Xion hadn't had been sure what to expect from a city made by ponies. She had been expecting floating buildings maybe, or perhaps a lot of hay everywhere. Deep inside she had hoped that she could ride some of the larger ones, as she liked the idea of her on the back of a unicorn riding into battle. But what she hadn't been expecting was an entire city of ponies with white eyes wandering around like zombies.
'Oh Faust, they caught Celestia's stupidity. Curse you princess, why must you ruin everything you rule?!' Sombra cried into the sky, while Xion tuned him out and walked through the streets of the city. To her surprise the pony city looked an awful lot like the World that Never Was, except during the day and without an eternal moon hanging over the city. But she didn't have much of a chance to look around, as the ponies that wandered around garnered her full attention.
"What happened to them?" Xion asked Sombra as she walked over to one of the ponies, kneeling down next to them and placing her hand against their chest. She closed her eyes for a moment before opening them again, shaking her head. "They still have their hearts, so I don't think the Heartless did this. But if not them, who did this? The Organization?"
'Perhaps. Until we've learned more, we'll go with that as our working theory,' Sombra replied and his tone of voice told Xion he too was concerned. 'Proceed with caution, puppet. We don't know what to expect in this city and while I doubt I can be made brain dead, genius mastermind that I am, if you were to lose your mind it would be troublesome for me. I'd have to plant my horn on your head and take control of your body myself.'
"Can you do that?" Xion asked with some disbelief, only to get Sombra to laugh.
'Keep on moving and hope that neither of us need to find that out. Come on, let's move.'
Xion summoned her Happiest Day keyblade, walking through the streets with the blade on her shoulder. She held Sombra in her free hand, wanting him able to act on the fly if something were to happen. She was on alert, but with the thousands of ponies all around her, she found it hard to concentrate on any danger she couldn't see.
'It's like they've lost their wills,' Xion thought to herself, looking away from a family that stood mindlessly in place. 'I know that hearts and bodies can be stolen, but can wills be taken as well? Perhaps this is not the Organization, but the Maestro. He would do something like this.'
'It's not the Maestro,' Sombra told Xion, who was visibly startled by the way Sombra seemed to read her mind. 'Whenever you think about that metal menace you get a strange fire in your eyes. I can't read your mind, at least not yet.'
"That's comforting. But why don't you think it's him?"
'Maestro, at least so far, has not been a being for subtlety,' Sombra explained. 'After he made you, did he just dump you off in Equestria with a note telling you what to do? No, he told you in person. Then he fought you so that you could see how pointless it was to resist him. That's all the signs of a villain that likes to grandstand. There is no way he wouldn't let you know that he was here.'
"I thought you couldn't read my mind. How'd you know so much about my first encounter with the Maestro?" Xion asked in a whisper. Sombra chose to chuckle as his response, leaving Xion mildly terrified of the small horn that she clutched tighter in her grasp. But her follow up question was cut off when three portals of darkness appeared in front of the girl and out of the darkness fell three Heartless that Sombra hadn't seen before.
The Heartless were giant, dark balls with sickeningly thin limbs that twisted from their bodies. Their teeth were black and sharp and their yellow eyes glared at Xion with both hatred and desire. Xion pocketed Sombra and took up her fighting stance, narrowing her eyes and waiting for the first move.
The first Darkball lunged towards Xion, gnashing its teeth as it approached the girl. Xion rolled out of the way and avoided the attack, letting the Darkball sail by her before she turned her attention to the other Darkballs. With a kick Xion was in the air over the Darkballs, giving them just enough time to look up at her before she struck down at them with the keyblade. One of the Darkballs let out a roar as the blade slashed across its face, sending it crashing into the ground as Xion landed.
"Freeze," Xion said to the Darkball on the ground before pointing her blade at it, firing an ice crystal from the end of her blade and right into the face of the Darkball. Icy spikes erupted from the crystal, impaling the Darkball and finishing it off. With the first Heartless out of the way, Xion turned her attention to the remaining two.
'These ones don't seem as hard as the ones that we fought earlier,' Sombra pointed out as Xion cracked one of the Darkballs over the head with her blade, stunning it long enough for her to follow-up with a thrust to its face. She drove the flame on the end of the candle clean through the Heartless's body, finishing it off and returning it to the darkness from whence it came. She turned on her heels and threw her blade towards the final Darkball, sending the spinning blade clean through the body of the Heartless. It vanished into darkness without another sound, ending the battle.
"No, they don't," Xion agreed as she summoned the blade to her hands once more before she turned and continued on her way. She kept an eye out for more Heartless attacks, but the more she walked the less and less she became interested in the Heartless and more about the ponies that wandered around. 'While they seem to have no clear goal in mind, there's no less than five in a group. I thought that I saw a family earlier, but it's possible that it was just a bunch of random ponies. But why are they gathered together?'
