//------------------------------// // 492 - Stratagem in Motion // Story: Lateral Movement // by Alzrius //------------------------------// The force of Lex’s strike left Starlight stunned, hunched over and gasping for air as she tried to figure out what was going on. He didn’t use magic! The thought reverberated through her mind, the implications of what had just happened struggling to make themselves known through the haze of panic and pain engulfing her. He just reared back and hit me! Everything Sonata had told her about Lex had convinced Starlight that her inevitable confrontation with the petty tyrant would result in a magical shootout, the two of them bobbing and weaving as they blasted each other with spells. Instead, the only magic Lex had used was that hideous transformation, after which he’d marched right up to her and slugged her in the gut. It ran completely counter to everything she’d expected him to do, being more like… That colt, she realized sharply. Lex was attacking the same way that Fruit Crunch brat had. Like teacher, like student. That fit with what he’d said about Sonata not knowing everything about him. For whatever reason, Lex had changed his fighting style since Sonata had left his side, mixing physical combat in with spellcasting. Something about that seemed wrong to Starlight. Why would somepony whose magic was strong enough to slay dragons and destroy devils bother with punching his enemies? But she knew she didn’t have any time to think about it now; from her hunched position, Lex was at the edge of her vision, and Starlight could barely make out that he was moving again, his body still under that unnerving strobe effect as he reached toward her- With a loud grunt of effort, Starlight threw herself backward. Biting her lip, she ignored the sensations of rubble digging into her hide as she rolled across the uneven ground, stopping only when she was sure she’d put some distance between herself and Lex. Shakily, she righted herself, two of her legs still too numb to support her weight. Worse, her vision swam for a second as the dizziness of her desperate maneuver, combined with the pain and fatigue she felt, momentarily overwhelmed her. But Starlight was less concerned with that than she was with coming up with a new plan, knowing that she had only bought herself a second or two at most. My attack went right through him like he wasn’t even there, but that punch felt plenty solid, she reviewed, pulling in ragged breaths as she tried to steady herself. So that means…what? It’s an illusion that he can make substantial for short periods? That he can selectively dematerialize? Something else altogether? But no immediate answers came to her, let alone thoughts on what to do about it. I’m going to have to wing it, she decided, turning her attention back toward Lex. But to her surprise, the sinister stallion was making no move to follow her, nor did he look like he was using a spell. Instead, he was lying in the dirt, struggling to get up. For a second Starlight could only watch, nonplussed, as Lex fought to rise, his limbs shaking and his face twisted in a grimace of pain. What was he…no, that didn’t matter! Even if he still had that weird flickering going on, she had to take this chance! Pointing her horn at Lex, Starlight called on her magic…only to encounter some sort of resistance when she tried. She could feel that the energy, as depleted as it was, was still there within her, but now there was a marked difficulty in accessing it, like turning a faucet all the way and only receiving a trickle of water. It was unexpected enough, and worrisome enough, to make Starlight gasp, her eyes wide. That was when she noticed the gemstone circling her head. The backlash was worse than Lex had expected. He had known that the weakness of his plan – originally designed to defeat Twilight Sparkle, and now repurposed for Starlight Glimmer – was that it relied on performing actions that placed his body under severe strain. But as risky as that was, it was still the most likely path to victory. Although she wasn’t an alicorn, Starlight Glimmer was clearly a unicorn of unusual magical potential. Even if the numerous residual spell auras dotting the battlefield hadn’t attested to that, the fact that she’d defeated Aria, Garden Gate, and the Night Mare’s Knights – as well as placed Sonata under a charm, something which made Lex grind his teeth to remember – all on her own made her strength beyond question. And while she seemed depleted by those victories, Lex knew that assuming that she was out of power when he didn’t understand the full scope of her abilities could quickly turn disastrous, particularly given how his ability to damage her was limited to something as feeble as trying to beat her into submission. The most effective way to prevent any unpleasant surprises, then, was to suppress her ability to not only use magic, but to fight back altogether. For that, he needed to use the gems that he’d taken from Xiriel. The central part of his strategy was simple. Each gem provided a continuous, albeit fairly