Rainbow Dash didn’t give Lex a chance to react before she was on him.
Before he could so much as utter a word, the enraged pegasus slammed bodily into him, knocking him off his hooves and hitting the ground hard, Rainbow Dash on top of him. Her wings flapping heavily, Rainbow didn’t let their combined momentum go to waste, flying forward even as she wrapped one hoof around Lex’s torso, pulling him to her while her other hoof pressed hard against his face, preventing him from lifting his head. The result was that he couldn’t stop her from scraping the right side of his face along the ground, pressing down hard enough that he left a trench in his wake.
Snarling as she curved her flight path to make sure Lex hit every rock and piece of debris in their way, Rainbow ignored the shrieks and horrified screams coming from the ponies around her, glaring down at the villain she was giving a well-earned beating to. “Try changing into a shadow now, jerk!”
“Y-you…!”
Rainbow smirked darkly at Lex’s labored response, feeling him struggling to get out of her grasp. “Yeah, me! Rainbow Dash, here to deliver some way-overdue payback for everything you’ve done!”
Her declaration was marked by her changing directions again, gaining a few feet of altitude and changing the angle of her forward motion so that Lex was directly in front of her rather than beneath her. His struggling intensified as she did that, but Rainbow had no intention of letting him fight back, increasing her speed. Less than a second later the two of them slammed into a nearby house, with Lex taking the brunt of the impact as they hit the exterior wall so hard that the wood splintered, barely managing to keep from collapsing under the force of the collision.
Having walked away from worse crashes ever since she was a filly, Rainbow Dash barely felt a twinge now. But she was intensely gratified to hear a pained groan escape Lex’s lips. "Let's see you cast a spell now!"
Magic wasn’t something that Rainbow Dash had ever been interested in. Sure, the magic of friendship was cool and all, but actually studying magic – like, reading books about it and stuff (boring old books, not awesome ones like Daring Do) – was lame. And Rainbow Dash was too cool for lame stuff. So when Applejack had started studying magic with Twilight back during their first trip to Everglow, Rainbow Dash had passed on joining them. The very idea of being stuck in a library while there was an entire new world of adventure and danger out there was fine for eggheads, but not for her!
But the one thing she had learned about magic, mostly from listening to Applejack talk about it after they’d officially gotten together, was that casting spells was hard. Even though it usually only took a couple seconds, those seconds required focus and concentration, kind of like being in a race. Which meant that if you didn’t have a chance to focus, then you wouldn’t be able to get a spell off, no matter how hard you tried.
And that meant that the way to deal with Lex Legis was to keep hammering him, never giving him a chance to use his magic, until he was down for the count.
Except he clearly wasn’t down now. Although he was barely twitching after the hit he’d just taken, Rainbow could still feel him trying to break out of her hold. Lifting her head confirmed it, since his left eye – the other one shut tightly with how badly the right side of his face had been scraped away – was still open and shining green-and-purple, locked onto her. “You…won’t…”
“Oh yes I will!” growled Dash, bringing her forehead forward to smash against his before he had any time to recover. But that was just a distraction, preventing him from trying anything underhoofed as she yanked him out of the wall and took off again, this time straight up.
Leaving a multicolored contrail behind her, Rainbow Dash soared into the sky, stopping abruptly after barely two seconds of accelerated climbing so that Lex wouldn’t have a chance to orient himself. “Get ready!” she bragged, changing her hold so that she was grabbing him from behind rather than in front. “Because you’re going down!”
And then she abruptly reversed their sudden climb, holding him out in front of her as she rushed straight down.
Lex could already feel his consciousness slipping away as the ground grew rapidly closer.
Rainbow Dash’s sudden appearance had taken him completely by surprise. Although he’d been preparing for a possible confrontation with Twilight Sparkle and her friends – including the unruly blue pegasus – ever since Garden Gate had warned him that they’d been summoned to Canterlot in the aftermath of his battle with the Royal Sisters, he hadn’t expected any of them to quite literally drop out of the sky and attack without warning the way Rainbow Dash had. He certainly hadn’t been prepared for her to do it mere minutes after he’d barely overcome Starlight Glimmer, when he was at the weakest he’d been since his fight with Xiriel.
Under other circumstances, he would have been exceptionally suspicious of her timing. But at the moment he didn’t have the luxury of worrying about the larger implications of her appearance, not when he was about to lose this latest battle and quite possibly his life along with it. Instead, he fought with what little strength he had left to stave off unconsciousness, determined to use the one course of action left to him.
His plan for fighting Twilight Sparkle had been a fairly intricate one, utilizing complex alterations to his magical gemstones in order to progressively incapacitate her. But Lex hadn’t focused his preparations exclusively on Twilight, knowing that she would likely come with the full complement of her friends. So he had likewise come up with strategies for overcoming the other five bearers of the Elements of Harmony in turn, based on what he knew of them. And having originally met Rainbow Dash back on Everglow, he knew a fair amount about her…
“This is what you deserve for what you did to Luna!” yelled Rainbow Dash, her voice filled with righteous anger. “You’re not taking anypony’s wings away ever again!”
