconds. One way or another, his control over them would be gone by then. Apart from the instructions to undo what I did already, however, there was nothing more I could do in my systems, all of them still in lockdown.
My attention was drawn back upwards with the blinding flash of light, and I flicked the command prompt closed again. The captain’s breath caught as he took a step back in his crystal, bumping into the other edge of it and not passing through. Oh, he was stuck there. That’s why he hadn’t just used it to avoid attacks earlier. Well, that didn’t work out well for him.
There was no time for him to formulate plans or make an attempt to escape. The huge ‘wave’ of light washed out his entire crystal in an instant, a scream of panic sounding off and cut short as the entire thing was washed away in the radiance. I winced, shielding my eyes from the intense light as it arced upwards, as if it had a mind of its own, crashing into the burning sky and exploding into a prismatic ring of color, expanding outwards like one of Rainbow’s Sonic Rainbooms. Huh. Well, I’m sure that wouldn’t have consequences at all!
Reality itself shook violently a moment later, the sky warping and twisting into white clouds with blasts of prismatic fire falling from the heavens. The ground around me warped and shattered, crystals jutting out of it in various spots and splotches of grass and a few trees ruptured out of the ground. Holy hell! It was like an inverse apocalypse was happening with me right in the center of it! What did you even call that?!
I flailed, then squeaked as a tree erupted under me and carried me up about five meters a moment later, and I decided that I had mixed feelings on this sort of apocalypse. The captain and his gem were nowhere to be seen, and with the lake of colors under me like a thick fog, I couldn’t see the girls either. The sky exploded into white as the backdrop fell away into a huge, bright blue and a golden sun somewhere above. My eyes widened, staring up at the huge, crystal blue abyss above me, clouds swirling out from the beacon of prismatic light going straight up into the blue. It was the calmest I’d ever felt, as a soft and warm rain started to fall all around me.
My operating system was less happy. Errors spanned the entire network, showing critical information failure on two of my CPU Cores, being the broken one and the third one that he’d hijacked. Generic exceptions were coming from CPU Core Three, which I contributed to suddenly losing all of the hooks he’d placed into it. Violently. Through whatever the hell energy the Elements of Harmony used. CPU Core Four was simply gone, showing up as one giant null pointer reference. I had no clue what that meant in the slightest, but imagined the captain wasn’t the happiest individual at the moment.
It didn’t matter, though. The structure of this ‘virtual’ empathic world I’d created on the fly was falling apart, my OS rebooting itself to try to recover from the catastrophic amount of damage it had just suffered. The Element Bearers got ‘disconnected’ a moment later, only Rainbow’s and Fluttershy’s sensations remained lingering for a moment, Fluttershy crying out and reaching for me, and Rainbow looking shocked.
They were gone a moment later, and everything was suddenly quiet. I was scared to move for a while, glancing down at the grass beneath me, hazy mist having risen up all around. There was no operating system. This had become just my mindscape, with no computer calculations or control whatsoever. I dropped down out of the spontaneous tree a second later and looked around through the sun-lit haze. It was a weird place to be, with a haphazardly thrown together mixture of different elements from a lot of different areas, including a grassland and forest at least. The prismatic fog didn’t help make the area feel any more normal, especially with the sun shining down in the blue sky above. I wasn’t waking up, and couldn’t will myself awake. Further, my OS wasn’t coming back, and I idly wondered if there was physical damage it had to repair first. Or maybe something had gone wrong and I’d been nonchalantly tossed into the afterlife with no transition at all?
Walking over to where the gem was, I was surprised to see the captain there. He shakily stood up off the ground, bits of his damaged leg and shoulder burning away around him in prismatic light. He was translucent now, and I wasn’t even certain he was fully there as crystal fragments jutted out from him in various spots.
“You bastard. They infected me! They infected me with this pathetic sugar-bowl fantasy crap that’s all around us… You should have just killed me! It would have been more pleasant!” he groaned out, voice elevating as he glared up at me, eyes empty and white. His colors were fading, being drawn out by the prismatic ‘leaking’ coming from around the crystals and his damaged areas. He was dying. Sort of. Maybe.