modest, benefit to its recipient. By forcing more magic into each gem’s magical channels, he could super-charge their output for a limited period of time. It had been that exact method that had allowed Garden Gate to temporarily become a one-mare army while fighting the ghoul horde. In order to defeat Starlight, Lex planned on doing the exact same thing, but with a twist: not only would he augment the amount of power flowing through each gem’s magical channels, he’d also reverse it. His experiments over the last few days, conducted alongside his augmented use of his shadow-form, had confirmed the viability of that idea. By causing the flow of power in the gems’ magical channels to flow backwards, the functionality of each gem was inverted. The iridescent spindle, which normally would directly oxygenate blood without respiration, would instead make it difficult to breathe, for instance. The pale green prism would impede the user’s central nervous system where it usually enhanced it. The scarlet and blue sphere would inhibit cognitive function rather than improving it. The dusty rose prism would interfere with reactive insight instead of abetting it. And the orange prism, which was circling Starlight Glimmer’s head at the moment, would interfere with a spellcaster’s ability to utilize magic instead of boosting it. According to Lex’s calculations, subjecting somepony to all five of the gems, once they’d had their functionality empowered and inverted, would be seriously debilitating. Enough so that, perhaps in conjunction with a curse or two, they would have been hard-pressed to defend themselves from even unskilled applications of brute force. Going into the battle with the defensive properties of his shadow-form upgraded, and benefiting from the standard functions of the gems until he reversed and enhanced them, should have provided him with a battlefield advantage of considerable magnitude. But that was being undercut by the injuries that he’d voluntarily sustained bringing Cloudbank, Turbo, and those other ponies back to life. Now, what should have been a series of painful-but-bearable exertions were proving crippling in their severity. Augmenting his shadow-form had been difficult enough, but forcing power through himself and into just a single gemstone had sapped enough of his strength that even standing had been too difficult, leaving him struggling to get back onto his hooves now. The sight of Starlight Glimmer reaching up to swipe at the gem circling her head, however, prompted Lex to struggle harder. Although the gems would still try to avoid obstructions, they wouldn’t be inordinately difficult to dislodge, as Garden’s fight with the ghouls had demonstrated. Nor would their inverted functions last very long, since the power he’d infused in them would be expended after a few minutes, at which point the gems would revert to their benign functions. Which means I need to keep Starlight’s attention on me! Abandoning his attempts to stand up, Lex instead concentrated on his dark magic, the one reservoir of power he had that was still largely untapped. An instant later, a thin cylinder of dark crystal – he didn’t dare waste power creating anything more substantial – grew out of the ground next to Starlight. Lancing upward at a high angle, the blunt tip of it collided with the side of her head, sending her staggering. The furious look she gave him a second later made it clear that he’d succeeded in making her focus on him. And Lex reaped the rewards of his efforts immediately thereafter, as Starlight fired a beam of magic at him in response. The ray was thin, and Lex could tell immediately that it lacked the power that her previous attack had possessed, but he still flung himself to the side, avoiding it by inches. Even if she hit him when he was incorporeal, her spell would still injure him, and Lex wanted to avoid taking any further damage if at all possible. But he wasn’t prepared for her spell to impact a section of what had formerly been the train station’s roof a few feet from him, blowing it apart even with the beam’s reduced power. The shrapnel sprayed in every direction, and it was to Lex’s misfortune that he was solid in the instant that the shower of debris reached him. Although most of the junk bounced off of him harmlessly thanks to the defensive spells that were perpetually on his person, a few pieces got through, causing Lex to recoil as a piece of tile scraped across his face, drawing blood from a long scratch it left just below his eye. He didn’t bother to wipe it away, knowing that he was running out of time. He was already nearing the halfway point of how long he could maintain his rapid-shifting, and if it ran out before he got the rest of those gems around Starlight, then his chances of winning- “I’VE GOT YOU NOW!” Lex barely had time to process Starlight’s triumphant cry before multiple explosions rang out. To think that a missed attack would be what did it! Starlight would have laughed if that yell hadn’t left her struggling to get her breath back. That last attack of hers hadn’t hit her