Glancing back over his shoulder at her with his one good eye, Lex struggled to make himself heard, refusing to concede the fight. “I’ll…take…one!” he rasped, his horn glowing purple.
“Oh no you don’t!” One of Rainbow’s hooves shot out, impacting his horn. Her position didn’t give her much leverage, resulting in the strike having little power behind it, the punch being a light jab more than a heavy strike. That would have been more than enough to disrupt an ordinary unicorn’s spellcasting, however, and although he didn’t need his horn to use his magic, his current state was such that even that weak blow was enough that it nearly broke his concentration.
Nearly.
But Lex had cast spells through excruciating agony too many times for Rainbow’s feeble strike to overcome him now. Between the incredible pain of casting a minutes-long spell to create a banquet when he’d accidentally overcharged his body’s magical channels, and the overwhelming torment of using his magic while Xiriel had squeezed his broken leg, this was nothing in comparison. It was with malicious satisfaction that Lex unleashed the last of his dark magic at Rainbow a second later, augmented by the miniscule amount of additional magic that he was still able to channel through his body thanks to the stamina-enhancing spell his shadow had used on him before.
Lex had first met Rainbow Dash in Viljatown, the capital of the Pony Empire, back on Everglow. Running into other Equestrian ponies on that world had been surprising, but not nearly as surprising as the injury that Rainbow Dash had sustained mere days later, having lost one of her wings in an underground pit fight that she’d been participating in for fun. Fortunately for her, that world’s advanced magic meant that she’d been able to find a spellcaster capable of regenerating it a few days later, but during that time she’d had no choice but to endure the loss of a limb, and with it her ability to fly.
Lex didn’t begrudge her having her wing restored. Mutilation wasn’t something he approved of, even for ponies that he hated. But it was one thing to cripplingly injure somepony else, and another to make them relive those injuries with magic.
Which was why Lex smiled grimly as Rainbow Dash let out a bloodcurdling scream a second later, his curse causing her to experience the torment of having her wing torn off all over again.
Instantly, her left wing went limp, her body telling her that the appendage had been violently ripped from its socket despite having taken no actual damage. The pain was enough that Rainbow Dash lost her grip on him, turning their controlled dive into a free-fall as they began to drift away from each other. Half-heartedly, Lex reached out toward the wailing pegasus, not in any attempt to comfort her but out of a desire to grab her and use her to break his fall. After how easily she’d shaken off their impact into that house a few second previously, he had no doubt that she’d be little worse for wear after hitting the ground now, whereas he likely wouldn’t survive unless something cushioned his fall, his hoof making contact with Rainbow Dash…
Only to be violently knocked away as she flailed, limbs kicking out at random as she continued to howl in agony.
Lex tried to grab her again, but his second effort was more anemic than the first, with his foreleg barely moving in response to his command. Nor was his horn responding, his telekinesis refusing to activate when he tried calling on it a second later. Or was he just directing it at the wrong point? It was hard to tell with how dark everything was suddenly getting…
Too much, Lex realized dimly, his awareness suddenly fading. I used…too much…
He’d already been at his limit during his battle with Starlight Glimmer, able to fight on only because his shadow had used his stamina-boosting spell on him at the last minute. But he’d expended most of that supplementary endurance with how he’d created so much black crystal to fight her. Now, with additional strain he’d placed on himself in order to curse Rainbow Dash, along with the new injuries she’d inflicted on him, he’d used up all of that extra strength and then some, which meant he was completely incapacitated now, to the point of passing out. And that was with the spell still being active; when it wore off a few minutes from now he’d lose even more vigor, it’d be anypony’s guess if his body would be able to handle the shock…
The thought made him snicker. “A few minutes from now”? He didn’t even have a few seconds until he hit the ground!
Dizzily, he tried to focus downward, wanting to look at Sonata again. She was down there somewhere, but everything was spinning…everything was spinning and there was some big shape nearby, closing in on him really fast…
An instant later Lex felt a jolt. But to his surprise it wasn’t the moment of intense pain followed by nothingness the way he’d expected. Instead it felt like a light jostling. Nor did it spread out across his entire body in a flat impact, but instead felt more centralized, as though something had grabbed him around his middle…
“I can’t believe I’m rescuing you like this.”
The voice that reached Lex’s ears a second later was male, their tone rueful, and it took Lex a moment to place it, and several more to realize what that meant.
Turbo.
Turbo had grabbed him out of the air, preventing him from hitting the ground.
One of the ponies he’d resurrected that morning had saved him now.
Lex’s last thought was to wonder if the Night Mare was laughing at him, not in the spiteful way he’d envisioned when he’d determined that he couldn’t resurrect everyone, but in amusement at how apt her admonition about the futility of trying to do everything on his own had turned out to be. Not just because of Turbo, but because of all the ponies who had played a part in everything that had happened that morning.
Then he passed out.