//------------------------------// // (Past Chapter 22): Breather // Story: The Unique Properties of Dark Magic // by Shadestyle //------------------------------// Glitter Bomb finally manages to track down Weiss, the unicorn having been hanging out on the surface by himself, his voice ringing out over the countryside as he reclines in one of the boiling geysers that had been dug out to relieve the water pressure that the Kingdom Heart had been making. ♪"Fighting crime "Trying to save the world "Here they come just in time "The Power~puff Girls!"♪ he sings, plinking at a small lute of some kind. The instrument makes several noises that a stringed instrument is incapable of. "I didn't know you could play." Glitter says, walking next to the young ruler. He still remembers when, just barely a year ago, the individual before him had been nothing but a scrawny big-nosed and rat-like unicorn. Now he's a pudgier big-nosed, rat-like unicorn. In the most... wholesome way possible. The music trails off. "I can't play a damn thing. The uke is enchanted and the strings are fake." Weiss says with an easy expression, wiggling his fingers through the illusory strings of the "Uke", where they pass through without making a sound. "Then why play it? If it's fake and all," Glitter responds, slowly meandering around to the point of his meeting with the ruler. Weiss doesn't answer for a long couple of moments, setting the instrument on the ground next to him as he sinks into the boiling water with a hum. "It's fun to play pretend," Weiss explains. "I've always liked the idea of playing an instrument. Don't have the patience for it, though," After a moment, he splashes the bubbling water lightly. "Come on in, the water's fine." Glitter shakes his head. "No time, sorry. I just wanted to tell you, Freezeflame Zone is nearing completion. We've already dug out the chambers and moved in the Janus tapestries. All that's left now is to let the spooks move in." Weiss huffs with silent laughter, slapping a white palm over his face. "Gosh! Don't let them hear you call them that!" Glitter's mustache ruffles with the silent huff of air he also releases. "I've heard them calling us 'Wallies', I think I'm vindicated." Weiss's helpless snorting laughter continues as Glitter turns and walks off. He pauses for a moment. "Weiss, there's some bad news waiting for you, but it's not urgent. So take your time, alright?" Glitter says, making Weiss's expression morph instantly into his serious mask. "Well, there's nothing I'm fonder of than bad news, Glitter, so I'll go ahead and deal with it. We'll talk on the way," Weiss responds, climbing out of the pool and leaving his ukulele behind as he trots up next to the disappointed Glitter Bomb. That kid is as tense as a sack of rocks, Glitter can't help but think. Sombra's black armor hides his wounds admirably, a necessity when dealing with scum like this, where any weakness demands betrayal. "For the sake of profiting us both, I have brought you all here." "Where I cannot, you will. I will make you all capable of standing against my enemy, and you will all be paid so vastly by my quest's end that there will be no doubt who are the richest creatures on this planet." Before him lie an assortment of the world's nastiest. Snakes and dragons, vile demons, and even a few more reasonable members of moose-kind. Sombra ensures at least ten feet remain between him and those moose he has recruited. He despises this. Allowing this scum to pollute his halls, promising them treasure when under any other circumstances, they would be happy with servitude. Well, not happy, more "Utterly possessed by mind-controlling magic." But as his tests had clearly shown, He's unable to even indirectly make headway into the Shadow Realm. Golems and spells erupt into flames on the spot, and Mind-controlled Crystal Soldiers are swiftly apprehended by all manner of machines and guards. Sombra's own slaves aren't that capable of executing complex commands, which means the Sage of Darkness must have another method to coerce them into action. It's honestly not a terrible idea, Sombra thinks, to keep a few ponies around free of mind control. Thanks to the snake doctor known as "Mercy", Sombra has been able to relax his micromanagement to a small degree. Now he doesn't have to worry about ponies fishing around to remove the Black Crystal chips giving him control. He can simply have Mercy implant them in more sensitive locations. Sombra did not understand a lot of what Mercy had rambled on about, but apparently, so long as Sombra produces the Black Crystals in a particular shape, Mercy can surgically replace parts of a pony's heart with the crystals. A process that is irreversible with modern medicine, based on Mercy's testimony. Sombra