The minotaurs were the first to make a move, with the war chief and his two companions charging right at Soft Step with their horns lowered. Soft Step leisurely waited for them to reach her before she turned incorporeal and passed through them, reforming into something solid on the other side. She let her horn flare up, and magic grabbed onto one minotaur’s arms and legs and pulled in opposite directions. The hulking warrior screamed in pain as Soft tore his limbs from their sockets and crushed his trachea with his own separated bones, and the alicorn licked her lips as she faced down the two remaining warriors.
Hot Coals, meanwhile, had rushed over to the side of the two dazed pegasi Soft had thrown into the chamber. “Are you guys okay?” he asked them, helping Champagne sit up. “You’re not hurt, are you?”
“I think she bruised my ribs, but I’m okay,” Champagne said, coughing once. Her eyes widened when she saw the fight unfolding at the exit. “Oh, Celestia, she’s going to kill us all…”
Black Flag, meanwhile, immediately shuffled to the side of the room. “We have to overwhelm her now,” he growled, and he grabbed his pistol that the mummies had taken from him when Soft had surprised them. He quickly checked that it was loaded, and he took aim at the alicorn while she toyed with the other minotaurs.
But some sort of sixth sense seemed to alert Soft Step, for she turned around and immediately smacked the pistol out of Flag’s mouth with her magic. The weapon clattered to the floor, and Soft grabbed the pirate by the throat and bashed his head into the wall, immediately knocking him unconscious. The other survivors cried out in alarm or shock, and a few began to rush at Soft Step in desperation.
“Foals, all of you,” Soft growled, and she blinked to the other side of the room before the minotaurs could stab her. She managed to separate the two of them, and her magic turned the stone beneath one into quicksand. The warrior shouted in alarm before he fell through the earth as if it wasn’t even there, and the shifting, roiling rock turned solid again as she let go of the spell. The last remaining minotaur, the one with the skull on his head, stumbled to the side in alarm, and Soft knew by the way he gripped his spear that she’d terrified what was undoubtedly the primitives’ finest warrior. That fact alone made her impending victory all the more delicious.
Four hooves connected with the back of her skull, and Soft whirled around even as she staggered forward from the blow. Growling, she pulled Stargazer out of the air, her lips peeling back in a vicious snarl. “Fall still and accept your fate!” she roared, and she snagged hold of the stallion’s tail with her horn and whipped his face into the floor. Bone crunched and teeth flew loose, and the stallion twitched on the ground from the force of the blow.
Her hooves cracked the stone floor as she stomped over toward the other survivors. “You are making this much more difficult than it needs to be!” she roared, her magic lifting Ruse off of the ground and choking him until he stopped struggling. “I will win, regardless of whether or not you struggle like the insects you are! Lie down and die as I command it!”
She flung Ruse aside, advancing on the remaining survivors with a relentless fury. Coals, Gauze, and Champagne all tried to take her down in one quick burst of magic and flight, but the twisted alicorn’s horn pulsed and enveloped them all in a telekinetic hold. “Go to sleep,” she commanded them, and the pale magic holding them turned a sickly black. One by one, the three figures fell limp, and Soft dropped them into a pile on the floor.
Pain split through her sides, and Soft staggered from the sudden force of a blow from behind. When she looked down, she saw the tip of a spear emerging from her body just in front of her right wing. She could feel the length of the shaft running across her body from left to right, and when she turned around, the minotaur let go of the spear and stepped back in horrified awe.
Soft smiled and advanced on him at a leisurely, menacing pace. “Did you think it would be that simple?” she taunted the chief, her fanged grin glowing in the dim light of the shrine. “Did you think that I, the avatar and embodiment of all of His power, the instrument that will set Him free, could be killed by something as simple as that?”
The minotaur tripped and fell backwards, and he scooted away as fast as he could on his hands. Soft Step stopped next to one of the pedestals and plucked the unicorn figurine off of it. “Do you see this?” she asked, holding it between her feathers. “There may not be a moon down here, but this effigy was carved in his likeness. Even as the followers of the Usurper struck down my predecessor, one of His faithful remained hidden in their ranks. She carved this totem to resemble him and engraved it with tiny runes to give it his power. She knew that another opportunity like this would arise even as the Ponynesians crumbled to dust around her.”
She set the totem back on the pedestal and grabbed both ends of the spear in her wings. Grimacing, she snapped the head off with a twist of her feathers and pulled the entire bloody length out of her body with the other wing. Instead of dropping it, however, she twirled it in her grasp and marched closer to the minotaur. “His power flows to me through that totem, perhaps even stronger than the moon’s light. After all, this totem was drenched in blood less than a thousand years ago, and blood magic is the strongest magic of all. So long as I am in this room, I cannot be killed.”
She stopped in front of the minotaur and looked at the crimson-painted stick in her grasp. “Allow me to put this in terms your primitive mind can understand,” she said, leering down at the minotaur. Then, instead of dispatching him with magic, she swung the bloody stick as hard as she could at the minotaur’s skull. The spear haft exploded into millions of tiny splinters from the force of the blow, and the hit picked the minotaur up and flung him across the room where he fell in a crumpled heap against the wall. Soft took the remains of the stick she still held in her magic and dropped them into a fire bowl, then calmly looked around the room. Nobody was left standing to challenge her, and she grinned.
“Time grows short,” she said, and her magic lifted her sacrifices into the air and arranged them around the central dais. “But there is still more than enough to finish the ritual.”