Sunny stared into the maw.
Thessalhydras were some of the strangest beasts that walked the face of Equestria. Barely related to the common bog hydra, thessalhydras were unique in that instead of mouths living in their numerous heads, they had basketball-sized, toothy graspers that fed a central mouth that sat at their chests. The main mouth itself was horrifying, resembling lamprey mouths.
Large, round, and filled with teeth that pointed to the gizzard, the mouths of thessalhydras resembled one of those unfathomable things that lived in the dark void beyond the stars. However, naturalists insisted that the large hole was more of a defensive structure than actively serving a purpose.
Many theorized that the smaller, grasping heads could have eaten all on their own at one point, but a singular head with more and more defensive capabilities began to develop. This central head started to get larger, with a thicker and thicker neck and required more and more energy until it simply became the creature’s only real head that mattered. The other focused on feeding it until the inevitable happened.
Celestia knew that this wasn’t actually the case and that these monstrosities had been born from test tubes of mad mages, but she wasn’t going to crush all of those naturalists’ dreams.
“Sweet Celestia...you were right. That is a hydra from my nightmares,” Marble muttered to her.
“If you think that’s bad, just wait until you see those teeth in action,” Sunny said.
“I really don’t think I want to.”
They sat on a tree branch, some ninety feet away from the monstrous creature. Marble managed to just barely lift the unicorn to relative safety, with some telekinetic help on her part, so they could see the problem for themselves as it passed them by. Judging by how green Marble was looking, Sunny was willing to bet that he almost wished he hadn’t.
The thessalhydra’s undulating, grasping arms snaked through the air as the monster lumbered down the road toward them. Sunny watched it as it moved closer and lightly tapped at Marble to get his attention.
He turned to her, and she motioned him to get a branch higher into the tree before she threw a rope around the trunk. Pulling against the rope, she began to walk her way up the tree. Getting a few feet higher before Marble reached down to pull her back up to the next branch.
One of the smaller heads sniffed at the branch they had sat on a second ago before it snapped at the tree and tore the limb off. Wood cracked and splintered before it tossed the branch aside before the small head sniffed at the pile of pulp for any sign of food before the body moved on.
“Well, that’s terrifying,” Marble muttered.
“Quieter,” Sunny whispered. “They can only see directly in front of them, but their hearing is great.”
The thessalhydra stopped for a moment beneath them. It waited a moment before the grasping heads all reached up into the air and moved carefully about, searching for the noise.
Sunny held up a hoof, and Marble nodded before taking a silent breath and shifting nervously on the branch. Neither of them said a word as the giant, reptilian beast moved past their tree. Sunny kept her hoof up to her and mouth even after it disappeared from sight.
“Okay, let’s get out of the tree and get out of here,” Sunny said.
“Is it safe?” Marble asked.
“As safe as it’s going to get,” she replied before she secured her rope and began climbing her way down.
Marble spread his wings and hovered next to her rope as Sunny’s hooves hit the soggy ground. The road had turned downhill into a swamp, and while Sunny could feel the stones beneath the silty soil under her hooves, it offered no benefit now beyond a vague sense of direction.
Marble untied the knot of her rope before he landed in the water next to her, and Sunny could only assume he did so he could give his wings a rest. Sunny shook her head at him. “No, we don’t have time to rest. We need to keep going,” she said before she began sloshing her way down the road.
“Why? Do you think it’ll come back?” the pegasus asked.
“I know it will,” she replied. “Thessalhydras are incredibly territorial, and they don’t move a lot. He’s probably hungry, and the moment he gets some food, he’ll be back here, feasting on whatever he found, and I don’t want that to be us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Marble said before he began flapping his wings again.
The swamp, which had been a village, was dotted with old stone homes and had the occasional Lusitanpec stone head that made the tribe famous. Now, these, along with whatever fallen trees littered its expanse, provided the only cover for the pair of ponies as they pushed their way across the swamp.
Sunny moved as carefully as she dared, trying not to make as much noise in the water even as the silt beneath the surface wanted to suck her down into the depths. Marble continued to fly, though she could tell his wings were already burning from the strain of carrying her up the tree and then continuing to press on.
He hadn’t said anything, though, so Sunny was willing to bet that he was still pushing forward, despite the pain in his wings.
“Now, if there was anything I think we could use right now, it’d be a pair of wings,” Inner Celestia commented. “Being able to give your legs a rest while still pushing forward is a godsend.”
Sunny was happy enough being a unicorn, thank you.
While wings would be lovely, she already learned the danger of not having a horn when you lost your changeling amulet.
She still had hers, for now, hidden in a secret pocket of her saddlebags, but if that were lost at any time, then she needed her horn and a Transform Body spell to get back into her true form.