'It doesn't seem right,' Sombra agreed once Xion voiced her concerns to the horn. 'If they were mindless, they would just be wandering. But you're right in saying that their are standing in groups. No more than seven, no less than five. How curious...'
"Well, if you don't have then answer then it can't be good news," Xion muttered aloud as the two of them reached an intersection. Xion glanced to her left and right, before her eyes went wide as she laid eyes on a certain store. Without thinking she raced over to the store, pressing her face against the glass while a huge smile crossed her face.
'What the hell are we doing here?' Sombra snarled at Xion. 'An ice cream store? Seriously, puppet? We're in the middle of trying to find out why all these ponies went stupid and you're here seeing what the flavor of the day is. Oh don't tell me you've caught the stupid as well?'
"No, it's just...seeing the ice-cream here brought back some memories," Xion said in a soft tone as a gentle smile crossed her face, her mind lost amongst memories of her and her best friends sitting on top of a clock tower, eating ice cream and talking with each other. Despite the altitude of the clock tower and the cold of the ice cream, a feeling of warmth washed over her as she recalled the past. "Memories of hanging out with Roxas and Axel. In a time before things became so...painful. They're some of my most precious memories."
'I can tell. You're radiating more light from you than I've ever seen from a creature of the darkness,' Sombra muttered to Xion, before he let out a gasp and used his power to yank Xion away from the window.
"OW! What the hell, Sombra? That really..."
Xion stopped talking as she lifted her eyes to see that all of the ponies were now shambling towards her, all of their white eyes locked onto the girl. Xion slowly backed herself up to the window of the ice-cream shop, looking around with confusion as the crowd of ponies swarmed in.
"What's going on? Why are they attacking us?" Xion asked Sombra as she pointed her keyblade at the crowd, hoping that the weapon would scare them off. It didn't.
'I don't know, but until I can think of a reason why you'd better start slashing!' Sombra instructed to Xion, who looked down at where his horn was with horror.
"I'm not slashing my way through a bunch of innocent ponies!" she roared in an outraged voice.
'First, no pony is truly innocent. We all have our demons. Second, if you don't this crowd is going to rip us apart piece by piece. And as a talking horn let me tell you it's not as fun as it sounds. Now start fighting!'
Xion gritted her teeth, but she didn't have time to argue as the first pony threw themselves at Xion. Xion blocked their hooves with her key before planting her heel into the ponies chest. She kicked the pony off of her and sent them tumbling back into the crowd, knocking over three other ponies in the process. Xion looked around at the advancing swarm while trying to figure out what to do, before she saw something off in the distance that caught her eye.
It was a being that looked like some kind of humanoid, but its head looked like its brain had swollen five times larger than it should be able to. Its red eyes stared at Xion with interest, while a blue ring floated around its head. But what drew Xion's eyes, and her rage, was the red and black heart symbol on its chest.
"Sombra! Do you see that?!" Xion yelled to Sombra before she dashed into the crowd of ponies, summoning a barrier around herself and using it to push her way through the ponies while not hurting them. "That Heartless has to be the cause of what's going on with the ponies! It's mind controlling them!"
The moment she started chasing after the Heartless the being of darkness took off through the streets, floating over the ponies as it did so. The blue ring around its head turned to red, which in turn resulted in getting all of the ponies to swarm towards Xion. Xion narrowed her eyes as her barrier gave out in the middle of a hoard of ponies, getting her to look around for a way out.
'Okay, so that thing is controlling all of the ponies. That means we take it down, we free all of these ponies and you don't have to worry about a guilty conscious for whacking a few of them,' Sombra recapped with a grunt. 'I take it you do want to avoid hurting them, right?'
"Of course. Wait, I mean, I don't want to hurt any of them," Xion said clearly for Sombra, who chuckled to himself before his horn began to glow within her pocket.
'I thought as much. Very well then, my dear puppet, I shall assist you.'
Xion was about to ask what Sombra meant, but then three beings shot out of puddles of darkness that had appeared at Xion's feet. Xion looked around with amazement as three more Xion's made of darkness took form in front of her, each of them matching how she looked perfectly. The three of them then let out a battle cry before they took off in different directions, each of them getting a good number of ponies to follow after them.
'Alright puppet, I've bought you some breathing room, but it's only a matter of time before the mindless fools realize which ones are fake,' Sombra said to Xion, who ran around the ponies that had stayed behind to capture her. 'We need to get to that Heartless and take it down before it takes control of any more ponies or, heaven forbid, us. I will not be a mindless follower like the rest of these sheep!'
Xion nodded before she sprinted after the floating Heartless as fast as she could, slowly gaining ground on the floating being of darkness. The Heartless turned around to see that Xion was chasing after it, getting it to narrow its eyes at the approaching puppet. It's ring turned yellow, which resulted in blasts of lightning striking down towards Xion.