returns his attention to the mercenaries in front of him. "If you will, servants will take you all to your rooms. Tomorrow, we will discuss your duties as loyal contractors to the Crystal Empire." The assortment of thugs mostly just shrug, uncaring of Sombra's words in favor of focusing on their pay. When the last glassy-eyed pony slave guides their charge out of the throne room, Sombra snarls at their insolence. If they are to work for him, they will give him the respect he is due. Perhaps Mercy would be interested in the opportunity to perform their heart-collar surgery on these money-hungry fools as they sleep. Just as a bit of added insurance. Yes... That's an idea that brings a bit more peace to Sombra's heart, in light of his difficult circumstances right now. Professor Axiom and Dr. Real are both in the same room. Considering their rivalry, I can see why this might be bad news. Both of them are staring at a camera feed from one of Wacky Workbench's seal-cells, where a Crystal Pony in full-plate is mindlessly attacking the walls with the halberd in its teeth. Weak blows failing to dent the reinforced material. "As you can probably tell sir, we don't have a solution to this yet," Axiom says, demonstrating his mastery of the virtual systems by drawing up the scans of the pony in question, a bright red spot in their chest marking the presence of a dark magic relic. "Couldn't we use a portal to surgically remove it?" I ask, zooming in to see the implanted mind-control device. Dr. Real shakes his head, gesturing to the hologram to rotate it around for a better view. "The crystal has been carved into an artificial heart valve, and used to replace the pony's existing one, and these spines here," he points to the small grey spots in the scan, "They're enchanted with growth charms, and their shape would make the wounds impossible to stitch up. Whoever did this, they know how to make it impossible to operate safely." "We're working as fast as we can, but as it stands, this pony has an extremely high chance of dying on the table if we attempted a removal. There were also a few other crystals implanted in other locations, but we were able to remove those safely, due to them being in less difficult areas." Dr. Real says, gesturing to a plate filled with black gems. Each one churning with smoke and possessiveness. I feel like destroying them on the spot but restrain myself. They will need to be researched. "How many ponies like this have we captured so far?" I ask. Professor Axiom responds to my question. "Only three, including Doctor Healing," Axiom says, gesturing to the effectively zombified pony attacking the walls. So they knew him? "Captain Helmsplitter believes that Sombra used them as an experiment. The Kingdom Heart, having access to the knowledge of our doctors, is aware that it can't afford to burn away the mind-control arrays in the ponies and so the Black Flames aren't able to touch them or ignite properly for fear of harming them." I breathe through my nose slowly. "That's alright. We accounted for the fact that the Kingdom Heart wasn't going to be an infallible defense. Are any of our sedatives effective on these ponies?" "A few," Dr. Real nods. I stare at the practical zombie tackling the walls after they had dropped their halberd in a stupor. "I want the best option for sedating them mass produced. Hook them up to an isolated Moon Crystal Array. Princess Luna has been harping about how vulnerable Moon Crystals could theoretically make a pony's mind. Maybe there's something we can do with that." The two doctors nod nervously, marking my plans down on their respective holopads. I turn to the imprisoned Crystal Pony. "Were you close?" I ask, not bothering to specify which of the two doctors I'm addressing. They look between one another. "Most ponies of science know one another," Dr. Real says. "Crystal Healing was... is an extremely intelligent doctor. My work was based on his regenerative crystal patents." I hum. "I'm sorry to hear it. We'll have to work hard to find a solution." I need to return to my studies, and soon. If I can just discover the right Dark Spell, I know I can help these ponies. Cold Spot is feeling the pressures of his peers right now, but his will is strong, and he will resist! "Come on, we just want to see it! Surely that won't be a problem!" Eclipse says, her eyes seemingly growing larger as she activates the secret technique that all fillies possess. The pout. He will resist! "Weiss said I should never show it to anypony unless the time is right though..." he says meekly, hoping his words will make the filly back off. "Oh come on Spot, whatever it is you've got, I've seen worse." Priss snarks from one of the room's corners, busy writing down ideas for insults and taunts