I sat down in front of him, no real feelings at all coming up as I watched him shakily stumble towards me. There was so much hate in him. The sun was gone now above, with gray winter clouds returning as it started to snow. The temperature dropped around us, and I realized something was indeed wrong, the colors starting to leave everything, not just him. We might be dying, instead.
“You really do hate everything, don’t you?” I asked quietly, watching him slip and fall into the snow that was rapidly gathering around us, landing messily on his chest, having only the stump of one forearm to catch him.
He glared up at me for a long moment before simply answering with, “Go to hell.” That was really all the answer I needed. This wasn’t him. This was some sad shard of his prior form. Just a remnant of the captain who hadn’t died with him on that far away planet. Killing this sad creature would be more a mercy than anything. It was like it was some sort of twisted mockery of what he used to be, and what he’d originally wanted. I suddenly felt sick just looking at the image in front of me.
Smiling softly at him, I whispered, “Goodbye, then.” He only glared before shakily standing up defiantly once more.
“I may be dying, but you’re going out with me, you monster! You’re not going to beat me so easily that-“ he started to deny.
I knew where they were now. Feeling them there was as simple as breathing. Still smiling, I just focused and completely opened the connection to Malice. The harsh blackness exploded out of me, not even hesitating for a second. The captain screamed, whipping an energy blade up in panic. He cut off one of the six hundred or so limbs that expanded out of the miasma of hate in front of him. I looked away as his screaming ceased, being replaced by a constant tearing sound. Their rage turned white hot and blinding, me pushing it away just so it didn’t consume myself as well. He apparently wasn’t incorporeal enough to avoid their wrath, and dark crimson lined the snow, spraying past me in long lines. The warm dots hitting my fur were the only warmth left in the area, and I sighed softly. That was that, then. I hoped it bought them some measure of peace.
Almost a minute later, the sounds finally stopped. I turned and looked back at the mass of concentrated black nothing as it turned slowly, almost looking disappointed at the five meter wide spray of gore in front of it. It moved like a singular entity, despite thousands of eyes opening up all over its form as it turned to look at me. Mmm. Was I next, then?
The creature just stared at me, however, the eyes suddenly softening all over it and almost looking sad. I felt so cold, the drops of red spotting my coat rapidly cooling in the air around me. I shivered, then winced as another flare of light came down out of the sky, a blast parting the clouds in an instant. What?!
Malice made a hissing sound, suddenly looking up as the prismatic column of light crashed down into it before it could even move. They weren’t done yet?! My eyes widened as the deafening thunder of a billion souls all screaming at once shattered through the air all around me, the sound vibrations actually blasting the snow away from both of us as I screamed, holding a hoof to each ear. I didn’t hear the explosion, but I felt it as the force shadowed me out, suddenly. The heat flashed my fur back, my silent scream getting sucked away behind me as I was flung like a ragdoll backwards.
I felt nothing as I crashed into the snow covered ground two dozen meters away. I skipped once, then twice more before rolling and coming to a crashed rest in the silent snow, the world going cold and empty again a heartbeat later. My body refused to move as I lay on my side, the snow coming down in full force once more, slowly erasing the long path my body had made. Crimson red expanded across it moving away from my vision, and I shivered, just closing my eyes and letting the numbness take me. After everything I’d been through, the last month just piled up all at once. I was so tired. I’d been almost killed so many times, fought tooth and nail literally for what I wanted to protect, and all of it was pointless in the end, wasn’t it? Would I even be around to enjoy what I worked so hard for? Or was it to be my legacy to just clear the way for better ponies who were less broken?
The energy faded from my body, and I no longer had the will to even shiver as the cold disappeared, too, falling away to numbness and a vast emptiness. No, I wasn’t going to fight any longer. There was nothing left in me at all, and I felt so very, very tired. The rest of them could have the future. For now, I think I needed a little rest…
Everything faded away completely.
