Up until a few seconds ago, Starlight had been quite proud of herself for how she’d stood up to Lex Legis without flinching.
She knew she was in a bad position, with the wounds and the fatigue that she’d accumulated fighting off his servitors and students. Even so, she hadn’t trembled when she’d first laid eyes on the admittedly intimidating sight of his shadow-form. Seeing the free-floating patch of writhing darkness that was his body had been something out of a nightmare, particularly in conjunction with his eyes. The way they’d projected malevolence had only been heightened by their alien colors, and being subject to their gaze had sent a shudder down Starlight’s spine.
Lex’s presence after he’d changed back into his pony-self had been only marginally less threatening. Despite no longer looking like something that would cause most ponies to wake up screaming, he still projected an ominous aura. Everything about him – his body language, the expression on his face, the contemptuous way he’d spoken – radiated a palpable sense of menace, as though he was just waiting to unleash his wrath on anything that provoked him.
But even knowing that she’d done exactly that, Starlight had met Lex’s gaze – as a pony and a shadow – without backing down.
Now, however, she couldn’t help but give ground, falling back as Lex advanced on her. “Sonata!” she yelled, somehow managing to keep her voice steady, rather than turning into a shriek of fright. “What am I looking at?!”
When no answer came, Starlight managed to wrench her eyes away from the monster that was moving toward her, looking back at where her friends had retreated. “Sonata!”
But the mare in question, her eyes wide and her jaw hanging open, could only shake her head dumbly, the sight making Starlight bite back a panicked curse. Lex hadn’t been bluffing; whatever magic he’d just used, it wasn’t something that Sonata knew about. Which meant that she needed to figure out what he’d done and how to deal with it, fast.
At a glance, Lex’s transformation was subtle. Someone who only looked at him for a split-second might have thought that nothing had changed at all, and that he was just in his pony body. But if they’d looked for even a few moments longer, they would immediately have realized that wasn’t the case, although they would have been hard-pressed to describe what they were seeing. Even Starlight, watching as Lex closed the distance between them, was having a difficult time figuring out what she was seeing when she looked at him.
It was like his body was flickering somehow, with a momentary field of darkness interrupting her view of him, and only of him, almost too fast to be seen. It made his motions appear stilted and jerky, with each small movement he made now being visually isolated rather than flowing smoothly into each other. It was as though he were under a strobe light or was being displayed by a filmstrip with too few frames. The sole exceptions were his eyes; still glowing green and purple, their visual continuity was the only part of him that remained uninterrupted. Somehow, that only made the way they were locked onto her all the more terrifying.
Starlight had a vague sense that had she been explaining the sight of Lex to somepony else, it wouldn’t have sounded frightening, but seeing him up close right now was horrific. The way every move he made seemed disconnected gave him an alien quality that was repulsive on a primal level, like looking at a giant spider. Starlight had little doubt that the fact that she was seeing it in broad daylight, surrounded by other ponies, was the only reason she hadn’t run away screaming.
And the slow, almost casual way that Lex was stalking toward her didn’t help.
But Starlight had come too far to back down now. Stamping a hoof, she concentrated on the ache in her leg, using it to make herself focus. “You think your little Nightmare Night parlor trick scares me?!” she yelled, forcing steel into her voice. “I’ll do to you what I did to all those other ponies you’ve deluded!” Without giving him a chance to react, she reared her head back, her horn lighting up as she thrust it forward and unleashed a magical blast at Lex.
Lex moved in a way that might have been an attempt to dodge – it was hard to tell – but any satisfaction Starlight felt at the sight died a half-second later as she watched the beam of energy pass through him with no apparent effect. Or at least, almost no effect; for a moment Lex halted his advance, glancing back at where the beam had struck the side of the house that he’d emerged onto the battlefield from, the building now sporting a sizeable hole in one wall. Then he looked back at her…and smiled darkly, continuing his advance.
Feeling her blood run cold, Starlight realized she had five or six seconds to come up with an alternative plan.
Then Lex would be upon her.
A heady sense of satisfaction flowed through Lex as he strode toward Starlight.
Part of that was purely academic. Although he’d run some brief experiments with what he was doing now during what little free time he’d been able to spare over the last several days, this was the first proper field test. So far it was working exactly as he’d expected. The fact that it was already giving him a not-inconsiderable advantage over Starlight Glimmer was simply a bonus.
As much as Lex was aware of the old adage about the best defense being a good offense, he had always found fault with that axiom. Far better to have a defense that would allow you to mount a good offense. And to a large degree, his shadow-form did just that. Being impervious to non-magical attacks, and highly resistant to most magical ones, it was the ideal state for engaging in a battle of magic.
