When the tendril of chaos finally finished forming itself, it didn't take a genius to see what the form had been inspired by.
It was a scorpion. It had the form of one at least. All the details were there: The legs, the claw-like pedipalps, the segmented tail ending on a stinger, and the general body shape. However, even someone who had never seen a scorpion in real life would be able to tell that it wasn't truly a scorpion.
It was far too big, for one thing, being easily twice as large as an ordinary house. The pedipalps were also weird, seemingly being made of crystal. And not only that, but something seemed to glisten inside them, something red like blood. The legs were different as well, as while the number of them was right, each and every one of them had something... odd, about them.
One was slightly longer than the others, leading to the backside of the scorpion being unbalanced. Another was metal, and sharp like a blade. Another looked like a birds leg, scaled up and with a black talon. Yet another was blue and seemed strangely malleable, like clay. And so on and so forth.
The stinger was strange too. It was split in two, one point being on fire, while the other was electrified. The carapace was layered in a way that should have made the body look bigger, but somehow didn't, and then there was the "face"...
The front part of the body was covered by a huge compound eye, but in the center of it were the chelicera and mouth. It was unspeakably weird.
"The drain effect is done, we can attack now." Applebloom, who had been running analysis on the enemy, spoke.
What she had used was a watered down version of Applejack's own magic, accessed via their bond magic. Since Applejack was her sister, she had the easiest time using it. Which was needed, because the Eyes of Truth were by far the hardest magic to access out of all of those they had bonds with.
Regardless, Spike was the first to go on the attack, just as they had planned. He jumped into the air, briefly manifesting gigantic dragon wings and flapping them exactly once. That produced gale-force winds that propelled him forward in an incredible acceleration. And yet they were perfectly controlled to avoid even touching his allies.
He dove forward, extended his right hand and shaped his magic. It formed a lance-like claw with a spiral pattern. He pierced at the eye, but one of the pedipalps suddenly shone with a ruby light, which created a barrier over it, helping it parry Spike's powerful attack.
Following that, the bird-like front leg vibrated for a moment, and Spike was hit by a veritable cannon of wind. But he had chosen to be the vanguard because he was tough enough to handle such things. His entire body briefly became reflective like a mirror, and the wind's force slipped around it, incapable of causing any harm. In fact, he used the wind to quickly force himself to the ground, following up with.
"Dragons's Charm: Earth Shaker!"
The earth under his fists moved like a wave, turning into a tsunami of rock that fell on top of the scorpion with the inevitability of a mountain, while the ground under it shook to ruin the footing of its multiple legs. The stinger shot into the wave like a missile, exploding and turning it into a rain of mud, the tail was only briefly stingless before it regenerated.
But Spike's attack had done its job, and exposed a weakpoint in the enemy's defense. The crusaders had teleported upwards, and then they shifted to using Sunset's bond, as they wanted the highest possible attack power.
"Bond Magic..." Sweetie Belle was the one who chanted. She was the best of the trio at pure destruction spells "Bombardment Blast!"
A rain of destructive shards of reactive magic crashed down onto the scorpion, battering every inch of its shell with dozens of explosions, causing a series of cracks to start appearing. The creature recoiled, but then its eye turned silver, and suddenly the scorpion vanished.
And it dropped down onto the Crusaders.
"Starlight Beam!" Sweetie shouted, reacting only barely fast enough. She shot a beam of power directly upwards, which had been so hastily put together that it could barely slow down the opponent.
Such wasn't her intention however. The recoil from her attack actually pushed them backwards, aided by Scootaloo's manipulation of their disk.
That earned them three whole seconds, enough for the pegasus filly to take the lead as Sweetie let Sunset's bond lapse.
"Bond Magic. Grand Wings!" Was the spell Scootaloo cast within that short period. Using Rainbow Dash's bond, she created a pair of wind construct wings, which she flapped once.
The Crusaders moved so fast it seemed like teleportation. They didn't go very far, but the simple side effects of that movement were enough to briefly disorient the scorpion while they barrel rolled from below it to just above it.
"Lightning Piercer!" Scootaloo followed up, creating a spearlike lightning bolt in her hoof and driving it down onto the enemy's shell.
At the last moment, she realized that the cracks in the shell had already healed, but it was too late to stop. Scootaloo hit the enemy and focused all her power into piercing as deep as possible, forcing the enemy downwards as she did it. Still, she couldn't pierce deep enough before two of the scorpion's legs wavered with power, and the trio was hit by a powerful soundwave that was also a cutting slash.
