“Come on, Rares! Can’t you go any faster?!”
Rainbow clutched onto the log as tightly as she could as the waves battered it about and sent spray into her face. At her side, Gyro similarly held on, trembling as she locked her limbs in place around the sodden wood. In front of them, the home island grew larger and larger, but not nearly fast enough.
“I’m going as fast as I can!” Rarity shouted, her muscular body bobbing with each paddle of her tail. “You’re not the one who has to push this thing! I can only go so fast for so long!”
“We don’t have a lot of time left!” Rainbow shouted. “Soft’s got everything she needs to do this ritual, and she left before us! If we give her too much time, we won’t be fast enough to stop her!”
“I’m going as fast as I can!” Rarity hissed again. Her forelegs bulged as she pushed against the log, and Rainbow yelped as it nearly dunked under the water. It’ll take me another ten or fifteen minutes to get there!”
“That’s too long! Stop!”
Rarity blinked. “Pardon?”
“I said stop!” Rainbow shouted, and she flared her wings for balance when Rarity abruptly came to a halt.
Gyro sputtered as water washed over her head, and she whipped her eyes around to focus on Rainbow. “Why are we stopping?” she asked her. “I thought we were trying to get there as fast as we could!”
“Rarity can’t bring us there fast enough,” Rainbow said. She stood up on the log and shook out her wings, shedding water from her feathers as if they were tiny blue thunderheads. “It’ll take her fifteen minutes to get there. I can be there in two if I fly.”
“Rainbow, you can’t!” Rarity cried, frowning at the pegasus. “You already fought Soft Step alone, and that was out in the open where you could fly! If she’s underground, then you don’t have any advantages! You can’t possibly hope to fight her!”
“Maybe,” Rainbow said, chewing on her lip. “Maybe not. I fucked up and got us into this situation. Maybe I can make up for it.”
“Okay, hold the fuck up, Rainbow,” Gyro said. She tried to drag herself onto the log to stand as well, but lacked the muscle strength in her legs to do so. Grunting, she sagged back down into the water and fixed Rainbow with a glare. “Your brilliant plan to stopping this is to fight Soft Step again and this time on even worse terms? What the actual shit are you thinking? You’re going to die!”
Rainbow sighed and let her wings sag. “The important thing is that I can distract her, maybe slow her down,” she said. “I don’t know how long this ritual of hers is going to take to cast, but I can do my best to make it take as long as possible. We can’t let her succeed, no matter the cost.”
Rarity took her hooves off the log and lightly hugged herself. “Even… even if you do delay her, what are we supposed to do if she… well…”
“You’re a siren, Rares,” Rainbow said, smiling up at her. “You’ve got a ton of great power locked up in there that you just need to figure out how to use. If I can slow her down, keep her confined in the shrine, then you can collapse it on her. It’s… it’s going to be our only chance to stop her once and for all.”
The siren gasped, and even Gyro seemed taken aback. “But if you’re in there… if the rest of our friends are in there…”
“It’s either going to be us or the world,” Rainbow said. “You guys are right. I can’t fight her and win. None of us can. She’s too friggin’ strong for that. Maybe I can save our friends somehow. I’m certainly going to try. But we need to destroy that shrine so that she can’t finish what she’s trying to accomplish.”
“And the barrier?” Rarity asked. “How can we lower the barrier if the shrine is destroyed?”
Rainbow hung her head and held her tongue as she wrestled with the ugly truth. “Maybe you’ll find a way,” she said. “Maybe there’s something else we can do. Maybe destroying the shrine will bring down the barrier on its own. I don’t know.” She managed to lift her head up to look Rarity in the eyes. “You have to admit that our chances of getting home were never that good to begin with.”
“No, no they weren’t.” Rarity hung her head and avoided Rainbow’s eyes. “Is this… is this going to be how it ends, then?”
Rainbow felt her throat tighten and her heart seize up. After shaking out her wings one more time, she fluttered up to Rarity’s face and put a hoof on her beak. “I’m not going to give up,” Rainbow said. “I’m going to fight until my last breath. I’m going to do everything I can to get in there, stop the ritual, and get out in one piece. Just… in case I don’t…”
“I… understand.” Rarity closed her eyes and shuddered like she was trying to shake off her panic and her worry. “Please do be safe for me, Rainbow.”
“Hey, I’m Loyalty, remember?” Rainbow let a small smirk pop onto her muzzle, and she hugged and kissed Rarity’s beak. “I’m not gonna leave you hanging. I’ll be there for you when this is all over. And I love you, whether you’re a big scaly fish, or a pretty little unicorn.”
“I love you, too,” Rarity said, sniffling and blinking away tears. “Just come back to me, will you, darling?”
“I will. I promise.” Rainbow kissed Rarity one more time and backed away. She shifted her attention to Gyro, and she flew down low enough to bump hooves with the mare. “You’re not one for sappy stuff, are you?”
“Not in the slightest,” Gyro said, shaking her head. Still, she managed a smile for Rainbow. “If you come back from this, I’m gonna buy you a drink when we get home.”
“Heh. I’ll keep you to it.” She held out her hoof and bumped Gyro’s, then winked at the mare. “See you on the other side, G. And don’t let Rarity freak out too much.”
Gyro nodded. “I’ll do my best, Rainbow.”
“Good.” Rainbow looked to the sky, where the pitch black of the night was slowly beginning to lighten to the east and the moon hung low beneath the stars. “The night’s almost over, and I’ve wasted enough time. Good luck, girls.”
And with a few beats of her wings, she was gone, rainbow trail glowing across the waves as she sprinted to the shrine.