//------------------------------// // 22 - Muzzle to Muzzle // Story: The GATE // by scifipony //------------------------------// Earth ponies, pegasi, dragons, and bipeds have a disadvantage compared to a unicorn when it comes to manipulation. The ability to quickly move one's hooves, lips, wings, claws, or hands into position to manipulate an object always proves proportional to an equation of mass and change in vector, subject to muscular control, strength, and inertia. All species can react similarly quickly, based on age and wakefulness, but a unicorn only has to cast a spell that is never subject to inertia or, to a reasonable extent, distance. In the "hand"-over of the weapon, the graybeard had a grip on the barrel of the barking arrow and on the fletching at the rear. The stallion had to grab for the trigger, getting a claw into the loop first, at a distance of about three hoof-lengths. And to aim, at me, at the same time. To the extent that Starlight had taught me anything about her quick-draw magic casting techniques—like I've said, she almost always won our magic duels—it was to immediately have in-horn a spell when the last one completed. I hadn't had one in my first battle with Lord Tirek in my angered mind when I teleported. But I'd learned much in the subsequent years. How my go-to use of Force ultimately failed to subdue Lord Tirek, and how I, multi-alicorn-enhanced, had devastated the lands and orchards around Ponyville, incidentally resulting the quarry Luna now mined for her portal mausoleum. My impulse to use Force had failed me miserably when Fizzlepop Berrytwist had conquered Canterlot. The apparitional reflection off their Chrysalis-throne-rock shields had destroyed a bridge and dumped us in the East Canterlot Cascade. We had been incredibly lucky statistically as well as kinetically that the seven of us missed the various extrusive crags and granite erosional structures going over the edge and during our descent! And that didn't include the boulders deposited in the lake...! What I had queued in Applejack's house turned out to be Levitate. And as burning numbers and vector math swirled into my horn and dashed across my vision, I realized it was because my subconscious had been working overtime. Nevertheless, as Graybeard's hand wrapped around the trigger mechanism, I shoved upwards. Hard. The sudden acceleration didn't rip the weapon free, but drew his forelegs, no, arms, with the barking arrow into the ceiling. He yelped as his hands struck. At which point he let go. A good thing, too. It occurred to me that had he succeeded in discharging the barking arrow, it would have pierced the roof and might have endangered the pegasi in the clouds. Thinking of pegasi condensed my subconscious into my conscious mind. I had instructed the pegasi royal guard what to do if the bipeds attacked. Levitate and Shield were mathematical transforms of the same spell arcana, with the former being the application of force as a vector at one or multiple points and the latter being a weaving of magic to form a fabric that could absorb force vectors. My reddish aura had formed a roiling cloud of sparkles at the muzzle and the rear of the barking arrow's fletching. As I pushed to make my horn calculate the needed transform, and Graybeard's salt-and-pepper mane contacted a wood rafter, I saw the aura bubble and spread. It thinned and became syrupy, and, as such, the magical liquid—or more aptly, liquid spiderweb—rushed into a dome shape as gravity and proximity to its magical source, myself, caused it to curve. Gravity took over from the acceleration I'd applied with Levitate and the biped began to fall. A good thing, that. From the roof, the stuttered Cracks! were deafening.