target, but in missing Lex it had hit some rubble instead, with one of the pieces it sent flying cutting his cheek. That had been all the proof Starlight needed that the “selectively dematerializing” theory was the right one. More than that, it had shown her what she needed to do to strike back. That gemstone Lex had put in orbit around her was clearly some sort of magic suppressor, but for the moment Starlight wasn’t concerned about it. If anything, it would serve to keep her from overextending herself. The important thing now was to take Lex down before he could use the rest of those gems on her or find a chance to slug her again or however else he was planning on counterattacking. Luckily, she’d known just what to do. Using the minimum amount of power possible, Starlight lashed out with her magic, firing beam after beam. But not at Lex. Instead, she attacked the area around him. Aiming at every piece of rubble that was within a few feet of him and bigger than a breadbox, her attacks sent splinters and stone shards and bits of twisted metal flying in all directions. Let’s see if you can change back and forth precisely enough to avoid all of these! She could already see that he couldn’t. Although a considerable amount of the makeshift shrapnel wasn’t connecting, Starlight gleefully noted the way Lex jerked and lurched as several of the attacks struck true, one particularly palpable hit from a broken beam spinning him around. After just a few seconds, he was bleeding from a half-dozen or more new wounds, bruises lining his body as he lay there with his back to her in the aftermath of the barrage. The sight made Starlight smirk, suddenly finding him a lot less menacing despite his transformation still being active. But part of her couldn’t help but be suspicious; being hit with all of that had to be painful, but Lex had looked like he was injured – perhaps severely injured – before she’d attacked him. Combined with how he wasn’t using the strong magic Sonata had told her about, it was enough to make Starlight wonder if something else was going on, the uncertainty of that thought causing her to hesitate. Is he not able to fight at full power for some reason? If that was the case, then the fact that he hadn’t moved in the aftermath of her attack just now likely meant that he was down for the count. If not, then there was a good chance that he was playing possum, waiting for her to let her guard down. But I’m not one of those bimbos from a horror story, sneered Starlight to herself. When the bad guy is down, you don’t go over to check on him. You hit him again to make sure he STAYS down! And in order to do that – she paused, tracking the orange gem circling her for a few seconds before using her telekinesis to grab it – this thing needs to go! In fact… An idea occurring to her, Starlight smirked as she telekinetically moved the gem over toward Lex. If this thing was a magic-suppressor, then maybe it would be able to power down that weird transformation of his so that she could blast him. Of course, he’d had it floating around himself before and hadn’t seemed any worse off for it, but that probably meant there was some trick to deactivating it. If he didn’t bother to do anything when she put it back on him, then she’d know for sure that he was out cold. Slowly, Starlight moved the crystal closer to Lex’s prone form, tensing as she did. If he was going to counterattack, he’d likely do it right before she released the thing. She had no idea how he’d even know she was about to, but she felt sure he would, silently preparing a shield spell just in case. Almost there… With barely two feet between Lex’s head and the gemstone, her caution was proven accurate. Right before she let go of the gem, Lex suddenly rolled over, turning and pointing a hoof at her, his eyes open and blazing. Starlight immediately let go of the gem, casting her spell and raising a pane of force between herself and Lex, being too depleted to make a full-body covering. But she’d misunderstood what Lex was doing, something Starlight realized too late as she felt agony suddenly radiate up from her one good hind leg, sending her tumbling to the ground even as she glanced back and saw the miniscule black spikes that had sprouted from the ground directly under her hoof. Cursing herself for forgetting that he could do that – he’d just hit her in the face with that same technique barely a minute ago! – Starlight belatedly realized that Lex had effectively immobilized her. With two of her legs still numb, and one injured, it would be all she could do to crawl- “Now, Cloudbank!” came Lex’s sudden whisper, the words hissed harshly enough that Starlight was able to hear them. She had just enough time to wonder who he was talking to when there was a sudden rumble of thunder. The sound made Starlight’s eyes widen as she realized that it was coming from right above her, a drop of water impacting her nose even as she looked up at the large black cloud hovering over her. When did that get there?! Then the rain began to fall in earnest…followed a second later by lightning.