The whole world was bells and high-pitched ringing.
Rarity whimpered on the ground. For the past eternity, she’d been curled in the fetal position as somepony tried to drill into her brain with a screwdriver. The ringing wouldn’t stop, and another nauseous convulsion wracked her body from the continuous stimulation overload. It made the cool, wet sand beneath her body feel so infinitely far away, like she was floating in a void, a void filled with bells.
But, little by little, the chimes finally began to ring their last. As the painful omnipresent noise started to silence itself, Rarity became more aware of her surroundings. She could feel the patter and kiss of rain on her face, the cold knives of the wind’s fingers through her coat, the coarse sand on her side. And she could finally identify the source of the pain giving her intense migraines. Raising her hoof to her head, she felt around her skull, grimacing at the blood sticking to her hoof, until she touched her right ear. She immediately hissed in pain and revulsion at the slightest touch, especially when she realized that it wasn’t there.
The realization made her want to cry and vomit at the same time: Squall had shot off her ear. No wonder the ringing and pain had put her down for the count, leaving Rainbow to fight the pirate alone for so long. And now she began to notice just how off the world sounded, how much different her perception of noise was with only one ear.
Then the practical part of her mind stepped in and quietly ushered those thoughts away. Her attention shifted back to the middle of the camp, where she heard a scream of pain. She saw Rainbow and Squall staring each other down, Rainbow’s sword covered with blood, but her eyes wide in alarm as Squall seared her own chest with a log she must’ve taken from the fire. “Is that all you’ve got?” the pirate taunted Rainbow, dropping the log in the sand with a furious hiss. “You’re gonna need to do better than that!”
Rarity swallowed hard. How long had the fight been going on? And how was Squall still standing? Rarity could see the wound and the blood from where she lied on the sand. There shouldn’t have been any possible way a pony could keep fighting through a wound like that. By the way she stood and carried herself, Rarity could immediately tell that the pirate couldn’t use her left foreleg, and the deep gash across her chest would’ve made it very difficult to move and twist her upper torso as well. Yet she still stood across from Rainbow, sword at the ready, bloodlust and rage filling her eyes.
Squall was no pony, Rarity realized, nor a rabid animal. She was a demon straight from Tartarus, driven mad by bloodlust. How could her and Rainbow possibly kill somepony like that?
To her continuing surprise, Squall was the first to advance on Rainbow, using her three legs to quickly and awkwardly close the gap between the two, her foreleg dragging uselessly across the sand. Though she couldn’t move as fast as she once did, she compensated for it with greater manipulation of her sword, quickly pushing it out and drawing it back in an irregular rhythm to prevent Rainbow from getting behind it or advancing too close. Rainbow shifted left and right as she tried to find a way past Squall’s defenses, but the pirate’s relentless pressure kept her circling around the camp, unable to close the distance.
Rarity knew she needed to help. Forget her missing ear; she could always cry about it later. What she couldn’t afford to lose was Rainbow herself, and she needed to engage the pirate now to help. Squall had left Rarity with her swords after she’d shot her, so Rarity quickly picked the three surviving weapons up again and began to stagger across the campsite to join the fray.
She’d hoped to jump Squall and take the pirate by surprise, but thanks to Rainbow’s frantic retreat from the crippled mare’s onslaught, Squall saw her before she could get close enough to strike. Snarling, she viciously jabbed at Rainbow, forcing her back, before she oriented herself to face both ponies. “Look who’s back,” she spat. “Want me to lop off your other ear?”
Rainbow’s head whipped to the side and she did a double-take. “Rarity! You’re alive!”
“Just dazed, darling,” Rarity said, her swords slowly spinning around her. “But I am still very much alive.”
“But… your ear…”
“I’m trying to save my vanity-fueled nervous breakdown for after this fight,” Rarity said, shooing her away with a hoof. Then, snarling at Squall, she marched across the sand to engage the pirate. “Early this night, I promised myself I wasn’t a murderer, that I wouldn’t kill ponies and betray who I am just to survive this nightmare. But you are no pony, Squall. You are a monster in a mare’s body, and I intend to split you open and show the world before I send you back to Tartarus myself!”
“You’ll die like everypony else,” Squall growled, beginning her own advance on Rarity. “You’re an upstart playing in the big leagues, and you’ll drown in a river of your own blood!”
Her red magic surged as she swung her sword at Rarity, but Rarity blocked it with her own cutlass. A grim smirk of confidence and anger took hold of Rarity’s muzzle, and she forced the pirate away with a twirl of her own weapon. “We shall see about that.”
-----
Gyro shivered in the cold and the rain. The storm had gotten so much worse, so quickly. The wind had turned all her chimes and noisemakers into a constant cacophony of noise. Her short mane was plastered to her face, and water dripped off her muzzle. The trees at least gave her a little cover from the most direct of the rainfall, but they weren’t nearly thick enough to keep her completely dry. That, and the rain came down so heavily that it would’ve gotten to her eventually.
She’d done all she could to run the noisemakers and keep the pirates away from the camp, and she’d been expecting Rarity and Rainbow to return any minute now. But there’d been no sign of either of her friends. To make matters worse, the pirates had quickly lost enthusiasm with the chase. They’d been huddled under a cluster of trees not too far away for the past five minutes, trying to avoid the worst of the storm while the jungle sang with metal plates crashing against each other. They were close enough that she could barely make out their conversations through the noise filling the night.
“This is awful. It fucking sucks.”
“There’s nothing out here. It’s just noise.”
“But where the fuck is it coming from? This is some spooky shit and I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.”
“It sounds like it’s coming from above us.”
“Yeah, I noticed it too. Hey—what’s that thing?”
“What thing?”
“Look, up there! Somepony raise a torch!”
There was a moment of silence, and Gyro’s heart practically seized up. She immediately began trying to stand, knowing that she was about to be discovered. Her walker and hind legs didn’t cooperate with her, and the mud tried to suck them back down into the ground. But at the very least, the loss of sensation below her waist meant that she couldn’t feel the cold and the rain on half her body…
“What the fuck is that shit?”
“It’s a bunch of panels tied to a rope.”
“Panels tied to a rope? What the fuck?”
“Cut it down. I want to take a look at this shit.”
Gyro continued to grimace and try to stand. The rain had half buried her walker in the mud, and with only her forelegs to leverage her body, it was proving incredibly difficult to get out of. And as she worked her way out, her eyes fell on the ropes tied in front of her when one suddenly went slack.
“What the fuck?”
“It’s only tied at one end.”
“Well, where’s the other go?”
“I think we should find out. We might find whoever did this.”
Gyro swallowed hard as she heard them approach. “I’d say fuck me, but…”