that she had felt inspired to record for future generations to enjoy and suffer from. Cool Spot groans as Eclipse's pout intensity slowly grows to nuclear levels. "But it's really embarrassing..." he attempts, before realizing that such a thing won't save him from them. At this point, even Oil Slick gives a sidelong look. "I'm not even interested in them and you've got me curious now." He returns to his cards. "You might as well get it over with, Eclipse has science on the brain. Just transform already so she can satisfy her hunger for Golem Design Specs." Cool Spot moans piteously, before striking a pose and shouting. "Lightning of Battle, Reveal my Heart! Ixion!" The activation phrase said, his Keldeo-Model form is replaced as portals run up and down his sides, replacing his sword-like horn and blue/tan watery coloration with the White and Navy coloration and the curved harpoon-like horn of the Ixion. The crackle of lightning, hulking size and smell of ozone do absolutely nothing to stop Priss from laughing uproariously at his small blush and nervous demeanor. "I'm sorry Spot! It's just... The look on your face is too much!" she wheezes, eyes locked on and her prose discarded as she watches the easily elephant-sized horse turn their head in a vain effort to hide the expanding flush coating their face. "Mmm," Cool Spot moans, looking down. "Priss! Be nice! Sometimes a pony just has to use a... creative incantation. There's nothing wrong with that!" Eclipse shouts, whipping out her own personal scanning wand and patting Cool Spot to get him to lay down for her attempts at stealing Weiss's secrets. "Oh wow, it's like a tiny factory!" she shouts, looking at the readings with awe. "What is? It all looks like gobbledygook to me," Priss claims, looking over Eclipse's shoulder. She points to a small patch of cells growing on what seems to be a grain of some tiny crystal. "Those are dragon stem cells, just like the ones Weiss's arms use, but see here? They're actually using Royal Crystal Growth to cultivate crystals, which the cells then break down using their inherent dragon magic for nutrition, and the whole thing is powered using energy drawn from Cool Spot, and stored in a sort of jellified temporal space. It's like a self-contained ecosystem, just to keep this body up and running." "Genius..." Priss says with sarcastic awe, slapping her hooves to her cheeks. Eclipse's eyes narrow as she bats her friend away. "You're no fun at all. Ok Cool Spot, you can turn back now, I've finished stealing Weiss's blueprints for this model," she says blithely. The childish Windigo lets out a bassy sigh of relief, allowing the transformation to revert him back to his smaller, more adorable pony-like form. "So, why did you want to steal these blueprints anyway? You know Weiss made it illegal to do weird stuff with healing magic, right?" Oil Slick says, watching his friend cautiously in case he needs to start acting like the oldest pony there. Which he is. Eclipse waves him off. "I'm just doing theory work right now. If I come up with any ideas, I'll just send them to Weiss and get a Writ of Permission to use one of the labs. He only made it illegal to do that stuff without his permission. Big difference." Oil Slick's eyebrows raise. "If you say so." "You know, I thought friendly feelings made your kind sick. Any reason why my club is so popular?" Drop Kick asks, the burly mare refilling Queen Cold's drink. "Love is like a guardian. It can slay, but only to protect." Queen Cold says, sipping the drink as slowly as she can, to avoid her stubby little nubs from spilling it again. "Your club might be full of friends and family, but three ponies just got wheeled out of here covered in bruises in the last hour. If you replaced that sort of aggression with flowers, you might be lucky to get as many bees," she says, watching Windigo in various states of ridiculousness, from one in a Waifu-Model soundly whipping all of their opponents at hoof wrestling, to the disembodied specter providing ice packs to the Longma who are coming fresh out of their drunken brawls. Drop Kick smiles. "Well, as long as everyone's having fun, it's no sweat off my back." She finishes wiping down the counter, and a few minutes of silent contemplation later, a prissy looking stallion comes behind the counter, relieving Drop Kick of her duty. "Looks like Salt Flat's here. Want to pack that drink up and continue our conversation elsewhere?" Drop asks, reaching for the disposable glasses right behind the gigantic emerald goblets Weiss had sent over weeks ago. Cold shrugs her tiny shoulders. "As long as you don't mind that I may fall asleep through most of it. Now that I can, I've been sleeping as often as possible." Drop Kick smirks. "Well, I'll try not to