Besides, going into the jungle without some kind of magic would be a very long and painful suicide. Despite her bravado, Sunny did not have any weapons beyond a machete, and she only had enough supplies to last her a week. It had nearly been a week since the boat sank, and they still had who-knows-how-many miles to travel. Not to mention the fact that she’d have to share with Marble to make sure he didn’t starve.
Sure, wings would be faster, but it would not be enough to save them.
Sunny rounded a house, half-sunken into the muck, before she chanced a look back, focusing on the water that swirled behind her. The mud and silt danced in waves while the water still roiled from where she walked through before she saw a single ripple move toward them.
“We need to move faster,” she said.
“How much faster?” Marble asked.
“Much faster.”
Sunny began to move faster through the water, though it came up to her belly and slowed her down.
“Faster than that?” Marble asked.
More waves and ripples flowed from behind her, and Sunny could see the growing look of horror on Marble’s face.
“Much,” she said through grit teeth before her horn rang with magic. She used magic to freeze the water in front of her into a sheet of ice a few inches thick, just in time for the thessalhydra to roar behind them.
Sneaking wasn’t worth it anymore.
Sunny pulled herself onto the ice sheet, and grabbing onto it with her forehooves, turned to look behind her.
The thessalhydra, with its teeth now jutting forward like ivory spears, ran through the water, snapping a tree that stood between them as a bull would charge through cheap particleboard. “Grab on,” she ordered before her horn lit up once more.
The water directly behind them started to swell up. It transformed with Sunny’s careful shaping before it stood as a ten-foot wall over the surface of the water. The water level around them dropped as it moved into the now towering column behind the sheet of ice.
The Thessalhydra roared again, moving closer with teeth quivering in the air as it charged. Marble glanced at it before he looked back down at the ice sheet before he dropped down next to Sunny and held on tight.
The unicorn hoped he was holding on tight.
Sunny released the water, and it crashed down behind them. The sheet of ice shot forward like an arrow from a bow as the water collapsed, and the ponies’ makeshift raft rode the wave even as the thessalhydra followed after them.
The sheet of ice skipped across the water, and they began covering ground at incredible speed, but the massive reptile behind them loped through the water at terrifying speed.
“We’re not going to outrun it,” Sunny said with a frown.
“So, what do we do?” Marble asked.
Sunny shook her head. “We’ll need to convince it that we’re not worth eating.”
“How do we do that?”
Sunny didn’t answer right away. Instead, her horn lit with magic as she tore some of the water surrounding her up into the air. The water froze into razor-sharp projectiles that shot back at the thessalhydra in a blast of ice.
The spear-like ice stabbed into the hydra’s body, and rivers of orange blood began to ooze out between the scales.
Sunny glared back at the monster before turning to back to Marble. “Stab it enough to convince it to leave us alone.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” he muttered.
The hydra’s grasping heads reached out to grab at them, reaching out to snap at them as it got closer and closer.
Sunny answered with magic, Controlling the water around her to form spinning blades and defensive walls of ice. The hydra slammed into the first wall without so much as flinching as it brought its forward-facing teeth spears to break the barrier apart before the grasping heads all pounced at Sunny where she stood.
She leaped back, throwing the spinning blades in a whirlwind of ice before she noticed Marble coming around.
He had his small dagger out and ready, and he flew around the hydra, distracting a pair of the grasping heads away from her.
She could deal with that.
Sunny continued to pour her magic into her surroundings, pulling stones and water up to form weapons and shields. The grasping heads tried to slam into her, which Sunny just barely managed to block with the two dozen chunks of rock and ice.
Her blades continued to spin and slash at the monster, but she couldn’t dare risk a cut to the beast’s necks, or she might have more grasping heads to attack her.
And that’s when she saw Marble streak through the sky and stab his knife into the hydra’s exposed side.
---☼---
“I did not sign up for this!” Marble thought as he took to the sky. He already felt his wings burning as after all the flying he’d done that day, but he couldn’t rest now, not with that monstrosity attacking them.
He flew around the beast, trying to distract the grasping heads of the hydra, while Sunny stood in the mud and held her ground.
Marble could not watch her defend herself long, but what he saw fascinated him. She almost danced between the attacks of the grasping heads, answering with her own strikes of ice and stone. Chunks of debris orbited the unicorn while blades and spears threatened the hydra’s dozen heads.
Sunny moved like a ballerina in the middle of a hurricane.
He’d never seen anything like it.
He tore his sight away from the art before him and focused on the thessalhydra that continued to try and eat him. He dodged the two heads that focused on him before he twisted around in an attempt to tie the heads up, either metaphorically or literally. Neither of the two heads formed a comical knot, nor did any of the other mouths pull their focus away from Sunny, and Marble cursed under his breath when he couldn’t at least distract the hydra more.