Scootaloo grunted in pain as a long cut opened on her flank and her bones and organs rattled. Such a close range attack had done a lot of damage, but she was still able to flap her wings to explode away from such a dangerous position.
Not that the scorpion would allow for them to escape so easily. It jumped off the air itself right at them, raising its metal like upwards to bring it down like a scythe. And yet they had gained enough time for Applebloom to take the lead, changing to Fluttershy's cutie mark and bringing out their greatest defense.
"Shield Spirit!" And a mirror appeared above them, showing the cutie mark of a familiar shield. The eyes of the trio shone with power as three layers of shield spells came into position.
They weren't yet capable of using World's Harmony, but by adapting some of Fluttershy's previous spells, they were able to borrow the might of Shining Armor, as interpreted by Fluttershy.
The enemy attack hit and pressed down with overwhelming momentum. One, two seconds and the first shield broke, one, two, three seconds and the second shield broke, one, two, three, four seconds... And the scorpion was hit from behind.
"Draconic Might: Mountain Breaker!" Spike punched out, hitting with such violence that one attack matched the destruction caused by the Crusader's earlier barrage.
He prepared a second punch while the Crusaders fell back to regain their metaphorical breath. However, the enemy's stinger came down, and he was forced to punch it instead.
It was a mistake.
As soon as his fist made contact, the stinger delivered its deadly payload. It was dragonsbane, the substance that was harmless for every other being, but reacted with dragon scales, going through them and changing into a lethal poison.
There was very little of it, but Spike's body was wracked with unimaginable pain. He was unable to even move, much less defend himself when the tail came back for another sting.
"Double Bond!" The voices of Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle shouted in unison.
And in the very next moment, the scorpion was hit from below with a punch that contained a powerful destructive spell, sending it flying upwards. It was the Crusaders, who now had the Cutie Marks of both Rainbow Dash and Sunset hovering above them. Connecting to two destinies at once increased the burden considerably, but the three could still handle it.
Combining Rainbow Dash's weather control and Sunset's Magic Enhance turned the Crusaders into a meteor-like form that shot through the battlefield at dizzying speeds, hitting the enemy with destructive attacks at close range. But after a few seconds of that, the scorpion adapted. One of its legs lit up in flames, causing the entire area to heat up like a furnace. The incredible heat disrupted the surrounding air, preventing the trio from moving as fast as they had.
And the enemy wouldn't let them get away and regain speed. It stayed on them like they were connected by a short string, and the battle devolved into a close range battle of spells and physical might, while the Crusaders had to endure the powerful heat of the leg.
Until the scorpion was suddenly hit by a vortex of cutting wind, disrupting its rhythm and allowing the Crusaders to escape.
The source of the attack was Spike, who had stopped in the air. His body was completely red, but not because of Draconic Change. Instead...
"Shed Scale." He announced and took a step forward.
That step had an effect similar to that of a volcano erupting. The air itself seemed to explode and Spike appeared to have teleported directly next to the opponent instead of moving there normally. He sent a punch out, and the hit was like a falling meteor, the shell around the area was rendered into pieces, exposing the interior.
That was Shed Scale. Spike's magic designed around sacrifice. By giving up the defense of his scales, he became a lot more vulnerable, but received exceeding power in exchange. The fact that dragonsbane would no longer work was just a bonus.
But despite the powerful attack, the monster wasn't staggered. It lit six legs at once, creating a multi-elemental omnidirectional barrage of attack spells that Spike had to move away from, due to his lowered defenses.
The fight was reaching its boiling point.
+0+
Trixie had a plan. However, it wasn't the kind of sudden genius breakthrough that would turn the tables immediately. She had simply found one shining light of possibility of victory, something she would have to struggle in order to reach.
She continued the fight with a renewed resolve, and her mind started doing complex calculations. She had fought for long enough, and moved around enough, that she had managed to get a very precise picture of the structure of that subspace. In a sense, it could be said that her entrapment had been a blessing in disguise, as it would be much harder to calculate what she needed out in the constantly shifting real world.
Even then, it took two whole minutes until Trixie was ready for the next phase of her plan. Setting off a sphere of magic containing three different spells, she distracted the construct long enough to open the distance again, then focused all her power into setting up an extraordinarily complex sigil on the ground, before advancing on the enemy again.
The construct prepared a spell to destroy the sigil, but Trixie wouldn't allow that, so she did the only thing she could to prevent it... Trixie deliberately lowered her shields and exposed herself to attack. The construct shifted targets at the last moment and shot her with the destructive magic, which Trixie wouldn't be able to dodge at such a short distance.