interrupt your naptime, then." With that, the gigantic barkeep finishes packing away a refill of her majesty's drink of choice, before pulling the small Windigo-Queen-turned-egg-pokemon onto her back. "I know a good spot. There's a maintenance tunnel that comes out right in front of the Kingdom Heart. You can practically see the whole damn thing from there," Drop Kick claims, walking out of the Steam Drill bar that she had been working at for the past couple of months. "I believe I would enjoy that." Queen Cold smiles, before remembering how heart-meltingly adorable her current state is and schooling her expression into something more neutral and respectable. ...She'll worry about it less when they get there. I throw three separate punches at Iron Diamond, who blocks them all with the shield attached to his shoulder, and a pretty complicated-looking movement. Seeing him turning around with my attack as an excuse, I almost panic. Ever since I finished my new combat arms, he had been insisting I wear those instead of my dress arms for all of our training sessions. He had also started actually kicking me, which explains my extreme hesitance to be anywhere behind him. This time, however, I'm prepared. I tackle him in the side, his hooves skidding across the ground as he tries to get purchase on the smooth floor, before giving up and deploying the claws in his hoof to stab into it. Knowing full well what that means, I pull myself over him and onto his other side like a twisted game of leapfrog, avoiding the slash that he throws out as the mechanical arm unfolds from his shoulder, automatically trying to attack anything at his left side. Now that I'm on his right side, with his claw still stuck in the floor and his guard open, I pull back and unload one hard overhand punch, actually leaning forward as I drive my back legs out and drop my front legs out from under me. With all of this combined, almost one metric ton of PSI is driven directly into Iron Diamond's back, pulling his claw out of the ground and moving him a few inches to the side. The sole circular bruise blooming on his back and his hard, attentive glare tell me how pleased he was with that. No matter how bruised and battered I might have been from today's training session, this was a win for me. "It's almost like a human buck." Iron repeats himself. He had said the same thing when I started showing him videos of everything I could remember, unedited. Where before, I had been manually converting all of my reference material into what I thought was pony-friendly forms, it was clear from the first few minutes of Iron Diamond watching the "Human" version of the various fight scenes that had pissed him off so badly in the past that something was different. Namely, that he didn't cringe a single time at the sight of Jotaro and Dio punching the shit out of one another. A scene that in it's ponified form had made him so sickened that he kicked apart the projector and ended the viewing session right there. Oh sure, cartoons and videogames don't portray martial-arts with even the slightest bit of realism, but apparently, replacing all the characters with quadrupeds pushed it from unrealistic to disturbingly impossible and surreal for any pony with a hint of fighting experience. After I came clean with Iron Diamond about what I used to be, he arrived at training the next day over an hour late with simplistic drawings of anatomical figures in various positions, their mass and vector calculations, and a set of crude golem arms mounted on his shoulders, which he had been using to experiment. He explained to me that he had what he needed to start theorizing on how I should be fighting, and how apparently, my limbs were never going to be suitable for extending the range at which I could fight. Because they were going to shorten it instead. A pony needs a lot of space when they're fighting. Space to run, space to turn, and even a good foot and a half of space just to kick properly. Humans, however, could start and end a fight without moving from where they were standing. He went on to refine what he had devised, spending nights poring over the specifications of my arms and working out how I can exert the largest amounts of force and obtain the largest possible advantages in physical combat. He's been drilling it into me every day since then. Celestia huddles in the igloo they had constructed for shelter while prodding and poking Sombra's Anti-Alicorn barrier for a fault or weakness. Or should she say, while Luna prods the barrier, as Celestia had always lacked the patience to learn the arts that Luna had. Celestia gives her characteristic snarl, rubbing some feeling into her hooves to save on magic. If there's one thing both she and Luna agree on, it's the separation