"Yikes!" Xion exclaimed as she leapt out of the way of one of the lightning bolts, only to throw herself in the path of another strike of lightning. The blast caught her in the chest and flung her backwards, where she fell into the streets while her body twitched. "Ugh, pain. Pain hurts. Heal," she grunted as she lifted her blade and cast a green energy around herself.
'It's going to be tough to get close to this thing with how slow you run. We've got to think of something else,' Sombra instructed Xion as the Heartless came to a stop a block away from Xion, watching to see what she would do next. 'Can your keyblade lock that thing in place or is it only good for unlocking things?'
"I...think it can lock things, but I've never seen it lock down a...hold on a moment, I have an idea," Xion replied as a smile crossed her face, before she started to look around. "But I'm going to need a place to do it. Think you can get this thing to follow me?"
'Please, if you could see me as a stallion, you would know why everypony wanted to follow me,' Sombra replied with a laugh as Xion pointed the horn at the Heartless. The Heartless titled its head to the side before Sombra fired a blast of darkness from the end of his horn, sending out a thin stream of darkness that struck the Heartless right in the chest. The beast let out a roar before it began to float towards Xion, who spun on her heels and began to run.
"So what did you do to it?" Xion asked as she ran, glancing around for a place to trap the Heartless.
'Made it...so that...it wanted to kill me,' Sombra said in-between pained grunts, his horn flickering as it tried to keep the darkness intact. 'Hurry. Can't keep...it up...for long.'
Xion nodded as she picked up her pace, looking for the perfect spot to unleash a trap. Her eyes rested upon a park in the center of the city, one which had an amphitheater in the center of it. A devious smile crossed her face before she turned and took off down the road towards the theater, glancing over her shoulder to see that the Heartless was closing in.
"Almost there, Sombra. Stay strong," Xion whispered to the horn as she approached the gate to the park. Without slowing down she pointed her keyblade at the gate and fired out a beam of light, one that unlocked the padlock that held the gate shut. The second the gate was unlocked Xion drove her shoulder into it, knocking it open while simultaneously ceasing her moment. She stumbled for a moment as she tried to regain her footing, giving the Heartless enough time to catch up to her.
'Puppet, look-'
A blast of energy caught Xion in the back and sent her flying into the air. She had just enough time to register where she was falling before she crashed onto concrete, getting pain to lance through her body while her vision went blurry. Through the pain she could hear Sombra yelling at her, but it wasn't until the Heartless was floating over her that she regained her senses completely. For a brief moment she stared up at the Heartless, before a smile crossed her face and she pointed her blade at it.
"Got you."
A blast of light erupted from the end of her blade and shot past the Heartless into the sky, where it exploded and rained light down around the battlefield. The Heartless looked around as a barrier of light encircled the battlefield, trapping it within the amphitheater with Xion and Sombra. While it was busy looking around, Xion pushed herself back up to her feet and summoned her keyblade, which gained her the full attention of the Heartless.
'What did you do?' Sombra asked Xion as he glanced at the barrier of light, getting a smile to cross Xion's face.
"Before I was struck down by Roxas, I learned how to create these barriers. They're useful for when I want to keep my foe in or my enemies out," Xion said with some pride, before the painful memories came back and her face fell. "I just wish that I didn't have to learn how to do it by almost trying to kill Roxas."
'No time for sadness, we've got ourselves a Heartless to kill,' Sombra reminded Xion, who shook her head and took up her fighting stance, getting the Heartless to narrow its eyes at her.
"Sounds like a plan. Come on, Mastermind, let's put an end to-"
An eruption of light filled the center of the amphitheater, blinding Xion and Sombra with its intensity. Xion lifted her hands to shield her eyes from the light, but from what little she could see through her fingers she found that the light had a rainbow coloring to it, a color that filled her with both hope and dread.
'No...no, you've got to be screwing with me,' Sombra snarled in a voice that was filled with worry. 'There's no way he managed to get one of them under its control! The freakin rainbow power is supposed to be able to resist this kind of crap! Damn it all!'
"Sombra, what's the matter?" Xion asked, but before he could answer the light died down and allowed Xion to see again. But when she lowered her hands, she found that she wasn't sure what she was looking at.
Standing before her was a pony, a pony who radiated a light the likes of which she had only felt when she had sensed Sora for the first time. Her coat was as white as the snow and her mane was primarily purple, but had numerous other colors in it as well. Three, blue diamonds were upon her flank, but then when Xion glanced at her eyes she found that they were as white and mindless as the rest of the ponies in the city. But she could fell the pony's power and it made her grip her keyblade even tighter.
"Sombra, I take it you know who this is?" Xion asked as she took up a fighting stance, not liking how the Heartless and pony stood side by side.
'That, my dear puppet, is Rarity. She's annoying, a drama queen and one of the six ponies in possession of a light that can destroy any darkness, present company exclude,' Sombra explained to Xion in a very annoyed tone. 'And it seems that she's fallen under the control of the Heartless, meaning that we will have to fight her along with the Heartless. Man, what a bitch.'