Stats
Page generated in 0.049 seconds
Total duration
1,010 users online
1,408,914 hits today, 2,004,447 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
If the next chapter is Aura visiting him in the afterlife, I admit that I won't be disappointed.
No, call back, he gets hit with an apple core from the sky.
What the crap?
You! You, you, magnificent bastard is one term that comes to mind. Please wait while I consult the Galactic Encyclopedia for proper terms to describe you and that cliff hanger. God what a time to not speak Klingon.
Season 4 FiM, meet Season 4 Reboot.
All we can do now, is wait.
vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/hellsing/images/7/75/Tumblr_m9swbkmlwh1qewk8to4_1280-1-.png/revision/latest?cb=20120923033656
With all the eyes and teeth, all I could imagine was Pride from Fullmetal Alchemist.
Amazing chapter, worth the delays.
Next chapter starts with "Consciousness stirred. That fundamental spark of awareness."
Calling it now.
edit: Just realized, Whats he going to tel Keela?
I wish you'd been a bit more original with the whole Malice thing. Totally ripped off Alucard and who knows how many other anime in this one.
This chapter was awesome. And it's so rare for anyone to pull off a (really really evil) cliffhanger like that and still have it feel so natural a stopping point!
So I see you've read/watched Hellsing.
Interesting chapter.
Someone is a Hellsing fan.
5667771 You and I both, really didn't expect this chapter to go this way.
Woah... That was, wow. Everyone should now worship Malice. I hope Mender is okay-ish enough to not die, can't kill a legend. The ending here was rather suiting, I liked the soft, easy feel that it has, not all brutal and not like "...and I slept" it was just really nice.
So maybe Mender is in a coma for a while, now. Or maybe he's even dead, but I doubt that for some reason.
He still has yet to become the weapon of mass destruction, a climax I'm still waiting for. It'll happen, I'm willing to bet. Just gotta wait...
And back in the hospital.
Well, my theory was way off the mark.
And this is why your my fav. Author. Epic story. Awesome fight scene. And, at of all of them, best way to end a chapter. Keep it up, Kiro.
I liked the chapter, though felt like the elements were kinda shoehorned in.
Damn it! I want to know what happens next!
Did- did Mender just pull an abridged!Alucard on the Captain?
Amzing chapter! i will now sit still and wait for the next one.
I am very much looking forward to the next instalment!
This chapter left me speechless. Well, that's a ton of questions answered.
As much as I want to say that mender still has to many mysteries to solve, if he truly passes on. Then all my tears will be shed for him.
GO DAMM IT THIS IS WHY I LOVE WRITTEN STORIES!!!!
i either see the souls being destroyed or being harmonized and cleared of their hatred.
A while ago (probably over a year) I made a comment about how Mender was a pony homuculus. I guess my description was more accurate than I thought.
static.zerochan.net/Pride.%28FMA%29.full.931935.jpg
That or he's a vampire.
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/hellsing/images/9/9c/HellsingAlucardDog.png/revision/latest?cb=20110906132420
That scene where he's daring the captain to heal himself and get up reminds me of Hellsing Ultimate where Alucard is doing the same to Luke Valentine.
Intense chapter
now its...
Hospital time!
:3
welp,
media.giphy.com/media/62Nw6HkaqTGxO/giphy.gif
Sleep well. Sir moon mender may your soul find peace
Have a good nap Mender! You earned it!
This is the story i go to when i want a good story to read. Thank you for your work.
Well... fuck! So is that malice gone now? Are they 'at peace'? Or are they gonna be pissed off that they just got, from the looks of it, Harmony'd?
5728837 i prefer "harmonized." rolls off the tongue better
5669801 Bitch I eat people!
That right there had me seriously worried for a bit, I so did not want a psychotic human to be in him... Especially since he was designed (raised?) by doctor Kyliona...
Hellsing reference?
after rereading this, i guess i haven't watched Hellsing yet when i first read this. as others said, seems heavily influenced by Alucard and Luke Valentine.