And yet, it was still imperfect.
For all the advantages that it conferred, turning into a shadow isolated Lex from the non-continuous functions of his magic items. While the passive defenses of his cloak, amulet, and ring were undiminished even when he became incorporeal, he wasn’t able to use the magic in his circlet when it had turned into part of his shadow-body. That was why he’d needed to return to being a pony prior to fighting Starlight, since he wouldn’t have been able to access, much less enhance, its ability to view the magical spectrum otherwise.
Nor was he able to access any of the stored items on his person in that state. Spells that required a material component to activate – such as the weak healing spell he’d used on Fruit Crunch – were stored in his saddlebag, which was inaccessible to him as a shadow. The same had been true for the five gems now circling him, since he’d kept them there when not in use.
And of course, he couldn’t physically interact with the material world when he was in shadow-form. Certainly, he could still use telekinesis while immaterial, but that only allowed for a limited range of motor functions, and even augmenting it could only do so much for so long. He could still create black crystals while incorporeal, but doing so in any notable quantity would quickly have depleted his stores of dark magic, and augmenting the quantity that he could generate was quite often a risky proposition in terms of how effective it was versus how much it depleted him.
Individually, none of those were particularly severe drawbacks. But taken together, and in conjunction with how limited his combat potential had become ever since he’d banished Severance, Lex had been acutely aware that he needed to minimize his weaknesses and maximize his strengths wherever he could. To that end, he’d started working on a way to improve his shadow-form.
The result was what he was doing now.
Changing into his incorporeal state was something that required a sizable amount of dark magic to enact, but not very much to maintain. It was a distinction that Lex had worked to exploit, channeling additional power into the initial transformation while at the same time interrupting the comparatively smaller flow of dark magic that held him in his non-physical state. With the activation energy overcharged, but unable to settle into a low-power state of stability, the transformation process was easy to loop back on itself, moving it into a repeating attempt-fail-reattempt pattern.
In practical terms, it meant that Lex was undergoing a series of extremely rapid micro-transformations, his body changing into a shadow and back dozens of times each second, faster than a pony could blink.
The result was that Lex was now able to utilize the benefits of his shadow-form without the disadvantages. So long as he timed it right – he had a small amount of control over precisely how fast he was shifting back and forth – he could receive attacks with all of the defenses that his shadow-form offered without being cut off from his full range of interaction with the physical world. Starlight’s magical attack just now had hurt, but its damage had been highly ablated, passing through him just as he’d become incorporeal.
Of course, there was a trade-off. While he could normally stay in shadow-form for hours on end, this was a state that could only be maintained for a little over a minute. And since he needed to augment it with additional power through his body, it wasn’t something that he could call upon frequently. That was the price of being able to be effectively incorporeal while still being able to touch things.
But since I can still touch things, thought Lex viciously as he finally reached Starlight, the mare’s attempts to fall back hindered by all the rubble around her, I can do THIS!
Rearing up onto his hind legs, Lex swung his right foreleg back. Immediately he saw Starlight’s eyes go wide, realizing what he was about to do, but she’d barely started to move when Lex pivoted in place, twisting his body to put all of his weight behind the blow, timing the punch to land precisely when he’d be solid even a roar escaped his lips, the rage he’d been suppressing suddenly exploding out of him. Nor did he stop there.
In between when Lex swung his hoof and when it connected, he called upon his dark magic once again, lining his foreleg from the elbow on down in a gauntlet of black crystals.
Physical strength had never been Lex’s forte. For all that he had trained his body to withstand abuse, he’d never deliberately worked to enhance the amount of force his muscles could exert. Combined with how enervated he felt, the punch Lex hit Starlight with then wasn’t one of overwhelming power.
But his black crystals were far stronger than steel. Lining his leg, they gave the impact mass that it never would have possessed otherwise. The result was that when Lex’s blow landed on Starlight’s abdomen, she practically doubled over, eyes wide as blood exploded out of her mouth, leaving her struggling not to collapse.
The sight brought a hateful smile to Lex’s face.
Hoof-to-hoof combat wasn’t something he was proficient in. But since his only attack spell – one designed to seal a target in a prison of supernaturally-cold ice, being a scaled-up version of a similar Equestrian spell that he’d designed in response to seeing how dangerous Everglow’s monsters were – was too deadly to use on another pony, even one as odious as Starlight Glimmer, that left him with no other way to attack her than to resort to brawling. And with his new technique, he could get in close with minimal risk to himself, rather than trying to telekinetically bludgeon her from afar.
And now that he was, it was time to enact the next part of his battle plan.