of Business and Pleasure. In spite of the incredibly spartan conditions of their encampment, the idea of having anything more than this small hole in the ice is unthinkable to both of the sisters. Speaking from pure pragmatism alone, nothing would sicken them more than experiencing common comforts while ponies are suffering. It is, therefore, less of a burden on them both to sleep out in the elements during excursions like these, where protection from the elements is not an absolute necessity. After all, what animal could threaten them? And if it could threaten them, what walls could protect two of Equestria's mightiest, where their spellcraft and strength of body cannot? All of this said, Celestia is not a fan of the cold. Her miles of vision have given her the unique pleasure of being envious of the Shadow Realm right this moment, as she can quite literally see the steamy pools dotting its land. Oh, what heavenly pleasure one of those must be, for them to be outright boiling. Groaning, Celestia tears her eyes away from the sight and firmly affixes her gaze back on the task at hand. A year. That's how long Celestia and Luna have been tirelessly searching Sombra's barrier for a weakness. Whenever Celestia and Luna have had to deal with these barriers, the worry has always remained the same. Whether or not they would miss the problem to be solved by a few decades by the time they destroy the barrier keeping them out. It's always the same story. Celestia hopes against hope that the number of Anti-Alicorn spells remaining unknown to them has almost been exhausted. Each time one is discovered, it leads to another isolated dark age like this one. Some twisted thing using it to keep Equestria's twin goddesses away long enough to exact horror. If Celestia and Luna weren't Tireless, then these dark magics would be very tiring to deal with, century after century. Celestia spots Luna in the distance, some twenty or so miles away, and approaching. A failure, then. Luna and Celestia had both agreed that should the barrier be faulted, Luna would give a signal for Celestia to approach as well. Ahh well. Tomorrow will be another day of things to try. "Celestia and I had watched your fight, Weiss." I chuckle, looking over various blueprints in the Virtual Dream. "Yeah, they got clapped in HD." I clap to accentuate my point. Luna's eyebrow raises, making me cough nervously with realization. "Right, right. Clapping someone in HD roughly conveys the idea that you spanked their rear, the 'Clap', and that you did so in such a way that recordings of it warrant being made in 'High Definition to capture just how thoroughly they had been clapped. the 'HD'," I explain, bringing up the specs for Project Ultima Weapon. The sight distracts Luna, who had been silently mouthing the phrase to herself, testing it for usability in the future. "What manner of monster is that? I've never seen such a thing before." Luna says, walking around the digital rendition of my latest plan. "Not a monster. A golem. I call it Ultima Weapon. It's going to be equipped with quite a few neat toys, if I do say so myself." Luna chortles. "You designed this? Why, it looks like a statue of Tirek had-" she guffaws helplessly, making the entire virtual dream shake and shudder. "Luna, please, I don't want to replace this data," I calmly request, prompting her to slowly draw back in her laughter, and allow me to re-establish the stability of the dream. "Ahh, it looks as though you tarred and feathered Tirek with knives! What manner of attack could it have, save enthusiastic hugs?!" Luna snickers, actual nickering entering her laughter. "Well, for one, the plan is for it to be able to generate and fire a kugelblitz." "Pardon?" Luna questions, staring at me with confusion. "You know, a kugelblitz, ball lightning. A miniature black hole?" Luna gives me an uneasy, slightly patronizing look. "Weiss, I know of black holes, I also know they involve phenomenal energy and pressure. Miniature is not a word that I have ever applied to one." I shrug. "Well, this weapon will be applying that word to them. Fake gravity from a modified version of Foxfire Enchantments, a source of electrons from my own special Dragon Lightning, and the end result fired once it becomes a singularity." Luna looks at my creation more approvingly than she did before. "You claim that gravity and lightning alone can create a black hole?" My eyebrows crinkling with confusion, and a tiny amount of unease, I nod my head. "Intriguing. I'll keep that in mind. It might prove... useful to me." Oh fuck me, she can't actually make those, right? She disappears from the dream like a soap bubble popping, and I'm aware of the fact that I've broken out into a cold sweat. I've got to stop telling her things.