But dodging had never been Trixie's plan anyway. She jumped backwards and erected a hasty protective barrier, at the same time directing her vital spots away from the area of impact.
The hit still almost caused her to faint, opening a deep gouge on her side and shedding blood. Still, Trixie borrowed the momentum of the attack to move away again, immediately putting another sigil on the ground and jumping forward again.
Trixie's assumption appeared to have been correct. The enemy was smart enough to try and destroy such obvious setups, but as a construct, it had very firm priorities, and if there was a chance to truly wound Trixie deeply, it had no choice but to take it. As such, Trixie kept doing her setup, allowing the enemy to heavily injure her again and again, shedding blood as the price to advance her plan. Trixie knew Twilight would be frowning if she was there, but that only made her more determined to succeed, even as it gradually became harder and harder to even move her body.
Trixie's vision turned hazy from bloodloss, and she lost the feeling on her flank. Her mind was in a delicate state between consciousness and unconsciousness... It was the perfect state for what she was about to do. Almost without meaning to, she started to chant.
"As the night falls and the shadows grow...
I devour the Infinite and forge the Dream..."
Her movements became even faster and surer as she was laying the final sigils. A normal opponent would have been alarmed, but all that the construct could understand was that Trixie's life was hanging by an increasingly frayed thread, so it kept going.
"The Self is nothing...
And the Self is everything..."
Finally, Trixie set down the last of the sigils, and spoke the last lines of her spell.
"A such, the Self is the World, and the World is the Self...
For in the Realms of the Unreal, Reality and Illusion... Are the Same."
The magic activated, and it not so much spread around the world as it simply became such that it had always been there all along. Except for the construct, everything in the space, and even the very space itself, and even Trixie herself... Changed. They all became hazy and unclear, seemingly less solid, less detailed. Like a dream, like an Illusion.
And in the very next moment, Trixie vanished.
+0+
The upper hand the Knights had on Chrysalis did not last long. After a few hits she seemed to regain her balance and sped away from the attacks, flying to an area where she had three entire seconds of freedom before the Knights could reach her, which was more than enough time for her next action.
"Flesh Doubles..." She announced in a low voice that still managed to carry across the battlefield perfectly.
The results of her technique were horrifying in several different meanings of the word. He sides bulged and expanded like the belly of a pregnant mare, but they continued expanding even beyond that, reaching a point where each of the fleshy growths was the same size as Chrysalis' original body.
With a grunt from Chrysalis, the two growths split from her body, at the same time as they shifted into a very familiar form.
It was Chrysalis. Both of them had turned into copies of Chrysalis. The three seconds ended, and Rainbow Dash arrived, punching out with a vortex of wind in her hoof. The left side Chrysalis waved a leg and blood shot out from beneath her shell, mixing with the air and turning into a powerful blade of wind.
Rainbow realized that she couldn't affect that wind, couldn't overpower Chrysalis' blood control of it. She shifted her attack into a parry, hitting the blade only briefly to disrupt its trajetory, and yet a long cut appeared on her leg. At the same time, a second Chrysalis flew at the second Knight to arrive, Fluttershy. Reaching her with unreal speed and punching out at the pegasus' eagle construct.
The hit sounded like the air itself was exploding, and Fluttershy was launched backwards, even her vaunted defense unable to completely mitigate the damage. And at the same time as that, the third Chrysalis (the original) teleported away from her position. But instead of bringing only her own body, she purposedly grabbed along a huge sphere of air from around herself.
As a result, most of the Knights were only able to tell her destination point in a very general sense, being incapable of any exact predictions. They still prepared for her arrival as much as they could in the brief instant it took for the teleport to complete, but they weren't ready for Chrysalis to have heated all the air to the point of plasma while in transit, the result being that the arrival was more like a localized volcanic eruption that distracted the Knights nearby.
It distracted them enough for Chrysalis to form and shoot a wickedly sharp black spike that flew at supersonic speeds straight at Rarity. The unicorn already had her swords raised, and condensed a barrier of water and earth to receive the attack, and she also had her rebirth armor shift similarly, but even so the hit was so strong that Rarity almost vomited blood just from the effect of the shockwave.
And the first Chrysalis to attack proceeded to teleport instead of pressing her attack on Dash. She appeared right beside Pinkie, managing to force her teleportation despite the earth pony having deliberately leaked a huge amount of chaos magic to disrupt it. Still, she was slower due to that, so Pinkie had time to defend herself.