He glanced back at the heads chasing him and his aching wings before he figured he didn’t have much choice.
He pulled the knife Sunny found in the tower and pulled up into the air. The pair of heads following him ran out of neck but stretched out as far as they could, snapping hungrily as they waited for Marble to get back in range, but the pegasus kept flying up. He reached the trees’ canopy and held the knife out and in front of him for a single moment. Then he turned and started his dive.
He pulled his wings in tight and held his dagger out in front of him as he pointed his nose straight into the back of the hydra. The grasping heads snapped at him as Marble dropped like a rock, with his hooves outstretched.
This probably wasn’t going to end well.
Marble already figured that landing into the hydra’s back would probably break his fall but wouldn’t put money on him walking away unscathed.
He dove past the heads that had been chasing him, and a third head glanced up at him, opening its jaw hungrily.
Marble ground his teeth and slammed into the hydra’s back.
The rugged hide didn’t even give, and Marble felt his legs nearly give out as he bounced off the hydra. Slamming into the monster’s back fled like hitting concrete, and even as he sailed through the air, he was sure he’d just broken his neck in the crash.
The hydra roared in agony as the pegasus flipped end over end in the air before he quickly realized two things. The first was that, despite what he thought, he still had complete control of his muscles, the second, that all of the pain in his body stopped.
He leveled out, his wings spreading wide, and he looked back at the hydra and saw the wound he left. A long gash of angry orange pulsed along the hydra’s back, and...and the cut was rotting?
The monster’s scales around the wound greyed as though they sat in the sun until bleached, while the cut itself began to turn white. The muscle curled on itself, and the orange blood coagulated even as it pooled into the now septic injury.
How, by Celestia, did that happen?
The thessalhydra squirmed under the blow, six of the heads flailing about the cut in his back, while the others continued to hiss at Sunny’s hurricane of debris.
Then the hydra began to step back, its massive mouth hissing as it retreated back into the water.
Marble realized his hoof was tingling, and he looked down at the dagger in his grasp and saw the orange blood that coated it slowly be absorbed into the dagger’s edge.
And he realized he felt even better.
As the hydra backed away, putting even more distance between it and the storm that Sunny became before it began to turn and leave.
Marble watched it leave before he moved closer to Sunny, whose magic slowed and dropped the stones and ice into the water around her. She glanced up at him. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine….”
“What did you do to the thessalhydra?”
“I stabbed it with the dagger, and I...I think it caused the wound to rot?”
Sunny nodded. “I see.” The unicorn glanced down the swamp, where the thessalhydra continued to back away, still facing them. “We should probably keep going. If the hydra thinks it can have a chance again, it might try to attack one more time.”
“You think it’ll try again?”
“If it thinks that’s the worse we can do, it’ll try.”
“Then let’s get going,” Marble said.
Sunny formed another ice sheet and raised the water behind them again before they surfed away out of the swamp.
---☼---
Sunny finished cooking dinner that night and handed Marble his strip of sugarcane before he spoke up.
“How did you do all that?”
“Hm?” Sunny asked as she bit into her own portion of food.
“That whole...magic storm you did. How did you do that?”
Sunny blinked as she looked at him before she swallowed her food and continued. “It’s all the same basic spell, it’s all Control Matter, and splitting a spell between multiple targets is a little work, but easy enough with practice, and I—”
“I know a little about magic,” he replied. “I know what you did is technically possible, but what I want to know is how you did it. I know magic takes energy, and that...that was a lot of magic.”
Sunny bit into her sugarcane chewed at it for a moment while Inner Celestia began sweating.
“Relax,” she told herself as she swallowed, “We’ve already come up with this. We did the work beforehand.”
“I specialized in Create Matter and Perceive Matter spells. My spell list is limited, but I’m very good at it.”
Marble nodded. “I see.”
Sunny took another bite before she nodded toward Marble’s dagger. “Do you think you figured out what that does yet?”
“Well,” Marble began. “It’s definitely magic like you said it was.”
Sunny nodded and smiled but decided not to say, “I told you so.”
“So, I think it causes cuts to infect faster?”
Sunny nodded, but Inner Celestia was pretty sure she figured it out. Hydra bodies tended to be dense, and diving into one like Marble performed should leave him in a hospital in the worst-case scenario. Yet, Marble seemed just fine. Combine that with the vampiric nature of the tooth, and Celestia was sure that the dagger transferred life energy, which would prove helpful.
But Sunny wouldn’t know that.
“Well, that might be good to keep the larger monsters away from us.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”