"Emotion Charge: Pure Sorrow." She declared.
Her transformation was instant. In one moment she was regular Pinkie Pie, but in the next moment she appeared to have been reduced in size, her color was a dirty white, and a faint mist surrounded her.
Chrysalis opened her mouth as spat out a blast of energy, had hit the mist like it was a solid shield, causing a powerful explosion. Pinkie's expression changed slightly, showing that she was hurt, though her body didn't show any marks.
Fluttershy's own Chrysalis dove down at extreme speeds at Twilight, who reacted fastest of all:
"Reaction: Momentum Breaker." She cast.
A sphere of space above her became colored a sickly yellow, and when Chrysalis passed through it, her speed fell to a quarter of what it had been before, giving Twilight enough time to teleport away from the impact radius.
And since she had been trying to attack all of them, it was no surprise that the Chrysalis that attacked Rarity followed up with a strike on Applejack, teleporting again and showering her with created spikes. The earth pony dealt with that better than any of the others, though, Stepping a few consecutive times to avoid every spike and even retaliating with a long range punch that hit Chrysalis in the horn and momentarily stunned her.
It wouldn't have been possible before, but with Chrysalis' power split into three, her resistance was low enough. Applejack tried to take advantage of that, but Chrysalis disappeared, and the same was true of the Chrysalis who had attacked Pinkie. Both of them reappeared beside the third Chrysalis, and they glared at Applejack as a unit.
Chrysalis had realized what the earth pony was doing. Her future vision allowed her to warn the others of Chrysalis attacks, making it so they could defend more easily and accurately. That was an advantage the changeling queen could not allow them to posses.
As one, the three muttered three words under their breath:
"Curse of Blackness..."
And then, they shaped their forelegs into spikes and pierced their own eyes. Applejack was barely able to contain a scream, as she felt like her own eyes had been pierced as well. Opening them up again, she was startled to realize that her future vision had been blocked.
'A curse... She removed her own vision to block my future sight...' Applejack realized, and passed the information to the others immediately, so they could prepare for not having any warning.
Applejack expected Chrysalis to follow up by focus her attack on one of them, but instead, two of the Chrysalises started shaking, cracks appearing all over their shells, those cracks spread to cover their entire bodies, at the same time as the shaking became ever stronger, and a dangerous looking light started to leak from the cracks.
And they exploded into tens of thousands of shell shards that rained down all around the battlefield.
Feeling the danger, the Knights tried to stay away from the falling shells, but there were just too many, and as they fell those shells started to bubble and crack even further, and they turned a brilliant white...
"World's Harmony!" Fluttershy shouted, protecting them all with her magic.
The shells exploded with a power that was incomprehensible based on their size. The battlefield briefly became an apocalyptic scene as if the world was ending.
And when it was over Fluttershy was revealed to be in bad shape. Her coat was covered in injuries and missing patches, her legs were unsteady, and was vomiting blood. But her eyes were still clear, and the World's Harmony was still up. No one else had been hurt.
"Restoration!" Rarity shouted, raising her swords.
That was the magic she had previously used to restore a broken inanimate object to its previous state. But that wasn't the true purpose of that power. She actually learned it to use the spell as a healing magic. That was something she had been trying to learn for a while, as Trixie had quickly realized that Rarity was well suited for learning such spells.
The magic swept over the group, mostly focused on Fluttershy, but also swirling around the other Knights who had been injured. The spell was a combination of extremely accurate telekinesis as well as some biological manipulation in order to build up extra material to replace what had been lost. Either way, its effectiveness could not be understated, as it literally rebuilt its targets, inside and out.
Thankfully enough, it seemed that using that attack had taken a lot out of Chrysalis, so she didn't return to attacking right away, giving time for Rarity to do her magic, but by the time it was over, Chrysalis was already diving towards her next target.
It was Fluttershy. Everypony had a brief period of confusion while they wondered what Chrysalis wanted to do, but before any conclusions could be reached, Chrysalis pulled back a leg and punched at Fluttershy.
"Gah!" That wasn't Fluttershy's voice.
Applejack turned and saw that Rarity appeared to have been hit in the head. She was woozy, even though her armor had obviously shifted to try and protect her.
Applejack's eyes widened as she realized what had happened.
'Chrysalis hit Rarity through the World's Harmony... She managed to target Fluttershy in such a way that the energy of the attack would be transferred to Rarity's position... How is that possible?'
But her thoughts were interrupted when she saw Chrysalis move her head slightly and realized that she was the next target.